Eudora Welty could do moonlight and magnolias as well as anybody, could give us a small white girl traveling by train to a plantation wedding and catching sight of the Mississippi Delta: “The land was perfectly flat and level but it shimmered like the wing of a lighted dragonfly.” She was born into the rigid social order of Jackson, Mississippi, in 1909, and for the most part didn’t chafe against it. And yet her novels and short stories have been praised by Black writers and readers, Toni Morrison among them. Welty did not confine Black characters to the edges of her fiction but often put them at the center—see, for instance, her 1941 Atlantic story “A Worn Path.” Morrison observed that Welty wrote better about Black people and the segregated South “in a way that few white men have ever been able to write”--perhaps because white women were more attuned to the intimacies, the codes, the language, and the dynamics of racial power within the household.

The first chapter of Welty’s memoir is called “Listening,” and that is what she did – carefully—from childhood on. She also watched. Welty’s photographs (many taken for the Works Progress Administration) treat Black subjects in a way other white photographers often neglected: moments of triumph and pleasure, moments that comprise astonishing acts of resistance against the American apartheid. There are photographs of a fashionable young woman looking through a shop window; of a little girl showing off a beautiful dress; of two little boys, clearly brothers, grinning over some private joke.

Welty won all the big national prizes, but her life was regional.  In 1943, she received a letter from another white Mississippian, William Faulkner. “Dear Welty,” that letter begins; “You are doing fine. You are doing all right.”