Dead Letters: From the Unknown

Filed by Fletcher Moody — Literary Correspondent

I was in Jackson, Mississippi, in June of 1963 to write a soft piece about the libraries of the New South for a quarterly that folded before it could run it, and I have never been able to make that errand seem like anything at all next to what the city became while I was in it.

Medgar Evers was shot in the back as he stepped out of his car at his home a little after midnight on the twelfth. He was the field secretary for the N.A.A.C.P. in that state, and he had spent his life on the work that got him killed. He was carrying a stack of T-shirts from the car to his door when it happened, and the shirts read Jim Crow Must Go. His wife and his children were inside the house. They heard it. I will not write any more about that part than that, because it was not mine then and it is not mine now, and there were people it belonged to who were in that house when the shot came.

What I can tell you is what a city does in the hours after. Jackson in the days that followed held a stillness that was not calm. Men stood on corners and did not talk. It was brutally hot, hot before dawn, the kind of summer that sticks a shirt to a man's ribs by seven in the morning and keeps the cicadas going in the oaks past dark, and the weather lay over the whole business like a hand held down. I was a correspondent with a notebook in a town where a man had just been murdered for the color of his skin and the nature of his work, and I did what my trade does. I went looking for someone who could say something.

There was a writer in Jackson. Everyone in the literary way of things knew she was there, because she had always been there, in the brick Tudor house on Pinehurst Street that her parents had built and where she had lived her whole adult life. Eudora Welty. She had written The Robber Bridegroom and The Golden Apples and a shelf of stories that people who knew stories spoke of the way you speak of weather that has passed through you. She was of that place in a way few writers are of anywhere, and if any white person in Jackson could be got to say a true thing about what had happened in that driveway, the reasoning went, it would be the one who had spent a lifetime listening to how the people around her actually talked.

I went to the house. I will be plain about the results. I did not get in, and I did not get a word.

I do not know that she was ever aware I had come. A woman I took to be a friend or a relation came to the door and said that Miss Welty was working and could not see anyone, and something in the way she said working closed the matter. I left my card. I stood a moment on the walk and looked up at the dark timbers and the shades part drawn against the sun, the whole place keeping its own counsel, and I could not have told you whether the not-seeing-anyone was grief or reticence or the plain Southern art of turning a stranger away without a scratch on him. I put it down to all three, which is a thing I can do only because I was never let past the door to learn better. I went back to my hotel with nothing.

She was working. That was the true thing, and I did not understand it until the story ran.

She had sat down that same night, the night of the murder, and written one. She wrote it at a single sitting, in anger, which she said afterward was the only story she ever produced that way. And she did not write it about Medgar Evers, or about his wife at the window, or about the shirts in the driveway. She wrote it from inside the man who fired the rifle. No one knew yet who that man was. She built his voice out of nothing but a lifetime of having heard men like him talk in stores and on porches and across counters. She got down into that voice and stayed there the length of the thing, the pride and the boredom and the ugly ease of it. It is not a comfortable thing to read. It was not meant to be. She did not write it to honor the dead. She wrote it from inside white Mississippi, to show what was standing there, and there is a hardness in that choice the years have argued over and not settled.

The story ran in The New Yorker on the sixth of July. By the time it did, a man had been arrested for the killing, and what came out about him resembled the man she had imagined closely enough that her editors had her change the names and the streets before they would print it. She had imagined him whole, in a night, before the police had finished assembling him out of the evidence.

I had gone to her door to collect a quotation. A sentence I could set in a paper under her name, some decent public sorrow that would let a reader feel the people it belonged to had felt it. That is what my trade goes to a writer's door to take. She had not given it to me, and on her walk that day I had counted it one more shut door in a career of them.

There was no sentence she could have handed me at that door worth the smallest part of what she was doing behind it. I have forgotten every quotation I gathered in Jackson that week. I have never been able to forget what she made instead. The door held because the only true thing she had to say could not be said to a reporter and could not be said in her own voice at all. It had to be built, alone, in the voice of the man the rest of us could not yet stand to imagine, while the body of his victim was not a day in the ground.

Years later I saw a description of her early drafts, the typed pages before her editors went to work on them. The raw version, the one she wrote overnight with the shades drawn, carried a title she did not keep. She had called it From the Unknown. I have filed a great many things under that heading, every one of them a place I could not get into.

I never got the quote. I am glad the door held.

— F.M.

Fletcher Moody is a literary correspondent. His column, "Dead Letters," covers the stranger truths of literary history. It appears when it appears.