As far as I can tell, some twenty-odd years after the events of Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding, and about eight years before the novel appeared, my great-grandfather was hired to manage the plantation Welty fictionalized in it. The book is set in September 1923, at Shellmound, just north of Greenwood, Mississippi. Very little happens in Delta Wedding, and apparently that was intentional. . . .
I’d like to believe my Mississippi forebears were too poor to own anyone and too far down the Antebellum social ladder to oversee plantations. That’s not the way it’s been presented, but, as a Mississippian once told me, “Delta Aristocracy is redundant. Completely. They all think they’re aristocracy, even the trailer park occupants.” So I’ve got a lot of research . . .
Here’s one last picture of Granddaddy, the last cotton buyer in Drew, Mississippi. He’s gazing (in adoration? nervously?) at the great-granddaughter (i.e., me) he bragged about to the reporter.
When my dad’s father’s dad — we called him Granddaddy — closed down his cotton business, this article ran in the Drew, Mississippi newspaper. Granddaddy probably really did grow up in a house without a ceiling, a house so cold that “when papa would talk through the hall to the other side of the house his mustache would freeze.” And . . .