Eudora Welty's photographs

Sue and I had two really wonderful days of reconnecting, and it all felt too brief. We already miss each other, but she has an important medical appointment in the morning, and I have a blipmeet. We read all the comments on the photograph of her hands and hats and basked in them, but we had so much to say and feel, after nearly a month of separation, that I didn’t make any more photos or respond to the comments. 

This blip is my photograph of a two-page spread in Eudora Welty Photographs. Welty had a government job during the Depression, documenting people in the south, where poverty and apartheid was a way of life, and although this photo was made five or ten years before I was born, it looks very much like a scene from my own childhood.

I spent much of my first five years with my grandfather on the Black side of Hendersonville, North Carolina, on the other side of the railroad tracks from the white side. He worked in a hardware store that catered only to Black customers, and I had a different experience than most other white children. I could play with the few Black kids who came to the store with their parents. Often I sat on the wooden porch outside the store. There I would wait for people to arrive. Some had to walk four or five miles to get to the store, and they would “sit a spell” in one of the rush-bottom chairs on the porch. If I were lucky, the man or woman would let me climb up into their lap. I listened to the rhythmic back-and-forth of my granddaddy and his customers who came looking for nails, rope, seeds, screwdrivers, and other necessities of life. 

“How’s the corn crop comin’ on, Willie Mae?” Granddaddy would ask.
“Oh, comin’ and comin’ on, and best I can tell the corn’s gonna make it, but I don’t know about my pole beans, they sufferin. Look like they might not make it.”
“Well we need more rain.”
“Yeah, that’s the truth,” she would laugh and bounce me on her knee just as easily as if I were her own grandchild, “seem like you got to pray for rain, but then when it commence to rain, you got to pray for it to stop before it drowns the seedlin’s and washes them clean out the field.” 

Talk was like touch, like music.

If you don't know Eudora Welty's short stories, and would like to be introduced, the one I sometimes performed (with important and strategic cuts) is available online in pdf format.