When fans envision Eudora Welty, one of the titans of Mississippi literature, they might picture an elderly woman at a typewriter by the window of her house on Pinehurst Street in Jackson. “But she was so much more than that,” says Anthony Thaxton. Or, to put it another way: “She was not just a little matron. She was a badass,” says the writer W. Ralph Eubanks in Eudora, the new documentary Thaxton produced with his wife, Amy, and the restaurateur and author Robert St. John through the Institute for Southern Storytelling at Mississippi College. Drawing on unprecedented access to Welty’s home videos, family papers, and personal photos, the documentary unveils the woman behind the words. She supported civil rights, refusing to read in front of segregated crowds. She engaged in a romance of letters (some four hundred) with a married man. She won a Charleston dance competition while studying business at Columbia in New York. She watched her father die during an ill-advised blood transfusion. “She had this youth, this life of loves and lost loves and tragedies,” Thaxton says. “She was also just so funny and witty. My favorite photo we found is of Eudora on a drum set.” The documentary also includes interviews with Mississippi stars such as writer Kathryn Stockett and artist William Dunlap, plus Welty’s niece Mary Alice Welty White and biographer Suzanne Marrs. “Most of the people in there knew her, and because of that, there is this intimacy,” Thaxton says. “It’s like you’re sitting around a table with her friends.” Eudora and its companion book debut at the tenth annual Mississippi Book Festival (September 14). The wider public can catch the film on Mississippi Public Broadcasting starting in October, and nationwide next spring.
Southern Agenda
Eudora Welty, Revisited
Illustration: Tim Bower