The Department of Archives and History wants to make the Eudora Welty House one of the foremost literary house museums in America, with a strong intellectual focus and, in accordance with Eudora’s wishes, a strong emphasis on the place of literature in our culture and the writer in our society. Early on we got good advice from Dan Jordan, director of Monticello. It was simply and strongly stated: scholarship should drive the mission.

In 2000, before Eudora’s death, at the request of the Eudora Welty Foundation, I visited several of the nation’s major literary houses and met with directors and curators, asking questions, looking at the contents and houses and policies. These houses included Mark Twain’s and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s in Hartford, Connecticut; Mark Twain’s in Hannibal, Missouri; Thomas Wolfe’s in Asheville, North Carolina; Ernest Hemingway’s in Key West, Florida; Carl Sandburg’s in Flat Rock, North Carolina; William Faulkner’s in Oxford, Mississippi; and Tennessee Williams’s in Clarksdale and Columbus, Mississippi.

The Eudora Welty House joinsapproximately 65 other literary houses across the U.S.; these houses hold a special place in the historic fabric of our nation by preserving the literate past and encouraging the future of our intellectual and literary life. The challenge of these houses is to use their evocative power as a catalyst for contemporary provocative programming. The possibilities are far ranging and almost limitless, and I feel prepared to say that the Welty House can be one of the most substantive experiences in the world of America’s literary houses.

The significance of the Eudora Welty House hardly needs telling: this is the house where Eudora Welty lived for over 75 years and where she wrote all of her fiction and essays. Her memory, which she called “the treasure most dearly regarded by me,” fed her stories, characters, landscapes, and dialogue. When she gave the house to MDAH, she emphasized that it was the house of her family, a family that honored books and reading. She did not want a “house about her,” but about literature and the arts in our culture.

Freeman Tilden, a prominent authority on museum interpretation, wrote that historic sites offer an education “superior in some respects to that of the classroom, for here [the visitor] meets the Thing Itself.” The Welty House will be one of the most intact literary houses in America in terms of authenticity. Its exterior, interior, and furnishings will be as they were: paintings and photographs, objets d’art, linens, furniture, draperies, rugs, and above all, hundreds of books will be in their original places—thanks to Mary Alice Welty White and Elizabeth Welty Thompson, the author’s nieces, who inherited the furnishings and donated them to the state.

The impression of the interior—with virtually every wall lined with books—is that of the house of a reader, a family of readers, who valued books and read widely in works by the best minds of the 20th century, as well as in the classics of world literature. Also in the House Collection are childhood memorabilia, family photographs, and medals and certificates of literary honors that Welty received. We hope here the visitor will meet Eudora. Her life was committed to the efficacy of the written word, so it is her keen sensitivity and intelligence that informs the educational goals of our programming.

This programming will take many forms, but it was our desire that it be as insightful and intelligent as Welty was in writing and conversation, and that the initial groundwork be guided by a Welty scholar. We were extremely fortunate in securing for this important slot Suzanne Marrs, one of the leading Welty scholars in the nation. Marrs assumed this position part time beginning in FY2003, funded by the Eudora Welty Foundation. Eminently qualified to provide the intellectual guidance that we are seeking, she is the editor of Eudora Welty and Politics: Did the Writer Crusade? and author of The Welty Collection, One Writer’s Imagination, and the forthcoming biography of Welty, to be published by Harcourt. We are also fortunate that the Eudora Welty Chair of Southern Studies at Millsaps is currently occupied by Peggy Prenshaw, who will be available for Welty House programs.

Educational Mission
Our overall educational mission is to use Welty’s home and work to convey the potency of the written word in our culture and the great themes of human life in Welty’s writing. She has said, “Human life is fiction’s only theme.” Her work focuses on a way to understand the human experience as she profoundly explored the communal existence that defines us and our culture. Her insights were not limited to her own experience. Toni Morrison wrote, “Eudora Welty writes about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing—it’s the way they should be written about.” On the publication in the New Yorker of the story “The Demonstrators,” Jesse Jackson wrote to the magazine: “Eudora Welty’s ‘The Demonstrators’ was so true and powerful that it makes me weep for my people.” And Welty’s body of fiction reflecting woman’s experience in 20th-century America is increasingly studied by feminist scholars. (Her work is prominently featured in Patricia Yaeger’s study of Southern women writers, Dust and Desire, which won the 2001 Holman Award as best book in Southern Studies.)

First let’s look at the basic programs.
Guided tours of the Eudora Welty House. The Eudora Welty House will be presented as the home of a family that honored books and words and produced one of America’s great writers. Her parents’ deep belief in education and reading are apparent in the thousands of books that line every room in the house. So the basic tour will highlight Welty’s life with her family, work, and career; her sense of community; her place in American and international literature; her use of place as an element in fiction; her influence on contemporary American short stories. Special tours and talks will be offered to groups that request them: on such topics as other literary luminaries who have visited the house (Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Spencer, Reynolds Price, Richard Ford, Ellen Douglas, Ellen Gilchrist, Margaret Walker Alexander, Joan Didion, Ross MacDonald, Willie Morris, Kaye Gibbons, and almost Henry Miller; her mother had read one of his novels and had decreed that he would not step foot in her house). Other special topics will be Welty’s photographic career and her interest and contributions to the theatre.

Guided tours of the Welty Garden. The tour will describe the garden’s lively place in the life of the family and its use in the works of Eudora Welty. Breathtaking descriptions of flowers, trees, sky, and earth abound throughout her fiction and correspondence. In her fiction Welty alludes to more than 150 plants. Even the briefest reading of her descriptions of flowers, trees, and shrubs introduces readers to the concept of metaphor, the brilliance of imagery, and the possibility of seeing things in a new way.

The Visitors’ Center. There will be a separate structure as an adjunct educational facility. One room will be devoted to videos. An orientation film for the Eudora Welty House, of 12-15 minutes, will be produced by MDAH. Visual footage can be drawn from previously filmed segments of Welty, including several from Mississippi Public Broadcasting and several hours of footage donated by the British Broadcasting Company as outtakes of their documentary on Welty in 1984. The C. W. Welty Photographs and the Eudora Welty Photographs in the MDAH archives also provide a wealth of visual material.

Exhibits. There will be temporary exhibits on such topics as the family photographs made by Welty’s father. Displays concerning Welty’s books, papers, photographs, and other creations will be rotated in the visitors’ center. Exhibits on Welty’s fiction will be theme-oriented.

Sundays at the Eudora Welty House. This series, perhaps four times a year in tents, will feature readings of poetry, drama, fiction, and nonfiction of Southern writers, including Welty.

Children’s story hours. Special children’s events will be scheduled in the summers. Books selected to help young Mississippians see widely the nature of the state of Mississippi (as Welty famously did) and understand the multiplicity of cultures that feed the culture of Mississippi. Titles might include Choctaw folk tales, African and European folk tales, contemporary children’s books on subjects ranging from ecological awareness to racial tolerance.

We have received a $450,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. And the great news is that it is 100 percent foreducational programming. Our plans for
activities to be funded by income from the NEH Welty Educational Endowment Fund are these:

An International Welty Conference will be held in 2009, the 100th anniversary of Welty’s birth. This event will be held in conjunction with Millsaps College, which will make available meeting rooms for individual sessions, an auditorium for general sessions, and lodging facilities. Since Welty’s work has been translated into virtually every European language, as well as many Asian languages, we will invite noted international Welty scholars to participate. Then, beginning in 2009, a national Welty conference will be held biennially, alternately at Millsaps College and Belhaven College. The conference will be patterned on the respected and long-lived William Faulkner conference at the University of Mississippi and will include writers and scholars as participants.

Other events will include Mississippi Writers’ Days, an event held every other year that will feature readings by Mississippi-born writers from all over the nation; research grants of up to $2,000 given annually to an applicant wishing to work in the Welty collections of MDAH; summer seminars for both college and high school teachers; and a series of panel discussions or lectures by national scholars on topics in relation to Welty’s work: philosophy, politics, race relations, humor, feminism, sense of place, the natural world, visual arts, theatre or film. We will also explore the feasibility of annual Elderhostel sessions on Welty, publish an electronic newsletter for high school and junior high school teachers throughout the state on teaching Welty, distribute materials to schools in preparation for field trips.

As the endowment grows and is added to, MDAH plans to enlarge its outreach to involve colleges and universities across the state in the presentation of Eudora Welty House programs. These institutions will include the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, which had a number of Welty programs during her lifetime; Mississippi University for Women, which has an annual Eudora Welty Day; the University of Southern Mississippi, where Welty scholar Noel Polk holds forth. We want to involve other local colleges: Tougaloo College, Jackson State University, and Hinds Community College, in workshops and programs involving documentary photography and creative writing.

As the endowment grows more and more—or if separate endowments can be found—we would like to sponsor an annual short story contest, nationally, with a prestigious judge and a prize worthy of its name; an annual photography contest, perhaps limited to Mississippi photographers to replicate Welty’s efforts “to see widely and at close hand the nature of Mississippi”; and why not, as long as we are wishing, a short film contest for Best New Adaptation of Welty’s fiction.

In short, the Eudora Welty House programming will continue the legacy of Eudora Welty’s striking intellect and creative powers, her zest and curiosity, the place of literature in our lives, and the writer in our society. Eudora’s words of 1954 seem current a half century later: “Mutual understanding in the world being nearly always, as now, at low ebb, it is comforting to remember that it is through art that one country can nearly always speak reliably to another. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth.” She believed in her medium, so do we.

 

Patti Carr Black, author, exhibitions curator, former museum director, and longtime friend of Eudora Welty, participated in a program the Center sponsored with the Mississippi Department of Archives and History as part of the opening of the garden at Welty’s home at 1119 Pinehurst Street in Jackson in April 2004. Black’s remarks, printed here, tell about programming plans for the home, which is expected to open in late 2006. • The NEH challenge grant to support programming at the Eudora Welty House requires matching funds of $1,350,000. Contributions are tax exempt and may besent to the Eudora Welty Foundation, Inc., P.O. Box 55685, Jackson, MS 39205- 5685. For more information, contact Mary Alice White, Eudora Welty House Director, by e-mail (mawhite@mdah.state.ms.us) or visit www.eudorawelty.org/.