New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race

Contributions by Jacob Agner, Susan V. Donaldson, Sarah Gilbreath Ford, Stephen M. Fuller, Jean C. Griffith, Ebony Lumumba, Rebecca Mark, Donnie McMahand, Kevin Murphy, Harriet Pollack, Christin Marie Taylor, Annette Trefzer, and Adrienne Akins Warfield

The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. The thirteen diverse voices in New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race deepen, reflect on, and respond to those seminal discussions. These essays freshly consider such topics as Welty’s uses of African American signifying in her short stories and her attention to public street performances interacting with Jim Crow rules in her unpublished photographs. Contributors discuss her adaptations of gothic plots, haunted houses, Civil War stories, and film noir. And they frame Welty’s work with such subjects as Bob Dylan’s songwriting, the idea and history of the orphan in America, and standup comedy. They compare her handling of whiteness and race to other works by such contemporary writers as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, and Alice Walker. Discussions of race and class here also bring her masterwork The Golden Apples and her novel Losing Battles, underrepresented in earlier conversations, into new focus.

Moreover, as a group these essays provide insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Nov 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496826169

Book preview

EUDORA WELTY, WHITENESS, AND RACE RECONSIDERED

An Introduction

Harriet Pollack

The year 2013 saw the publication of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race, a collection in which twelve critics changed the conversation on Welty’s fiction and photography by mining and deciphering the complexity of her responses to the Jim Crow South. Since then, the critical discussion of her work has often been a dialogue with those essays.

The eleven diverse voices of this new volume engage that earlier work to deepen, reflect on, and respond to it. As a group, these essays draw added attention to the tangling, interdependent intersectionality in Welty’s portrayals of race, class, and gender—an interaction defining and configuring our American social structure and prominent American systems of disadvantage in both Welty’s time and our own. These essays and the collection as a whole help us to more clearly understand Welty’s artistic commentary on her time and place and how it unfolded in her photography and fiction when the country as a whole was moving towards increased social awareness. The volume’s organization follows the chronology of Welty’s canon, allowing us to trace the pattern in her art over time. And several of these discussions bring her master work, The Golden Apples, and her novel Losing Battles, which were underrepresented in the earlier conversation, into new focus. What follows is a brief introduction to the essays you will find in this book.

In Transformative Performances: Eudora Welty’s ‘Negro State Fair Parade’ Photographs, Annette Trefzer examines previously unpublished photographs that Welty took in Jackson in the mid-1930s. Held by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, these images demonstrate Welty’s interest in capturing public street performances over several years. Trefzer examines these photographs as a unified study of and on public culture in the segregated landscape of the Depression South. She argues that the Negro State Fair Parades in Jackson offered opportunities for the African American community to display their upward social mobility and shape modern racial identities. Welty’s documentation of these parades captures intercultural interactions that the Jim Crow rules and spatial segregation of Mississippi would increasingly seek to constrict. For me, Trefzer’s argument recalls anthropologist Victor Turner’s theory of the power of ritual to create communitas—a ceremonious ritual space in which people stand together outside everyday society and generate a lingering community effect. Trefzer suggests that these parades in Jackson were opportunities for the African American community to come together, rewrite the rules, [and] display … their active participation in the forward march of Mississippi commerce for all to see. Capturing moments of racial mobility in photographs well layered with cultural and historical meaning and sharing some photographs not previously seen outside of the archives, Trefzer demonstrates that the pleasure of the parade reveals a politics of play closely linked to debates about African American citizenship, self-fashioning, and socioeconomic ‘progress.’

In "The Lynched Earth: Trees, Trespass, and Political Intelligence in Welty’s ‘A Worn Path’ and Morrison’s Home, Donnie McMahand and Kevin L. Murphy show that as early as 1941 and in a story as frequently read as A Worn Path," Welty was attentively depicting the segregated South. In their comparative essay, they bring Welty’s early tale together with Morrison’s novel Home, to show two writers, one white and one black, portraying the natural world in ways that evoke America’s submerged history of racialized violence. McMahand and Murphy see these two very different fictions as comparable variations of what they term reformed pastoral, a counter-tradition that they argue developed in the work of African American and southern women writers. Reminding me of Camille Dungy, who—in her groundbreaking 2009 Black Nature anthology—identified a long black tradition of incorporating the natural world in what is not at all romantic nature poetry, McMahand and Murphy show how these two women writers create landscapes that record and telegraph the restrictions, indignities, and atrocities of American racial history. While reading Welty and Morrison intertextually, they attend ecoimages that bind terror with natural space and graph the burden of history onto the black body and psyche, and they discuss the political acumen that directs characters’ cross-racial negotiations. Prompting readers to recall woodlands associated with the lynched black body, McMahand and Murphy call attention to a doubleness in the writers’ imagery of tree branches—evoking, on the one hand, the repressed history of southern atrocity for African Americans and, on the other, life forces pointing expectantly toward survival and regeneration.

Sarah Gilbreath Ford’s essay "Specters on Staircases: Race, Property, and the Gothic in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon continues McMahand and Murphy’s productive charting of the connection between earlier and later twentieth-century writers’ projects. Ford identifies a prototypical scene that recurs in all three novels; in each, characters enter haunted houses seeking information, but then they are impeded by mysterious African American women who appear on flights of stairs. Ford argues that these three writers use their fictional houses, built on the well-trod soil of the gothic, to interrogate slavery, servitude, and race through the vexed concept of property. She suggests that the energy that drives the repetition is the conflation of person and property, causing the novels’ black specters to haunt the houses but also to haunt as houses, in the status of property assigned because of their race. Each of these female figures uses her position as property to assert a different kind of possession and power. As property, the women embody the horror of slavery’s reduction of human." As specters, the women reveal how that horror haunts the present. In doing this, Ford shows that Welty’s Delta Wedding, a work that in comparison to Faulkner’s and Morrison’s novels has rarely been termed gothic, yields productively to that characterization.

In Moon Lake’s Orphans and ‘The Other Way to Live,’ Jean C. Griffith considers the orphan’s probationary whiteness and status relationship to the promises of American democracy. Her argument reveals how the figure of the ‘orphan’ was used by the genteel to test the promises and dangers of a white racial identity untethered by fixed categories of class. Griffith also uses Welty’s Moon Lake to demonstrate how powerfully the social and political issues associated with adulthood [shape] the discourses of children and childhood. Innovative and pioneering in its close reading, the essay is startlingly large in its wide-ranging discussion of the orphanage as an asylum designed and delegated to attempt social engineering, an institutionalized response to twentieth-century national debates about poverty and eugenics, caste and class, race and sex, motherhood and women’s work, and cultural purity and pluralism. Griffith probes American social-welfare policy, reflecting the goal not just to help unfortunate children, but also to ‘conquer misfortune itself.’ Moreover, her framing unifies the story’s two structurally disparate plot parts—first, the elaborated portraits of Nina Carmichael and Jinny Love Stark, two young representatives of social entitlement who are figuring the orphan Easter’s meaning for them; and second, Easter’s dramatic drowning at the hands of a small black boy’s casual brushing touch and then her resurrection by the determined Boy Scout’s sexually suggestive resuscitation—in a way that convincingly uncovers the elusive unity of this story.

This essay by Jean Griffith and the following one by Christin Marie Taylor bring new and needed attention to the topic of whiteness and race in Welty’s masterwork, The Golden Apples (1949), written as the modern civil rights movement approached. In "The Boogie in the Bush: The Boundaries of Race, Nature, and Desire in Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples, Christin Marie Taylor asks about Welty’s engagement of the dynamics of race and space, and she maintains that while black presences appear marginal in the collection, they touch the heart of it. Reminding us of Morgana Mississippi’s all-too-culturally familiar southern race-rape rumor that a crazy nigger had jumped out of the school hedge and got Miss Eckhart (365), Taylor explores the association of nature, race, and desire in American culture and its production of a vocabulary equally about controlling black masculinity … and white feminine power. In her argument, the ecoimage of the hedge is central—a border and interstitial space where constructed notions of an inside (domestic) whiteness and an outside (untamed) blackness collide. Focusing on black characters who speak from Morgana’s liminal boundaries, Taylor illuminates the significant challenges to white narratives brought by rose-adorned yardman Plez Morgan and woods-roaming Twosie McLane, leveled from their border positions. Recentering the importance of Plez Morgan to A Shower of Gold, Taylor highlights the role Plez plays in overturning Katie Rainey’s romantic construction of King MacLain as idealized white masculinity. When his visioning of King enters Katie’s telling, King transforms—from the man who meets a woman in the woods while offering gifts that break a woman’s heart—to a man running from domestic space—who is a more actual threat to white womanhood and female power than the imagined black boogie in the bush. Similarly, Twosie McLane challenges the narrative of Jinny Love and Nina Carmichael in Moon Lake when she tells them, Yawl don’t know what’s out here in woods wid you … Yawl walk right by mans wid great big gun, could jump out at yawl. Yawl don’t eem smellim" (Collected Stories of Eudora Welty 419–20). Twosie’s black knowing … renders visible a profuse hunting and haunting white masculinity and clarifies issues of point of view and storytelling central to the story cycle. As Taylor points out, the hedge allows Welty to evoke a subtle consciousness about the nature of segregation as she unearths a portrait of the white world as it did not see itself, even as the writer leaves open questions about whether such attitudes and societies will change.

Rebecca Mark, in For Crying Out Loud, or ‘The Truth Is Something Worse, I Ain’t Said What Yet’: African American Howls and Cries as Radical Punctuation/Puncture in Eudora Welty’s Fiction, considers the African American screams that punctuate Welty’s representations of a whites’ only dance (‘Powerhouse’), a white girl’s summer camp (‘Moon Lake’), and the white people’s’ Civil War (‘The Burning’). Opposing the view that the white woman writer speaks softly or obliquely on the topic of race, Mark argues that Welty’s drumbeating political opinions come through loud and clear in these full-throated African American cries. Combining insights from arenas as diverse as black stand-up comedy and Hélène Cixous’s work on The Character of Character, Mark suggests that while writing from Mississippi during segregation, Welty insistently invites her African American characters to cry out and that their freedom cries become a full orchestration of African American despair, fury, grief, celebration, and rebuke. Comparing howls and utterances such as Sssst and Plooey to graphic novel visual punctuation, Mark shows that Welty’s assortment of African American diegetic sounds comprises a gestural vocabulary, … [a] non-verbal lexicon, as she deciphers their use in a pattern across Welty’s career.

In Faltering Narrative: Eudora Welty’s ‘The Burning,’ Slavery’s Ghosts, and the Politics of Grief, Susan V. Donaldson interprets Welty’s lone Civil War story not just as a clever parody of the Gone with the Wind phenomenon but as an eerily contemporary condemnation of the politics of identity, history, and grief that came to be associated with monuments and memorials to the Lost Cause and its culture of defeat, white nostalgia, and melancholia. The Burning both parodies and ponders the losses endlessly mourned by Lost Cause art and literature by resorting to a potent symbol for white nostalgia in an image that Welty brought back with her from her Guggenheim-funded tour of Europe—that of a plantation manor’s majestic mirror framed and supported by two sculptures of black men. For the story’s white mistresses, the mirror suggests the world of white mastery that they have lost, but to their slave girl Delilah, who obeys them in their final act of self-destruction, the mirror evokes the fading mastery of the past, the fast-multiplying possibilities of her future, and the losses linking her in grief to her mistresses, who cannot face a world without slavery. From start to finish, the story falters, in the language of feminist philosopher Judith Butler, because of the destructiveness of white nostalgia denying the grief and interdependence of defeated masters and emancipated slaves—and ultimately the bonds uniting whites and African Americans even in Jim Crow Mississippi.

Adrienne Akins Warfield, in Insiders, Outsiders, and Class Anxiety: Eudora Welty and Bob Dylan on the Medgar Evers Murder, examines how insiders and outsiders to the South conceive of the mindset of southern racists and the complexity of southern social relations, exploring the happenstance that the fifty-four-year-old Jackson insider Eudora Welty and the twenty-one-year-old northern outsider Bob Dylan both produced artistic responses to the murder of Medgar Evers that shared attention to the killer’s class identity. That Welty and Dylan, two very different artists, made similar contemporary assumptions about Evers’s murderer and his motivations allows Warfield to consider what they and more recent historians suggest about the relationship between class, racial violence, and southern identity. Situating Welty’s story Where Is the Voice Coming From? and Dylan’s song Only a Pawn in Their Game within the context of the facts about Byron de la Beckwith’s murder of Evers and the treatment of Beckwith’s trial by both national media sources and Jackson locals, Warfield further analyzes Welty’s emendations of her earliest draft of Where Is the Voice Coming From? for publication in The New Yorker—changes that increased the emphasis on the killer’s class status. The essay thus shapes an analysis and commentary on class anxiety as a motivating factor in acts of racist violence and in artistic conceptualizations of such violence.

Ebony O. Lumumba, in Demonstration of Life: Signifying for Social Justice in Eudora Welty’s ‘The Demonstrators,’ illustrates that in her 1930s and 1940s correspondence and sketches, Welty began by portraying black characters in ways that are problematically magical, awkwardly revealing her white distance from and her romanticizing of the black community that she entered as an outsider. Lumumba suggests that by the 1960s Welty is drawing on her 1930s personal experience when she dramatizes the problem of white misunderstanding through the figure of Dr. Strickland. By then more aware of white privilege, white blindness, white offense, and white criminality, Welty creates a character that she recognizes from personal connection, but she is also separate from and willing to prosecute. The essay’s driving focus is toward the story’s black women’s challenge of the doctor in a nuanced reading of their resistant signifying—a tradition Welty might not have had the name for but had carefully observed and consequently portrayed. Lumumba thus shows an evolution and a connection between problematically magical black portraits in Welty’s early correspondence and sketches and her ability to write the characters of The Demonstrators as real.

Jacob Agner, in Welty’s Moonlighting Detective: Whiteness and Welty’s Subversion of the American Noir Tradition in ‘The Demonstrators,’ reads Eudora Welty’s 1966 civil rights story The Demonstrators against the American noir tradition in fiction and film while considering the tradition’s intersections with the story of race in America. Extending recent critical discussion of Welty’s political narrative as written in the mode of detective fiction and the murder mystery, Welty’s Moonlighting Detective takes the argument a step further, to consider the similarities and the intersections between Welty’s career with noir and the tradition of particularly dark crime stories that flourished between the 1920s and the 1960s. Considering the tradition as color coded and racialized, Agner examines how Welty’s use of well-known noir narrative and compositional traits—such as the hard-boiled detective and high-contrast chiaroscuro (black-and-white) lighting—addresses the racial politics and crises of Welty’s time and place. Throwing a spotlight on her generic adaptation, Agner shows that through the lens of noir storytelling, Welty throws whiteness into relief.

In "Ideology, Ethnicity, and Performativity in Eudora Welty’s Losing Battles," Stephen Fuller locates Losing Battles in the broad context of its production and publication during the era of civil rights agitation and foment. Fuller meets the citizens of Banner with a challenge that reverberates in our own political time when he asks about a chronically impoverished white farming community that unthinkingly accepts ideologies that both help keep them oppressed and alienate them from potential working-class allies of other ethnicities. Drawing on Marxist critic Terry Eagleton’s inquiry into recognition that the most efficient oppressor is the one who persuades his underlings to love, and desire, and identify with his power (Ideology xxii), Fuller considers the speech acts that typically limit the Bannerites’ emancipation and show them as unwitting drivers of their own impoverishment. In an interpretation that blends the political with the stylistic, Fuller argues that the novel holds out the promise of meaningful economic and intellectual liberation and assesses its younger generation’s ability to distinguish cultural narratives of freedom and tolerance from ones that foster alienation and animosity.

If the essays of Eudora Welty, Whiteness, and Race responded to the need to newly deliberate a controversial topic to understand Welty’s body of work as sensitive to and conscious of issues of race and class (in ways that had been neither expected or appreciated), New Essays on Eudora Welty, Class, and Race takes the conversation further still. The essays reflect both her political sensibility in a problematic era of American history and her growing awareness in a world in need of change. Moreover, they provide fresh insight into Welty as an innovative craftswoman and modernist technician, busily altering literary form with her frequent, pointed makeovers of familiar story patterns, plots, and genres. And they show her as remarkable writer idiosyncratically engaging and revising old forms to confidently alter literary history.

TRANSFORMATIVE PERFORMANCES

Eudora Welty’s Negro State Fair Parade Photographs

Annette Trefzer

It is well established that Eudora Welty was a serious photographer meaning, in the words of Pearl McHaney, that she took the art of photographing seriously (A Tyrannous 46).

Welty began taking photographs sometime in the late 1920s, perhaps, as Suzanne Marrs suggests, in the summer of 1929 after she had graduated from the University of Wisconsin and before she became a graduate student at Columbia University (Welty Collection 77). And classifying her photographs, Marrs adds that Welty’s early photographs tend to focus on encounters, and upon small groups of people, while her later photographs more often depict landscapes and townscapes. But her photographs also show unexpected lines of continuity: pictures of parades and carnivals date from her use of the simple Kodak and extend through her years as a photographer (Welty Collection 79). Among the photographs held by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, there are forty-six photographs that Welty took of State Fair Parades in Jackson in the mid-1930s. Welty was photographing the parades at least three years in a row.¹ Given Welty’s persistent interest in capturing street performances in Jackson, these photographs form a unified body of work on public culture in the segregated landscape of her hometown.

When Eudora Welty was growing up in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1920s and 30s, it was the small-town capital of an essentially agricultural state. Surrounded by cotton fields and truck farming, Jackson did experience the changes of increasing urbanization and more than doubled its population size from 22,817 in 1920 to 48,282 in 1930 (Brinson 180). But despite this rapid growth, only a small number of streets were paved yet, and life was a far cry from the lavish, affluent, and roaring twenties because social changes occurred slowly: the population was largely rural, a majority was black, and churches exerted an overall conservative influence. Whatever amusement there was in Jackson during the 1920s was provided by circuses and touring attractions of transient troupes; visits by opera companies from cities like Chicago or New York; or movies, concerts, lectures, and sports events.²

By far the largest yearly entertainment and educational feature in Jackson was the Mississippi State Fair held every October on the grounds behind the Old Capitol building. The State Fair became an annual event in 1904, and for the first decade of its existence, it was supported by public-spirited citizens. Then it was obtained by the city, and after 1915, it was conducted by city officials and operated as a municipal department (Brinson 179). In the early years, the Mississippi State Fair was not always well attended, but after the 1922 centennial celebration of the city, its admissions rose dramatically to twenty-five thousand, and the city made a nice profit (Mills 9). After the Depression struck Jackson in October 1929, attendance at the fair declined again. In many ways, the annual state fair was an excellent barometer of prosperity, as Mary Shadburn writes, and during the 1930s it was designed to make the most pessimistic Mississippian forget for a brief week ‘that cotton is down to five cents, that the legislature is in session and times are hard’ (68). But particularly during the hardest years of the Depression (1931–34), many citizens could not afford to visit the fair. In a broadcast transcript for WJDX of September 27, 1932, Commissioner of Agriculture J. C. Holton reviewed the history of the fair from its beginning as the Agricultural Convention of 1840 to the current moment when he announced that it was for the first time, a Free Fair as a response to the decreased financial condition of our people during the Depression (Mississippi Department of Archives and History [MDAH], Subject File). Responding to the changed financial situation, the fair organizers offered a free gate policy during the rest of the decade. Holton wrote, The gates are wide open. There will be neither ticket sellers nor ticket takers and the good people of Mississippi’s Capitol City are issuing a general and cordial invitation to all of the people to visit with them (MDAH, Subject File). As a result, fair attendance for 1933 was the best in years and indicated better business days ahead (Shadburn 71).

From the beginning, street parades were an integral part of the Mississippi State Fair. Various business, civic, and political clubs staged parades going down Capitol Street, Jackson’s main economic thoroughfare during the 1920s. For instance, in 1921, all the traveling salesmen stationed in the city marched up Capitol Street proudly sporting their white hats and walking sticks. As the Jackson Daily News reported, this jaunt of the knights of the grip closed a week of parades which began with the Rotary Club, Boy Scouts, and a brass band (Mills 10). On the last day of the fair in 1922, college students from Oxford and Starkville, in town for a football game, staged a spontaneous snake dance on Capitol Street that caused a lengthy traffic jam (Mills 10). As articulations of Jackson’s various social economies, the parades in conjunction with the State Fair claimed public space in a demonstration of economic progress and fun. But parades were also used in more sinister ways as acts of racial ordering and hierarchy. Looking back to the reconstitution of the southern economy after the Civil War, Grace Hale draws attention to the crucial relationship between race and public space to argue that it was racial identity that became the paramount spatial meditation of modernity within the newly reunited nation (7). And looking ahead to the Jim Crow South, we can see that racialized public space became of supreme importance. Such a claiming of public space was staged by the Ku Klux Klan, who took to the street as reported in the Jackson Daily News of October 21, 1922. At the end of the State Fair, about three hundred robed members of the local KKK staged a night parade on Capitol Street, walking past a silent crowd which expressed neither approval nor disapproval. After a march around the racetrack at the Fair Grounds, during which the ‘same respectful silence prevailed,’ the group disbanded (Mills 10). Using a parade as a public ritual of empowerment and intimidation, the KKK’s performance polices racial boundaries and highlights the official exclusion of African Americans from the city’s public space. It is against this background of a street culture with the power to mark social inclusion and exclusion that Welty’s parade photographs come into sharp focus.

What emerges in Welty’s parade photographs is not a singular idea of white public power or amusement culture, but a more complex social setting of street performances by whites and African Americans. Taken during the mid-1930s when minstrel performances were still popular with mainstream southern audiences, her photographs work against denigrating stereotypes of African Americans.³ Recent critical attention to Welty’s visual representations of race and gender highlights her interventions in the politics of the Jim Crow South. In Eudora Welty’s Fiction and Photography: The Body of the Other Woman, Harriet Pollack studies the grammar of her racial images to argue that they are of her time and yet also … innovative, presenting us with alternative visionings (76). Susan Donaldson posits Welty’s deployment of a third eye that looks back at power and enables her to part that troubling veil dividing the Jim Crow South (68), and Wendy Atkins-Sayre suggests that Welty’s contested images of race have the potential to act as a salve on the wounds inflicted by segregation (91). Keri Watson also examines Welty’s visual representations of Depression-era black Mississippians to argue that these images deviate from normative constructions of African Americans to enact sharp social commentary" (76). And, in the same volume on Eudora Welty: Whiteness and Race, Mae Miller Claxton argues that Welty’s image Window Shopping/Grenada, 1930, critiques the economic and racial barriers of southern consumer culture.

Building on this scholarship, I argue that Welty’s parade photographs guard against a kind of overstatement of black racial difference by affirming African American public participation and self-definition. Specifically, Welty’s parade photographs capture intercultural interactions that Jim Crow rules in Mississippi and spatial segregation increasingly sought to constrict. The Negro State Fair Parades in Jackson were opportunities for the African American community to come together, to rewrite the rules, and to display their social mobility and active participation in the forward march of commerce for all of Mississippi to see.⁴ Welty captures these moments of racial and social mobility in photographs layered with cultural and historical meaning. What looks like fun is a performance that is deeply serious. It is a politics of play closely linked to debates about African American citizenship, self-fashioning, and socioeconomic progress. By following the parades both on Capitol Street and in neighborhoods, Welty documents the segregated practices and spaces of the American South, but she also shows the transgressive rituals and transformative performances of an increasingly socially mobile culture, both black and white. In Southscapes, Thadious Davis uses fiction to understand the persistent conceptual power of the South as a spatial object and ideological landscape where matters of race are simultaneously opaque and transparent (2). I argue that we can read such conceptual power also in the visual register of Eudora Welty’s photographs that capture racial space firmly delineated by Jim Crow rules. However, as Davis argues, and as I want to show in my reading of Welty’s photographs, these rigid separations did not completely exclude more flexible social spaces: While an understanding of fixity and rigidity, and separation informs the analysis of social landscapes and spatial regionality, the idea of space on the margins, in between, liminal, in flux and interactive functions as an alternative way of enunciating and translating a productive space of alterity, otherness, and difference (4). Welty’s photographs illuminate the performative fluidity of African American identity and economics during the Mississippi State Fair Parades in the 1930s.

Dating back to well before the Atlanta Cotton States International Exposition of 1895 and the famous address by Booker T. Washington, we can see the increasingly important role in the early 20th century of state and world fairs as opportunities for African Americans to exhibit civic leadership, pride, and progress. The Mississippi State Fair was similarly used to measure social and economic progress as is evident by a report in an early issue of Crisis magazine (January 1914) that reprints the observations of a correspondent writing for the New York Evening Post:

The managers of the Mississippi State Fair, recently held in Jackson, the capital, some months ago determined to give Negro exhibitors a larger opportunity than has been theirs in years past. They permitted the erection of a Negro building by Negro contractors, encouraged exhibits largely from Negro schools, but also individual exhibitors, and also designated the last two of the ten days of the fair as Negro days, with provision of a Negro parade and mass meeting addressed by speakers of both races, athletic contests, a declamation contest, and, in general, emphasis on Negro work and life in Mississippi. (Crisis 128)

And, evaluating the effort, he goes on to say that the results have been altogether happy. The Negro building was filled to overflowing with exhibits altogether credible, largely from Negro schools, but also from individual exhibitors. This report helps us understand that in the early days of the Mississippi State Fair, the exhibitions by African Americans had been integrated into the fair grounds, and two days were set aside for visits by the African American population. The spirit of success and celebration is also evident in the journalist’s comments on the Mississippi State Fair’s Negro Parade:

The Negro Parade, said to have been a mile long, and to have included about 5,000 Negroes, with double that number looking on, was a surprise, not to say an astonishment, in the eyes of both Negroes and white people. It included floats, illustrative of phases of Negro progress since emancipation, sections of Negro school children and thousands of plain citizens; was orderly, impressive, and by its general good management proved the organizing capacity of Negro leadership. (Crisis 128)

If this report sounds overly enthusiastic and too neatly in line with Crisis magazine’s interest in fostering African American citizenship in general and the politics of its editor, W. E. B. DuBois, more specifically, the Jackson Daily News was similarly impressed with the success:

Negro day at the State fair has simply knocked the spots out of any feature that white patrons of the big institution have pulled off this year—or almost any year for that matter. The parade, shortly before the noon hour, was hardly short of a sensation. To say that it created astonishment among the white folks is expressing it very mildly. Honestly, you’ve got to hand it to the colored folks. They have set an example of civic pride, enthusiasm in behalf of the State Fair, and pride for their native State that white folks could well emulate.