Reckoning Race in Eudora Welty’s Photographs

by James McWilliams

Two portraits; two men. Both are from 1930s Mississippi. The men are situated together, photos 22 and 23, both from Eudora Welty’s only published book of photographs, simply titled Photographs. If you could put a frame around both images it would be the Jim Crow South.

The image to the left is of an older, stout black man with a white moustache that droops around his mouth. He sits on a bench in a cluttered work yard in Grenada County. It looks to be the end of the workday. A small chicken darts past his left knee. Two large melons rest at his right, almost out of the frame. The man’s posture shifts, leans back, and his expression, assured but quizzical, darts over his left shoulder, as if responding to a call from elsewhere. His right hand relaxes. His left hand, in motion, blurs with movement. His eyes are dark and deep set. He answers to others. But he knows who he is.

The other photo, the one on the right, is of a taut wisp of a white man about the same age. He also sits on a bench, but he’s inside a neatly kept shop in Rankin County, just down the road. A soft light enters a large window to his left. It illuminates the silky flip of white hair on the imposing forehead of a man whose posture declares: “country store owner.” He is dignified and stern, not elegant, but proud, sporting a tie…