EUDORA WELTY….A Curtain of Green

When we moved back to Chicago, leaving our wonderful years in California, my daughter Christie sent me a book of collected short stories to read in those infrequent moments when I would not be unpacking, setting up a new household.

She sent me the work of Eudora Welty, a southern writer whose name I knew, but whose work I had not explored. But in time, I was able to quietly turn the pages of this author’s work, and thus be transported to her southern world.

Ann Patchett writes in her intro to the book: “When I first read THE COLLECTED STORIES , I thought Welty was a fabulist, a writer endowed with a superior imagination and love of tall tales. Those things are true, of course, but Welty, who spent most of her life in Jackson, Mississippi, in the house her father built when she was a child, was also telling the TRUTH.” (caps are mine)

Also, the amazing writer Donna Tartt wrote: “The reason it’s so impossible to write about Mississippi is that everyone thinks you’re exaggerating.” I LOVE THIS!

And thus, Patchett adds: “In the last 25 years in which I have been going to Mississippi regularly, I’ve come to believe that Welty was to her state what Joan Didion was to California: the clear eye of verisimilitude….There is no writer I know who tells the truth of the landscape like Welty.” 

LITERATURE RECORDS REAL LIFE 

So, if you want to take a trip to America’s south, keep reading. 

In the collection, A CURTAIN OF GREEN is the story of a southern garden. “To the neighbors gazing down from their upstairs windows it had the appearance of a sort of jungle, in which the slight, headless form of its owner lost itself….”  Foreshadowing? 

No neighbor dared go into this garden…

“Early that morning they had heard whistling in the Larkin garden. They had recognized Jamey’s tune, and had seen him kneeling in the flowers at Mrs. Larkin’s side. He was only the colored boy who worked in the neighborhood by day. Even Jamey, it was said, Mrs. Larkin would tolerate only now and then…”

BECAUSE…Mrs. Larkin’s husband had died the summer before, in an accident that echoes the fearful love of a southern garden: a tree, “a fragrant chinaberry suddenly tilting dark and slow, like a cloud leaning down to her husband, ” but crashing down on his car as he was arriving home.

And Mrs. Larkin had seen this happening, had strongly believed her love for her husband would save him. But it did not.

THUS, WELTY MUST ASK A QUESTION 

Why would a woman who loved flowers, trees, all growing things, why did she have to lose her husband this way? And what is Welty telling us? 

Then later  in the story, while the other women of the town sit inside “fanning and sighing, waiting for the rain,” Mrs Larkin is once again in her garden, where she chooses to be consistently, as again we feel the rules of the south having their say: “…since the accident in which her husband had been killed, she had never once been seen anywhere else.”

Yet hers is a fertile garden that needs “cutting, separating, thinning and tying back” to keep the plants from “overreaching their boundaries and multiplying out of all reason”. Yet Mrs Larkin in her deranged grief does none of this, instead she works incessantly, obsessively, planting more and more. 

And there is Jamey, a Black man who has helped her in this garden. Jamey kneeling in the soil and working, though the sight of him makes her so angry, that she finds herself lifting the hoe. “Life and death, she thought gripping the heavy hoe, life and death which now meant nothing to her…” And in then in this story Welty asks: “Was it not possible to compensate? to punish? to protect?”

“Pale darkness turned for a moment through the sunlight, like a narrow leaf blown through the garden in a wind. In that moment, the rain came. The first drop touched her upraised arm. Small close sounds and coolness touched her. 

Sighing, Mrs. Larkin lowered the hoe to the ground and laid it carefully among the growing plants. She stood still where she was, close to Jamey, and listened to the rain falling. It was so gentle. It was so full–the sound of the end of waiting.

One critic wrote: “A curtain of green” is a great read, for its exploration of how grief can derail you, making you, temporarily at least, a little mad.”  

THANKS FOR READING.