(Image source: YMD.org)

“You can’t drink wine and not eat cake!” said Battle.  “Look here.  What kind of house is this?”

I’ve written before, here, about my love for Eudora Welty’s writing.  My high school freshman English teacher introduced me to Welty – insisting my mother buy me a copy of One Writer’s Beginnings, which she promptly did.  I immediately fell for Welty’s voice and proceeded to tear through her short stories and most of her novels – but Delta Wedding was my favorite.  I read it multiple times in high school, but hadn’t re-read it in years.  I often find myself craving Welty during the dog days of summer, and it was time to dive back into her world of the Yazoo Delta and Dabney Fairchild’s wedding preparations.

(Image source: Eudora Welty Collection, National Endowment for the Humanities)

The novel begins on a hot September day in 1923.  Nine-year-old Laura McRaven is arriving in Fairchilds, Mississippi, on the Yazoo Delta, aboard a train called the Yellow Dog.  She is en route to attend the wedding of her seventeen-year-old cousin Dabney Fairchild, at Shellmound, the Fairchild family’s plantation.  When Laura arrives, she is met at the station by a gaggle of Fairchild cousins, and is immediately swept back into family life.  The events leading up to Dabney’s wedding are told through a series of vignettes, all of which are gorgeously crafted – Welty is at her best when recording, in minute detail, the incidents of everyday life and the natural landscape.

Grass softly touched her legs and her garter rosettes, growing sweet and springy for this was the country.  On the narrow little walk along the front of the house, hung over with closing lemon lilies, there was a quieting and vanishing of sound.  It was not yet dark.  The sky was the color of violets, and the snow-white moon in the sky had not yet begun to shine.  Where it hung about the water tank, back of the house, the swallows were circling busy as the spinning of a top.  By the flaky front steps a thrush was singing waterlike notes from the sweet-olive tree, which was in flower; it was not too dark to see the breast of the thrush or the little white blooms either.  Laura remembered everything, with the fragrance and the song.

It would be impossible for Welty to focus on every Fairchild – there are so many of them.  So a few characters – Ellen, Laura, Dabney, Shelley, George and Robbie – get the most attention, while others – Battle, the aunts, the younger cousins, baby Bluet – are more sketchily filled in.  As a teenager, reading Delta Wedding for the first time, I was most drawn to Shelley Fairchild.  One year older than the teenaged bride Dabney, marriage couldn’t be further from Shelley’s mind.  She wants to travel and to write, and she is forever finding herself saddled with the little ones – schlepping Laura and India on a mission to inquire about her mother Ellen’s lost brooch, stopping off at the store and forgetting the groceries.

Part of the delight of Delta Wedding, indeed, is that there are so many characters – there is always someone with whom to identify, no matter your stage in life – and there is always a character to draw you in.  I’ve been Shelley, the eldest child longing to flee the nest.  I’ve been Laura, the young visitor, and Robbie, the unwelcome interloper.  (Indeed, on this reading, Robbie touched my heart more than she used to do.)

This time, though, the character who most interested me was Ellen.  Married to the eldest brother – Battle – and lady of the house at Shellmound, Ellen is both of the Fairchilds and apart from them.  To an outsider like Robbie, Ellen is just as much Fairchild as the rest of them.  But there are little droplets of mentions and implications that Ellen is not Fairchild.  It’s repeatedly brought up that Ellen is “from Virginia” and thereby, a little bit “snooty.”  Ellen herself feeds into this – while she has mostly settled down to become a Fairchild baby machine, she can’t help but mention that the “Dabney” china (her family’s) is the good china.  And at one point, she muses about the strangeness of life’s paths, making her the matriarch of a big country family when she is more suited to a bookish life in the city.  (It’s an interesting juxtaposition – Robbie, who has married George, the youngest Fairchild brother, and is living a luxurious life in the city, couldn’t be more discontent with her lot.  Ellen would have thrived there, for all she has made life work at Shellmound.)  I was interested in the contrasts between Robbie and Ellen – both married into the family, but Ellen has been accepted wholeheartedly, if acknowledged as a snooty Virginian, while Robbie is persona non grata.  Why?  Is it because Ellen has been around longer, or because she was from a fancy Virginia family instead of a poor Mississippi family, or because she has made so many Fairchild babies, or because she married eldest brother Battle instead of beloved baby George, or something else?  Was Ellen immediately accepted or did she have to earn her Fairchild stripes?  I could read a whole book about Ellen.

I can’t conclude this review without mentioning the setting – physical and temporal.  As with any book set in the 1920s on a plantation in the deep South, you can expect to encounter racial issues.  There’s not much strife at Shellmound, and I think that’s largely because the characters of color are side characters to this particular narrative.  (Whether or not they should be given a more central place in the narrative is above my pay grade: it’s a story about a wedding in a gigantic family, so maybe Welty just couldn’t cope with any more central characters; several of the family members also get short shrift.)  The characters relate to one another in a fairly standard way and, for the times, it’s nowhere near the most cringeworthy thing I’ve ever read.  It would make this review much too long to address the subject of race relations in classic novels and I’m not sure I am up to taking that topic on, anyway.  Suffice it to say I think there’s value in reading these older works from a contemporary perspective, recognizing that things have improved and there is yet more work to be done, and acknowledging the literary merit apart from the social issues.

This is not a story about race relations – there is much more class tension than race tension.  Both George (with Robbie) and Dabney (with Troy) are considered to have married, or be marrying, “beneath” them and “beneath” the Fairchilds.  Troy has an easier time getting accepted by the family, although none of them are over-thrilled with the match.  Indeed, that class tension is the driving focus of the narrative – something I missed completely when I first read Delta Wedding at sixteen – and is personified in the three in-law characters, who are rather more interesting than the Fairchilds themselves.  Ellen, Troy and Robbie – the ways in which they are similar (not Fairchild) and the ways in which they diverge (pretty much everything else) – represent that class tension between the Fairchilds and the rest of the world.  And of course, Eudora Welty is the writer to explore that, with her telescopic focus on the small details of everyday life.

A brown thrush in a tree still singing could be heard through all the wild commotion, as Dabney and Troy drove away, scattering the little shells of the road.  Ellen waved her handkerchief, and all the aunts lifted theirs and waved.  Shelley began to cry, and Ranny ran down the road after the car and followed it as long as it was in hearing, like a little puppy.  Unlike the mayor’s car that had come up alight like a boat in the night, it went away dark.  The full moon had risen.

Have you read any Eudora Welty?  Which is your favorite?