 September 2001
American Friends Service Committee Peacework Magazine Patrica Watson, Editor Sara Burke, Assistant Editor Pat Farren, Founding Editor 2161 Massachusetts Ave. Telephone number: Fax number:
pwork@igc.org Peacework has been published monthly since 1972, intended to serve as a source of dependable information to those who strive for peace and justice and are committed to furthering the nonviolent social change necessary to achieve them. Rooted in Quaker values and informed by AFSC experience and initiatives, Peacework offers a forum for organizers, fostering coalition-building and teaching the methods and strategies that work in the global and local community. Peacework seeks to serve as an incubator for social transformation, introducing a younger generation to a deeper analysis of problems and issues, reminding and re-inspiring long-term activists, encouraging the generations to listen to each other, and creating space for the voices of the disenfranchised. Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC. |
Honoring Eudora Welty Below, an excerpt from "Where is the Voice Coming From?", written in August 1963* , on the night civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated in his driveway. The narrator of the story is the murderer, and the story is his account of the event; in the story, the name of the civil rights leader is Roland Summers. He was down. He was down, and a ton load of bricks on his back wouldn’t have laid any heavier. There on his paved driveway, yes sir. And it wasn’t till the minute before, that the mockingbird had quit singing. He’d been singing up my sassafras tree. Either he was up early, or he hadn’t never gone to bed, he was like me. And the mocker he’d stayed right with me, filling the air till come the crack, till I turned loose of my load. I was like him. I was on top of the world myself. For once. I stepped to the edge of his light there, where he’s laying flat. I says "Roland? There was one way left, for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you, by Dad, and I just taken it. Now I’m alive and you ain’t. We ain’t never now, never going to be equals and you know why? One of us is dead. What about that, Roland?" I said. "Well, you seen to it, didn’t you?" I stood a minute—just to see would somebody inside come out long enough to pick him up. And there she comes, the woman. I doubt she’d been to sleep. Because it seemed to me she’d been in there keeping awake all along. Eudora Welty died last month in Mississippi, where she had lived almost all of her life. Of her stories written in the sixties, she said that they "reflect the unease, the ambiguities, the sickness and desperation of those days in Mississippi. If they have any special virtue in this respect, it would lie in the fact that they, like the others, are stories written from within—they were part of living here, of my long familiarity with the thoughts and feelings of those around me, in their many shadings and variations and contradictions." She also said that she had been told, both in praise and in criticism, that she seemed to love all her characters. We are grateful for the body of work, shining with love, that she has left us. Correction: In the introduction to this piece we wrongly described the date of Medgar Evers' assassination, perhaps drawing on Welty's incorrect recollection that the assassination occurred in August. He was actually murdered on June 12, 1963. Apparently, Eudora Welty did write the story the night she learned of the murder, though her imagined story fit the details of accused killer Byron De la Beckwith (finally convicted on February 5, 1994 after two all-white juries refused to convict him during trials in 1964) so closely that the New Yorker insisted on changing some details before publication later in 1963. The story is available in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, starting on page 603. Thanks to reader Marjory Olson for bringing this mistake to our attention. |
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