A Curtain of Green by Eudora Welty

It was December--a bright frozen day in the early morning. Far out in the country there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson. She was very old and small and she walked slowly in the dark pine shadows, moving a little from side to side in her steps, with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a grandfather clock. She carried a thin, small cane made from an umbrella, and with this she kept tapping the frozen earth in front of her. This made a grave and persistent noise in the still air, that seemed meditative like the chirping of a solitary little bird.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to walk along a sunken portion of the original Natchez Trace. The Trace was once a heavily trafficked path running from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. It was blazed by Native Americans, and used by early pioneers. Before roads and railroads spread across the south, merchants took their goods to Natchez on steamboats along the south-running Mississippi, then walked back 400 miles along the Trace. Today, portions of the "sunken trace" remain, where the feet of thousands and thousands of travelers have worn a path twenty feet down in the soft earth. Walking along one of these portions is like walking along a shared history.

What a pleasure, then, it was to return to Eudora Welty's story "A Worn Path," about an elderly black woman walking along the trace to Natchez, where she is to pick up medicine for her grandson. The Trace, by the time of the story, is largely disused; in Natchez they call it the "old Trace," and few others use it. It's a difficult trip, that involves crawling under a barbed wire fence and over a creek, but she makes it, as she has every few months for years. The story is a well-loved one because it has a beautiful simplicity: Phoenix Jackson is an image of diligence, of courage and steadfastness. She's also wily: she pockets a nickel dropped by an unwitting hunter, and cajoles another one from the pharmacist in Natchez. But walking the sunken trace made me realize the extent to which she is also a symbol of a history that, as Welty wrote the story, was being abandoned and forgotten, a history literally written in the earth.

"A Worn Path" is one of two familiar masterpieces in A Curtain of Green, an early collection of Welty's; the other is "Why I Live at the P.O.," which is certainly a contender for the funniest short story ever written. I have always loved this story, with its escalating familial outrages, and its gaggle of comic Southerners, as colorful as something out of commedia dell'arte. It's a story I've always thought about teaching, but have avoided, partly because of the single casual n-word, and partly because it seems a shame to cut it up and analyze it, which might kill it. It's a story that should only be enjoyed, and maybe marveled at.

Most of the other stories in A Curtain of Green were disappointing. Many of them, like the title story, seem awfully slight, attempts at portraying a milieu or a mind, or even a vibe, rather than a story. Some of them struck me as being mainly experimental, attempts by a young and newish writer to feel out her craft. How different they are than, say, the linked stories of The Golden Apples that Welty wrote later in life. Some of them are Welty straining at the Southern Gothic, and not particularly succeeding: "Clytie," for example, about a trio of ghoulish rustic shut-ins who are left to fend for, and fight, one another after the death of their father, struck me as being grotesque for grotesque's sake, and its ending--the dim-witted Clytie drowns in a water-barrel after becoming captivated by her own face--like an unfunny joke. I enjoyed the comic narrator of "Mr. Marblehall," who can't stop being flabbergasted by the pathetic audacity of the title bigamist, but it's hard for anything to feel funny when it comes behind "Why I Live at the P.O." Several of the stories just seemed forgettable: what was "Flowers for Marjorie" about again?

But there are two stories that were new to me that I thought were, like "Why I Live at the P.O." and "A Worn Path," Welty at her best. The first is "The Hitch-hikers," about a traveling salesman who picks up a couple of vagrants on his way back into his hometown. One of the two hitchhikers murders the other, and the murderer is locked up in the hotel room across the hall from the salesman. The salesman goes out to a party while the police and the hospital deal with the aftermath of the killing; but of course the event weighs on him strangely. "The Hitch-hikers" is one of those stories that successfully gives the impression of a whole life, a whole world, beyond its margins. The violence does not interrupt a peaceful routine, but stands in, somehow, for the alienation the salesman feels from his own life.

The other masterpiece is "Powerhouse," about a black jazz musician playing in small Mississippi clubs. At first, I wondered a little about the way the narrator describes Powerhouse:

You can't tell what he is. "Nigger man"?--he looks more Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil. He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard's, but big glowing eyes when they're open. He has African feet of the greatest size, stomping, both together, on each side of the pedals. He's not coal black--beverage colored--looks like a preacher when his mouth shut, but then it opens--vast and obscene.

But as the story went on it seemed to me that the narrator (not Welty) is trying to label Powerhouse, to understand him by affixing these words to him, and failing. The narrator fails, because Powerhouse takes over the story, whipping up the crowd with an extended black comic story about the death of his wife, which he has just learned about in a telegram. He tells this story as he plays--interspersed with descriptions of the song that plays beneath it--and then, later in the bar, elaborates upon it. His wife, he says, fell out of the window while she was looking for him, her body discovered by the telegram sender, a man with the unlikely name of Uranus Knockwood:

"Why, he picks her up and carries her off!" he says.
"Ya! Ha!"
"Carries her back around the corner..."
"Oh, Powerhouse."
"You know him."
"Uranus Knockwood."
"Yeahhh!"
"He take our wives when we gone!"
"He come in when we goes out!"
"Uh-huh!"
"He go out when we comes in!"
"Yeahhh!"
"He standing behind the door!"
"Old Uranus Knockwood."
"You know him."
"Middle-size man."
"Wears a hat."
"That's him."

The charismatic Powerhouse has completely taken over the story, molding it into call-and-response jazz rhythms, wrested it, it almost seems, even from Welty herself. It's never clear how much of the outrageous story Powerhouse tells is true. "And who could ever remember any of the things he says?" Welty writes. "They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke." There is real grief, real resentment, real outrage--you can figure out for yourself who it is, in the context of the Black South, that might always be "standing behind the door," coming in when they go out--but the story is a performance. Everything about Powerhouse is a performance. Like "A Worn Path," "Powerhouse" is a depiction of a Black person by a white writer, but where "A Worn Path" succeeds (in my opinion) through admiration and empathy, "Powerhouse" succeeds from something like intimidation and wonder. It's a story that seems channeled, not written. It's incredible.