Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

It seemed to Shelley all at once as if the whole room should protest, as if alarm and protest should be the nature of the body. Life was too easily holy, too easily not. It could change in a moment. Life was not ever inviolate. Dabney, poor sister and bride, shed tears this morning (though belatedly) because she had broken the Fairchild night light that the aunts had given her; it seemed so unavoidable to Dabney, that was why she cried, as if she had felt it was part of her being married that this cherished little bit of other peoples' lives should be shattered now. Dabney at the moment cutting a lemon for the aunts' tea brought the tears to Shelly's eyes; could the lemon feel the knife? Perhaps it suffered; not that vague vegetable pain lost in the generality and the pain of the world, but the pain of the very moment. Yet in the room no one said "Stop." They all lay back in flowered chairs and ate busily, and with a greedy delight anticipated what was ahead for Dabney...

I felt compelled to revisit Eudora Welty this month, one of my favorite authors who has been absent from my life for some time because I have finished everything she's written. In that she joins Muriel Spark, Penelope Fitzgerald, who live in the back of the mind like old friends you never see. I wanted to re-read Delta Wedding specifically because I remember it both as something incredible and as a kind of challenge, a book that drops you in a Jim Crow plantation world that's so rich, so intricately peopled, you can easily get lost. The titular wedding is between young Dabney Fairchild (of Fairchilds, Mississippi, if that tells you something) and the plantation overseer, Troy Flavin. The wedding has brought together dozens of Fairchilds and their spouses and children, who arrive at the plantation Shellmound and thicken the scene with their histories and characters.

What do I notice now, re-reading it? Well, despite the fact of the large cast and the whirlwind way that Welty jumps between points-of-view (look how effortlessly she skips from Shelley to Dabney and back again in the paragraph above--they're thinking similar things without knowing it!), there are actually only a small handful of characters whose perspective is explored in a sustained way. There's Laura, the little cousin who arrives at Shellmound having recently lost her mother; Dabney, the bride; Ellen, Dabney's mother; and for a little while, Robbie Reid, the outsider who has married George. The Fairchilds are brutal to outsiders, who have trouble penetrating the family's bonhomie. At the beginning of the book, Robbie has left George because of a convoluted scene in which he puts himself in front of a moving train to save Maureen, a mentally handicapped cousin. What Robbie really objects to, it seems, is the feeling that George would not do the same for her; that she is permanently on the outside. And yet, she's not the only one: Ellen is a Virginian who has had to bend and adapt to the ways of the Delta. And of course, there's Troy, who is of a different class than the Fairchilds, but seems too stupid to feel like an outsider. By contrast, those who are deepest inside are almost inaccessible, like the dreamy George, who is the most beloved of all the Fairchilds, or Denis, the long-dead cousin who was the most beloved before him. (The way George blends into Denis in the book is really fascinating.)

This time, I paid more attention to the Black characters of the book. Shellmound is populated by servants whose labor make the wedding possible. Many of these characters are well-drawn, and come alive through Welty's keen eye for the characters of the Mississippi world in which she grew up, characters like the loyal Partheny or Aunt Studney, who carries a sack on her back everywhere that no one knows what's inside, and whose name seems to come from her suspicious refrain: "Ain't studyin' you." But these characters are undoubtedly at the margin, and a modern reader, if they're like me, quickly becomes uncomfortable with just how marginal they really are. Is Welty as blind as her characters to this invisible labor?

There's a moment I'd forgotten about, though: Shelley comes upon Troy, in his capacity as overseer, pointing a gun at a couple of Black fieldhands. There seems to have been some kind of conflict; what it was, we never know, but we see Troy--who moments ago has been all idiot chuckling--shoot the fingers off one of them. Shelley, who is older than Dabney and has been jealous of her marrying, suddenly sees "the reason why Dabney's wedding should be prevented. Nobody could marry a man with blood on his door... But even as she saw the reason, Shelley knew it would not avail. She would jump as Troy told her, and never tell anybody, for what was going to happen was going to happen." Welty never possesses the undercurrent of rage possessed by McCullers, whose books look squarely at injustice as if to say, "Why isn't anyone doing anything about this?" But Welty is no fool, and this moment gives us, I think, a momentary glimpse into the dark machinery that keeps the charmed life of the Fairchilds going. How can we go back to the room of the flowered chairs, the wedding cake, the bridesmaids with their shepherd's crook staffs, after seeing this? Of course, like Shelley we know it's meaningless; everyone knows what happens in the fields and they choose not to see. This time around, I wondered what it meant to have someone like Troy incorporated whole into the body of the Fairchilds. Perhaps once they kept that kind of necessary violence at arm's length, but now they have brought it to their heart and embraced it.

I have a high opinion of Welty. I think she does things no one else could even attempt. There are times when reading Delta Wedding that I think she is among the two or three best writers the 20th century United States produced, and I mean that without hyperbole. Perhaps, as she recedes back into that "old friend" corner of my mind, I'll feel differently. But returning to these books leaves me with awe.