Girls Like Us
"Though Eudora Welty never claimed to be a feminist, her life was an example of what I felt feminism could do for someone like me."
Occasionally, we publish “lagniappes,” bonus issues filled with original poetry, prose, and/or photography with a connection to Mississippi. Today, we have a personal essay from Victoria Richard, a soon-to-be graduate of Millsaps College, originally from Progress, Mississippi.
The first time I went to the Eudora Welty House & Garden in Jackson, Mississippi, I was sixteen years old, attending a creative writing workshop for high school students at Millsaps College, just a short walk from the author’s home. Three years later I enrolled at Millsaps as an English and Creative Writing major. Since then, I’ve worked alongside Dr. Michael Pickard to create a spreadsheet of all 5,280 of the books the Pulitzer Prize-winning author owned at the time of her passing. I’ve co-taught a class on Welty’s fiction, interned at the home where she lived and wrote, and done research for an article published in the newly released Eudora Welty and Mystery. But what I don’t think I’ve told anyone about my relationship with Welty is that it wasn’t her fiction that drew me to her: it was her life.
Eudora Welty defied the world of the early 20th century housewife she grew up in. She never married; she never had children. Most importantly, she never seemed bitter about the life she lived. She was content to write, to travel, to garden, and to pour the joy and satisfaction these things gave her back into her community. Even if there were times when she wanted marriage and a home of her own, Eudora’s happiness ultimately came from the strength of her own mind and imagination.
At sixteen, I saw in her an example of the life I wanted to live.
Recently, I heard a fellow student say “no one really tells women they have to get married anymore, not since the 1990’s.” I wasn’t buying it. That may be true in some cultures, in some parts of the country, but growing up in Progress, Mississippi nothing could be further from the truth.
Progress, Mississippi wasn’t put on the map until 2017 with the rising dependence on GPS. Our closest gas station was twenty minutes away, in a small town called Magnolia. Our closest grocery store was 45 minutes away in McComb, a larger small town.
When I was eight or nine, my mother enrolled me in a program called “Keepers at Home.” Like the name suggests, the concept of the program was to teach young girls to “keep the home”—to be housewives. I learned cooking, cross-stitching, knitting, and other things I was told would keep my future family comfortable and happy and bring us “glory in heaven.”
Now, I’m still fuzzy on exactly how cross-stitching was supposed to keep a ring on my finger, but the overarching concept of the organization was clear: at nine a girl should begin to understand that she was destined to be a mother and a wife, a dish washer, a laundry folder.
Around the same time, my first sibling, a brother, was born. As a result of my mother’s new schedule, I took on a greater portion of household chores. I quickly learned that my permanent position was in the laundry room, at the dishwasher, or wherever help was needed. These were places my father and brother would rarely be in their lives.
When I visited the Welty House that first time, I saw a life I wanted, one with freedom and contentment outside of what I felt was expected of Mississippi girls like us. Though Welty never claimed to be a feminist, her life was an example of what I felt feminism could do for someone like me.
One day I, too, could have the freedom to live alone, if I only allowed myself to separate from the cruelties of casual remarks like “gosh, we were starting to wonder if you’d ever find somebody!”
In school in Jackson, I found what I was looking for. Independence of thought was encouraged at Millsaps, but with that new freedom came the loss of a different freedom I had taken for granted. Though I had tired of driving an hour to the movie theater or bookstore, Progress offered a space for solitude that I now missed. In solitude, one must become comfortable with their own thoughts, to find their own voice and inner desires.
With every waft of the sewer and tire smell I have come to associate with the parking lot outside my dorm, I miss the Mississippi I grew up in. Before my grandmother’s garden was resized to become more manageable, I would hide in its shadow writing and reading where no one could find me until the sun grew cool and I ran down the hill back home.
Looking around at my peers now, I am aware that there are two desires inside of me. One part of me wants nothing more than to shed the world of my childhood that told me so many lies about myself and about what men and women should do. Another part longs for the sweet simplicity of hulling corn and carrying pails of water through the garden.
The first seeds of my free will were sown in that country where the world couldn’t touch me, not through “dial-up,” not through satellite TV. Of course, pastors and teachers tried to control my beliefs (unpacking what those men did would require a memoir of its own), but the self-reliance I learned from daily life in Progress taught me to stand strong in my independent self once I found her.
Welty herself had a complex relationship with Mississippi. After going to school at Columbia University in New York, she tried to find a job in the city. Soon, however, her father fell ill, and she returned home to support her family. After his death, the opportunity never arose for her to move from her parents’ home again. Even with this blow, in all of her hundreds of letters, Eudora never seemed defeated or ashamed of living where she did. Even then, there was as much joy in this place as there was disappointment.
The backyard garden of the Welty House is completely invisible from the road. Recently, my afternoons have been filled researching the home’s historic rose collection. Periodically, I go outside and compare the notes I have made with what I see in front of me. In those moments, when the wind picks up the scent of the rose petals, my early days in Progress come back to me.
In those small slivers of time, I am able to be both sides of myself—the part that knows the work of baling hay and pushing seeds into the ground and the part which relishes the free thought and independence I’ve gained in Jackson, Mississippi.
I like to think the garden provided a place of peace for Eudora as well, a place where she could comb through her own thoughts and contradictions.
I don’t want to leave Mississippi. The rest of the country seems to think there is little opportunity in Mississippi and certainly no intellect. One might say that as a feminist, I should hate living in a place associated with such oppression. But how could I leave a place that has taught me so much, including how to value my own peace over things I have been told I need to chase? I probably will never be a proper “Keeper at Home,” but because of my upbringing I have a zealot’s appreciation for my independence—it is loved because it was fought for.