JULY 18, 2013
A MURDER IN DEEP SUMMER
Although she was in the thick of her novel “Losing Battles,” Eudora Welty paused from that long work to write a short story. “I don’t write out of anger,” Welty later said, but rage was distracting her. “There was one story that anger certainly lit the fuse of.”
Welty’s fuse was lit early one morning in June, 1963, when the civil-rights activist Medgar Evers was shot and killed in Jackson, Mississippi, the town where she lived for nearly her entire life. “I wrote a story that same night about the murderer,” Welty described in her autobiography “One Writer’s Beginnings.”
“Where Is the Voice Coming From?” was published in The New Yorker less than a month later. Welty drafted the story before Evers’s murderer, Byron De La Beckwith, had been identified or arrested. Two trials of De La Beckwith ended with hung juries, but he was finally convicted of first-degree murder thirty years later.
The story is one of Welty’s least known, but I’ve been thinking about it again this July. Fifty years later, the fear and prejudice that caused Evers’s murder still lives. The racism that Welty fixed on the page still lingers.
The original title of the story was “From the Unknown,” yet much of its power comes from Welty’s willingness to acknowledge how much she did know. In an interview with William F. Buckley, she later said: “What I was writing about really was that world of hate I felt I had grown up with and I felt I could speak as someone who knew it.” Welty’s story was so accurate, her characterization of the murderer so precise, that The New Yorker changed several important details: Medgar Evers became Roland Summers, the time of the shooting shifted to a few hours after midnight, and Jackson became the nonexistent Thermopylae.
Racial hatred was as familiar to Welty as the stifling Southern heat that seems to rise from the story’s pages. Although she rarely wrote fiction in the first person, the narrator of this story—who is never named—speaks for himself: “I says to my wife,” it begins. He tells her to turn off the television: “You don’t have to set and look at a black nigger face no longer than you want to, or listen to what you don’t want to hear.”
Page 1 from “Where is the Voice Coming From?” by Eudora Welty. Click to expand. Credit: Eudora Welty, LLC, and Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
“It’s still a free country,” he shouts at his wife in the story’s opening. That thought, that deformed notion of freedom, drives the narrator to do something about the black face on the television: “I reckon that’s how I give myself the idea.”
The brief story—it’s only two pages—encompasses the hours before and after the assassination. After telling his wife to turn off the television, the narrator borrows his brother-in-law’s delivery truck, heads west, and waits for Roland Summers to return home.
Though the story’s details are scarce, “Thermopylae” suggests that the hot gates of Hell had opened in the racial strife of mid-century America. “Nathan B. Forrest Road,” on which the narrator drives to reach Summers’s house, is named for a Confederate General who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
The narrator drives past Thermopylae’s Branch Bank, whose “sign tells you in lights, all night long even, what time it is and how hot.” “It was quarter to four, and 92” on the way to Summers’s house: “It was so hot, all I did was hope and pray one or the other of us wouldn’t melt before it was over.”
The murder takes place in less than an hour. The narrator waits for Summers to arrive home, then shoots him with a rifle. Standing over the dead man’s body, he taunts the corpse: “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?”
He stays only long enough to see Roland Summers’s wife run from the house. “Going home,” he thinks smugly, “I seen what little time it takes after all to get a thing done like you really want it. It was 4:34, and while I was looking it moved to 35.”
The bank’s sign shows that the temperature held steady at ninety-two, and the sticky, rotten heat of summer punctuates the story. The narrator’s rifle becomes so hot that he drops it after the murder. Later, he says that the “pavement in the middle of Main Street was so hot to my feet I might’ve been walking the barrel of my gun.”
The narrator returns home and is greeted by his wife, who unlike Summers’s wife has not left the light on for him. Coldly, her first question is: “Didn’t the skeeters bite you?”
Together they debate his reasons for the murder. She deflates her husband’s sense of originality by telling him that a newspaper columnist already proposed assassinating civil-rights activists. While she encourages him to consider the murder as an act of patriotism or southern pride, he rejects those ideas and says: “I done it for my own pure-D satisfaction.”
She continues demeaning his motives and the significance of his crime, telling him “The N. double A. C. P. is fixing to send somebody to Thermopylae. Why couldn’t you waited? You might could have got you somebody better.”
Welty’s narrator is hateful and ignorant, self-pitying and self-aggrandizing at the same time. He denies the possibility that he committed the murder for political gain, but yearns for the approval of the segregationist governor of his state. He desires to avoid prosecution for his crime, but envies the media attention posthumously given to Roland Summers. He laments race riots, but resents the “thousand cops crowding ever’where you go, half of ’em too young to start shaving.”
He is poor and uneducated, but he is also frustrated. He is a white man frustrated that a black man appears on his television. He is a white man frustrated that a black man has a house with a garage. He is a white man frustrated that a black man has a new car. He is a white man frustrated that a black man can afford to irrigate his grass and leave a light burning through the night. He is a frustrated, poor, and uneducated white man who murders a black man for his “own pure-D satisfaction.”
In her 1972 interview with Buckley, Welty said that when she wrote the story: “I thought to myself, ‘I’ve lived here all my life. I know the kind of mind that did this.’” She knew the kind of resentment boiling in so many white hearts, and the kind of hatred that could lead a killer to think that his act was not criminal, but instead reasonable and just. She recognized the kind of perverse logic that leads a murderer to think any prosecution would be the state “try[ing] to railroad [him] into the electric chair.”
One of the most upsetting exchanges in the story is when the wife asks her husband about the murder weapon. “Where’s the gun, then?” she asks after he has returned home. “What did you do with our protection?”
How prescient, how pathetic are those questions? Weapons used for murderous acts are still construed as instruments of self-defense; gun violence is still accepted as a consequence of the right to protect one’s self.
Prescient, too, is the false anticipation of riots by the narrator in Welty’s story—something we have been warned against again and again this summer. “I won’t be sorry to see them brickbats hail down on us for a change. Pop bottles too, they can come flying whenever they want to. Hundreds, all to smash, like Birmingham. I’m waiting on ’em to bring out them switchblade knives, like Harlem and Chicago.”
“Watch TV long enough,” he says, “and you’ll see it all to happen on Deacon Street in Thermopylae. What’s holding it back, that’s all?—Because it’s in ’em.”
That fear-stoking language is terrifyingly familiar: the audacity to forecast violence after acting as an agent of violence yourself. “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” is one of Welty’s best stories because it dares to take these views seriously without ever explicitly condemning them. Only hate has a voice in this story; morality is silent. The burden of judgment is imposed on the reader. The story is haunting because that burden is still ours; these views still haunt our country.
Two years after she published the story, Welty wrote an essay called “Must the Novelist Crusade?” The essay attempts to distinguish the novel from the editorial, the novelist from the journalist. Its titular question comes from the experience of having “a stranger over long distance in one of the midnight calls that [she] suppose[s] have waked most writers in the South from time to time”: “All right, Eudora Welty, what are you going to do about it?”
The it, one presumes, is racism, though Welty never names it directly. That question—what are you going to do about it?—is one that many artists have asked themselves in the days since Saturday’s verdict in the Trayvon Martin case.
Welty’s answer is initially infuriating, especially when one’s first impulse is to crusade against injustice. But crusading, she argued, produces bad fiction; novelists must produce plot, not argument. “A plot,” she wrote, “is a thousand times more unsettling than an argument, which may be answered.”
For Welty, a novel is neither manifesto nor polemic; it differs from the editorial. “The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what’s told alive.” Yet, for Welty, the novel is not an apolitical or morally neutral genre: “Indeed, we are more aware of [the novelist’s] moral convictions through a novel than any flat statement of belief from him could make us.” The novelist contributes to social change in ways that the journalist cannot.
“Great fiction,” Welty wrote, “shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean.”
Editorials must continue to address community policing, gun violence, and racial profiling. But fiction must follow. To remember Eudora Welty’s words once more: “To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most.”
Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Follow her on Twitter@cncep.
Above: The widow of Medgar Evers comforting her grieving son Darrell during her husband’s funeral. Photograph by John Loengard/Life/Time & Life Pictures/Getty.
Video of Myrlie Evers giving 2011 DNC invocation. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpug4Nq6U50
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