(Above: Medgar Evers' widow, Myrlie, comforts the couple's 9-year-old son, Darrel, at her husband's funeral in Jackson, Mississippi on June 15, 1963. AP photo.)
This short story first appeared in the July 6, 1963 edition of The New Yorker. But it did not appear as the initial version that Miss Welty sent them in which she had used Medgar Evers’s name and the city of Jackson and local landmarks and street names, etc. She has claimed that it was the only story she wrote out of anger. She was “fueled by it” because she wrote it in “one sitting, through the night” on the day that Medgar Evers was assassinated, she told me when I gave her a ride home from one of our mutual friend Frank Hains’s parties when I was 19 years old. I wrote about giving her that ride in my first memoir Mississippi Sissy but I did not write about that part of the conversation we had as I drove her because she was a bit tipsy from that last favored Maker’s Mark of hers at Frank’s, which was why Frank suggested I drive her home a few streets where she lived on Pinehurst. I don’t remember her exact words except for those couple of phrases. I had thought I remembered her saying that they made her change the story yet, in the years that followed, I wondered if I had not remembered that correctly. Who would “correct” a Welty story, especially in such a way? Indeed, such a correction went past editing into a kind of fearful censorship after she had so bravely written what she initially wrote as a Mississippian. I like to think William Maxwell, her editor as well as a brilliant writer himself, stood up for her yet lost his argument with the magazine’s publisher, R.H. Fleischmann. A few years ago, confirming my memory, The Clarion-Ledger, the daily newspaper in Jackson, received permission to print Miss Welty’s original version with the real names in it instead of the nomenclative fiction forced on her by The New Yorker because of its fear of being sued for libel, I presume, by Byron De La Beckwith who was arrested for the assassination ten days after it occurred.
I realize now that the journalistic instinct of someone who would later in life become known for interviewing famous figures was already there within me when I attempted to have a conversation with Miss Welty as I drove her home in my little white Mercury Comet. I wasn’t exactly conversing with her but interviewing her. Always political, I wanted to know about that story she had dared to write. One doesn’t often think of Eudora Welty as daring but I remember thinking of her that way that night, marked by Maker’s Mark and a memory I was eliciting in her when her daring anger was too much of a dare itself for The New Yorker which printed the story, but only on its own terms. That was not daring on its part but speaks to another kind of temerity that it took to treat one of America’s greatest writers that way, a tedious kind, when it was used ironically to enforce an editorial timidity dictated by its publisher.
I often call MAGA cultists of Donald Trump, now 47 years later, theocratic white authoritarian fascists. But they are even more deeply the political progeny of the racist segregationist Dixiecrats - De La Beckwith, et al. - who were so warmly welcomed into the GOP after fleeing their complicated home in the Democratic party when the Democrats decided to cut them loose in the 1960s by crafting Civil Rights legislation and becoming the party identified with it. The Dixiecrats then infected the body-politic of the GOP and did not shape-shift to fit into the party but the party, over time, has shape-shifted to accommodate the bigotries the virulent racists brought with them into it. Republicans have become even more rabidly right-wing and radical and staunchly opposed to any form of civil rights, whether for African Americans or LGBTQ citizens. Indeed, their stolen Supreme Court has not only overturned Roe but seems ready to overturn Civil Rights laws themselves just as they gutted the Voting Rights Act and have stood with the states rights argument in support of voter suppression laws, an argument to which segregationists of yore yoked their own racist arguments when trying to make it more palatable to places where slave plantations never existed and therefore never held up romantically as tourists stops told with a narrative that Miss Welty detested for its overly fictionalized dishonesty.
(Above: Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker Alexander at the Governor’s Awards ceremony in Jackson, Mississippi. 1992. Photo: Charlotte Moman.)
Frank Hains once regaled me with what Miss Welty really thought about Gone with the Wind. I’ll keep that rather ribald tale off-the-record but it is safe to say she preferred her friend Margaret Walker Alexander’s Civil War novel, Jubilee. Alexander, in fact, lived only a few doors down from Medgar Evers and she and his wife Myrlie belonged to the same garden club. Their children played together. Also a poet, Alexander wrote two poems about Evers after the assassination. But it was the assassin that Welty felt compelled not only to conjure with her literary brilliance but to confront, and stunningly did so from the only vantage point she had, her white and privileged - indeed cosseted - Mississippi heritage. Even with Jackson renamed Thermopylae in this short story below and Medgar Evers becoming Roland Summers, The New Yorker could purposefully pare away its reality but it could not neuter the courage of its honesty which she honed that night she stayed up writing it in what just might have been the kind of whiteness truly alien to her, the white heat of anger. The voice that came from her, however, was tinged, almost tarnished, by that privilege of hers since she made the assassin more lower-class than De La Beckwith, who was arrested between her writing the story and its publication, turned out to be. He was a member of both the establishment White Citizens Council as well as the KKK. Born in California, married in Rhode Island before resettling in Mississippi, he was orphaned when he was 12 and raised in the state’s Delta region by an uncle and aunt. He was related by marriage to Welty’s fellow Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, liberal Democratic, activist, and politician, Upton Sinclair. De La Beckwith also attended The Webb School in Tennessee, a prestigious boarding school, the oldest in the south that has produced more Rhodes Scholars than any other prep school in America. When The Clarion-Ledger printed the story’s original version in 2013, one of its reporters, Jerry Mitchell, who interviewed De La Beckwith, told NPR: “He's actually the most racist person I ever spent any time with. It's just one racial epithet or comment after another. He just kind of spewed it. And yet he was very kind to his wife, very gentlemanly. And so there's kind of that massive Southern contradiction that we have, and all kind of wrapped up in him.”
(Above: Miss Welty at her typewriter in her upstairs bedroom on Pinehurst Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo: Jill Krementz)
It was wrapped up in a different way in Miss Welty who didn’t have a racist bone in her gibbous body but knew in her bones who such racists were just as I know who their political progeny are in the present-day GOP. It is in that deep saturating silence of self which resides in such bones - our to-the-marrow essence - where voices struggle to matter and emerge and shape us into the chorus of who we are. This is doubly true for for writers who utilize the capacity to access such voices into the voice with which they compose their sentences - a cadence they discern (that discerns them?) which eddies and ripples the silence of the self which laps up around them when they write - especially authors such as Miss Welty known for her sense of place. Where is the Voice Coming From? came from her, this deeply civilized Mississippi woman, this lifelong liberal Democrat, this literary light who heard the darkness of this monologue emerging from the Mississippi muck that had finally muddied even her. No amount of personal gentility could muffle the voice she was hearing that night she sat in anger in her upstairs bedroom and banged out this story not only as a cri de coeur, a curdled one that sits in a way like clabber atop this story churned up from a startling souring in her of the south, but also a cultural and political - and maybe even a literary - amends that it took this tragedy for such sourness to be sorted finally and no longer concealed in the congealing of the congenial. She could no longer ignore this part of the state’s political and historical sociopathy that I consider more deeply evil. I am not haunted by the image of her sitting up all night at her typewriter in her upstairs bedroom with the echo of her fingers angrily engaged with the keys lifting over Pinehurst in something that for once could not be described as the lovely staccato lilt of “just listen to Eudora up there working” that those who lived along her block had grown to live their lives by in a rhythmic neighborliness. I instead find inspiration in thinking of her sitting there for hours in the white heat of her anger until the white heat of another Mississippi June day rose about her as she found a new kind of cadence lapping about her and she typed the story’s last words, which she assigned to the assassin’s singing voice because such a sorry man conjured by such a great woman in the appalling apologia she knew how to craft because she knew she had to confront this voice which shockingly came from somewhere within her that she needed to write as much as it shockingly needed finally to sing even if, in singing, it sang this: “ …a-Down. And sing a-down, down, down, down. Sing a-down, down, down, down. Down."
I debated whether to keep in a certain word used by racists that Miss Welty repeatedly used when writing in the racist’s voice or to signify it with its first letter and then use dashes for the rest. Would my not using it as written lessen the whole point of the story: to hear and know this racist, to confront his evil in the dumb thud of a lone vowel as well as the nasty aim of his rifle? I decided finally to use the signifying version of the word in case Substack has a policy about its use in 2022 that The New Yorker even in its timidity did not have in 1963. It has literary worth in this story, not just the evil sound of bigotry. But then I convinced myself that the reader by reading it without it being fully written out would feel a kind of complicity with the assassin that maybe seeing the word plainly wouldn’t conjure in them. Maybe it is even more discomfiting to read the word in your mind without it being really written. There is a whole essay to be written about that alone.
WHERE IS THE VOICE COMING FROM
by Eudora Welty
I says to my wife, “You can reach and turn it off. You don’t have to set and look at a black n- - - - - face no longer than you want to, or listen to what you don’t want to hear. It’s still a free country.”
I reckon that’s how I give myself the idea.
I says, I could find right exactly where in Thermopylae that n- - - - -’s living that’s asking for equal time. And without a bit of trouble to me.
And I ain’t saying it might not be because that’s pretty close to where I live. The other hand, there could be reasons you might have yourself for knowing how to get there in the dark. It’s where you all go for the thing you want when you want it the most. Ain’t that right?
The Branch Bank sign tells you in lights, all night long even, what time it is and how hot. When it was quarter to four, and 92, that was me going by in my brother-in-law’s truck. He don’t deliver nothing at that hour of the morning.
So you leave Four Corners and head west on Nathan B. Forrest Road, past the Surplus & Salvage, not much beyond the Kum Back Drive-In and Trailer Camp, not as far as where the signs starts saying “Live Bait,” “Used Parts,” “Fireworks,” “Peaches,” and “Sister Peebles Reader and Adviser.” Turn before you hit the city limits and duck back towards the I.C. tracks. And his street’s been paved.
And there was his light on, waiting for me. In his garage, if you please. His car’s gone. He’s out planning still some other ways to do what we tell ’em they can’t. I thought I’d beat him home. All I had to do was pick my tree and walk in close behind it.
I didn’t come expecting not to wait. But it was so hot, all I did was hope and pray one or the other of us wouldn’t melt before it was over.
Now, it wasn’t no bargain I’d struck.
I’ve heard what you’ve heard about Goat Dykeman, in Mississippi. Sure, everybody knows about Goat Dykeman. Goat he got word to the Governor’s Mansion he’d go up yonder and shoot that n- - - - - Meredith clean out of school, if he’s let out of the pen to do it. Old Ross turned that over in his mind before saying him nay, it stands to reason.
I ain’t no Goat Dykeman, I ain’t in no pen, and I ain’t ask no Governor Barnett to give me one thing. Unless he wants to give me a pat on the back for the trouble I took this morning. But he don’t have to if he don’t want to. I done what I done for my own pure-D satisfaction.
As soon as I heard wheels, I knowed who was coming. That was him and bound to be him. It was the right n- - - - - heading in a new white car up his driveway towards his garage with the light shining, but stopping before he got there, maybe not to wake ’em. That was him. I knowed it when he cut off the car lights and put his foot out and I knowed him standing dark against the light. I knowed him then like I know me now. I knowed him even by his still, listening back.
Never seen him before, never seen him since, never seen anything of his black face but his picture, never seen his face alive, any time at all, or anywheres, and didn’t want to, need to, never hope to see that face and never will. As long as there was no question in my mind.
He had to be the one. He stood right still and waited against the light, his back was fixed, fixed on me like a preacher’s eyeballs when he’s yelling “Are you saved?” He’s the one.
I’d already brought up my rifle, I’d already taken my sights. And I’d already got him, because it was too late then for him or me to turn by one hair.
Something darker than him, like the wings of a bird, spread on his back and pulled him down. He climbed up once, like a man under bad claws, and like just blood could weigh a ton he walked with it on his back to better light. Didn’t get no further than his door. And fell to stay.
He was down. He was down, and a ton load of bricks on his back wouldn’t have laid any heavier. There on his paved driveway, yes sir.
And it wasn’t till the minute before, that the mockingbird had quit singing. He’d been singing up my sassafras tree. Either he was up early, or he hadn’t never gone to bed, he was like me. And the mocker he’d stayed right with me, filling the air till come the crack, till I turned loose of my load. I was like him. I was on top of the world myself. For once.
I stepped to the edge of his light there, where he’s laying flat. I says, “Roland? There was one way left, for me to be ahead of you and stay ahead of you, by Dad, and I just taken it. 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?” I said. “Well, you seen to it, didn’t you?”
I stood a minute—just to see would somebody inside come out long enough to pick him up. And there she comes, the woman. I doubt she’d been to sleep. Because it seemed to me she’d been in there keeping awake all along.
It was mighty green where I skint over the yard getting back. That n- - - - - wife of his, she wanted nice grass! I bet my wife would hate to pay her water bill. And for burning her electricity. And there’s my brother-in-law’s truck, still waiting with the door open.
“No Riders”—that didn’t mean me.
There wasn’t a thing I been able to think of since would have made it to go any nicer. Except a chair to my back while I was putting in my waiting. But going home, 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. And the temperature stuck where it was. All that night I guarantee you it had stood without dropping, a good 92.
My wife says, “What? Didn’t the skeeters bite you?” She said, “Well, they been asking that—why somebody didn’t trouble to load a rifle and get some of these agitators out of Thermopylae. Didn’t the fella keep drumming it in, what a good idea? The one that writes a column ever’day?”
I says to my wife, “Find some way I don’t get the credit.”
“He says do it for Thermopylae,” she says. “Don’t you ever skim the paper?”
I says, “Thermopylae never done nothing for me. And I don’t owe nothing to Thermopylae. Didn’t do it for you. Hell, any more’n I’d do something or other for them Kennedys! I done it for my own pure-D satisfaction.”
“It’s going to get him right back on TV,” says my wife. “You watch for the funeral.”
I says, “You didn’t even leave a light burning when you went to bed. So how was I supposed to even get me home or pull Buddy’s truck up safe in our front yard?”
“Well, hear another good joke on you,” my wife says next. “Didn’t you hear the news? 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. Listen and hear ’em say so.”
I ain’t but one. I reckon you have to tell somebody.
“Where’s the gun, then?” my wife says. “What did you do with our protection?”
I says, “It was scorching! It was scorching!” I told her, “It’s laying out on the ground in rank weeds, trying to cool off, that’s what it’s doing now.”
“You dropped it,” she says. “Back there.”
And I told her, “Because I’m so tired of ever’thing in the world being just that hot to the touch! The keys to the truck, the doorknob, the bedsheet, ever’thing, it’s all like a stove lid. There just ain’t much going that’s worth holding onto it no more,” I says, “when it’s a hundred and two in the shade by day and by night not too much difference. I wish you’d laid your finger to that gun.”
“Trust you to come off and leave it,” my wife says.
“Is that how no-’count I am?” she makes me ask. “You want to go back and get it?”
“You’re the one they’ll catch. I say it’s so hot that even if you get to sleep you wake up feeling like you cried all night!” says my wife. “Cheer up, here’s one more joke before time to get up. Heard what Caroline said? Caroline said, ‘Daddy, I just can’t wait to grow up big, so I can marry James Meredith. I heard that where I work. One rich-bitch to another one, to make her cackle.”
“At least I kept some dern teen-ager from North Thermopylae getting there and doing it first,” I says. “Driving his own car.”
On TV and in the paper, they don’t know but half of it. They know who Roland Summers was without knowing who I am. His face was in front of the public before I got rid of him, and after I got rid of him there it is again—the same picture. And none of me. I ain’t ever had one made. Not ever! The best that newspaper could do for me was offer a five-hundred-dollar reward for finding out who I am. For as long as they don’t know who that is, whoever shot Roland is worth a good deal more right now than Roland is.
But by the time I was moving around uptown, it was hotter still. That pavement in the middle of Main Street was so hot to my feet I might’ve been walking the barrel of my gun. If the whole world could’ve just felt Main Street this morning through the soles of my shoes, maybe it would’ve helped some.
Then the first thing I heard ’em say was the N. double A. C. P. done it themselves, killed Roland Summers, and proved it by saying the shooting was done by an expert (I hope to tell you it was!) and at just the right hour and minute to get the whites in trouble.
You can’t win.
“They’ll never find him,” the old man trying to sell roasted peanuts tells me to my face.
And it’s so hot.
It looks like the town’s on fire already, whichever ways you turn, ever’ street you strike, because there’s those trees hanging them pones of bloom like split watermelon. And a thousand cops crowding ever’where you go, half of ’em too young to start shaving, but all streaming sweat alike. I’m getting tired of ’em.
I was already tired of seeing a hundred cops getting us white people nowheres. Back at the beginning, I stood on the corner and I watched them new babyface cops loading nothing but n- - - - - children into the paddy wagon and they come marching out of a little parade and into the paddy wagon singing. And they got in and sat down without providing a speck of trouble, and their hands held little new American flags, and all the cops could do was knock them flagsticks a-loose from their hands, and not let ’em pick ’em up, that was all, and give ’em a free ride. And children can just get ’em more flags.
Everybody: It don’t get you nowhere to take nothing from nobody unless you make sure it’s for keeps, for good and all, for ever and amen.
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 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.
I’m ready myself for that funeral.
Oh, they may find me. May catch me one day in spite of ’emselves. (But I grew up in the country.) May try to railroad me into the electric chair, and what that amounts to is something hotter than yesterday and today put together.
But I advise ’em to go careful. Ain’t it about time us taxpayers starts to calling the moves? Starts to telling the teachers and the preachers and the judges of our so-called courts how far they can go?
Even the President so far, he can’t walk in my house without being invited, like he’s my daddy, just to say whoa. Not yet!
Once, I run away from my home. And there was a ad for me, come to be printed in our county weekly. My mother paid for it. It was from her. It says: “son: You are not being hunted for anything but to find you.” That time, I come on back home.
But people are dead now.
And it’s so hot. Without it even being August yet.
Anyways, I seen him fall. I was evermore the one.
So I reach me down my old guitar off the nail in the wall. ’Cause I’ve got my guitar, what I’ve held onto from way back when, and I never dropped that, never lost or forgot it, never hocked it but to get it again, never give it away, and I set in my chair, with nobody home but me, and I start to play, and sing a-Down. And sing a-down, down, down, down. Sing a-down, down, down, down. Down. ♦