Playing in the dark with Welty: The symbolic role of African Americans in Delta Wedding

College Literature, Summer 2003 by Entzminger, Betina

In his essay "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity," Ralph Ellison explores the symbolic role of African Americans in the white imagination. "Despite their billings as images of reality," he asserts, "these Negroes of fiction are counterfeits. They are projected aspects of an internal symbolic process through which . . . the white American prepares himself emotionally to perform a social role" (1953, 27-28). Ellison goes on to propose that "we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds" (28). Here Ellison addresses not only early American economics where black labor was exploited to build the material dreams of whites, but also the metaphoric social role, whereby African Americans became "a human natural resource who, so that white men could become more human, was elected to undergo a process of dehumanization" (29). African Americans thereby become the Other against whom white Americans define themselves.

Almost forty years later, Toni Morrison revisits these ideas in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Morrison cites sociologist Orlando Patterson, noting that "The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom-if it did not in fact create it-like slavery" (1992, 38). Like most of the writers that Morrison and Ellison explore, southerner Eudora Welty wrote long after slavery ended. But as Suzan Harrison (1997) demonstrates in her analysis of "Where Is the Voice Coming From?," Welty's story that deals with southern racism most overtly, Welty's white narrator defines his sense of his own freedom in direct proportion to the confinement of African Americans in his community. The story portrays Civil Rights leader Medgar Evers's assassination-which occurred on June 12, 1963-from the assassin's point of view. Though the murderer was only later discovered to be Byron De La Beckwith, Welty creates an anonymous white voice that proves to be uncannily similar to Beckwith's. According to Harrison, the narrator resorts to murder when he "is forced to redefine freedom . . . in the face of the new, civil rights image of the articulate black leader appropriating a subject position" (640). Morrison's and Ellison's point is that many twentieth-century white Americans defined themselves and continue to define themselves in the same was as the unnamed protagonist in Welty's story. Morrison calls for more studies on

the strategic use of black characters to define the goals and enhance the qualities of white characters. . . . Such studies will reveal the process by which it is made possible to explore and penetrate one's own body in the guise of the sexuality, vulnerability, and anarchy of the other-and to control projections of anarchy with the disciplinary apparatus of punishment and largess. (Morrison 1992, 53)

This essay attempts to answer Morrison's call by exploring the symbolic role that African American characters play for white characters in Eudora Welty's early novel, Delta Wedding.

Because Welty often casts her black characters in stereotypical roles of servant or underling without revealing their internal motivations, readers tend to ignore these black characters to focus solely on the struggles of the white characters.1 One can, however, use Ellison's and Morrison's theories to illuminate the black characters' symbolic roles in revealing the thoughts and motivations of Welty's white characters. As Welty points out in her essay "Must the Novelist Crusade?,"

There are relationships of the blood, of the passions and the affections, of thought and spirit and deed. There is the relationship between the races. How can one kind of relationship be set apart from the others? Like the great root system of an old and long-established plant, they are all tangled up together; to separate them you would have to cleave the plant itself from top to bottom. (Welty 1978, 155)

My main intent, therefore, is not to explicate Welty's political message about southern racism but to uncover the black characters' positions in the white characters' perceptions of their own identities. This discovery will in turn offer readers a better understanding of Welty's understanding of white southern racial attitudes, an understanding that seems quite similar to the dynamic outlined by Ellison and Morrison.

According to Ellison, "for the Southern artist, the Negro becomes a symbol of his personal rebellion, his guilt and his repression of it" (1953, 42). Before the Civil Rights movement and to some degree even afterward, southern society used fear and hatred of blacks to reinforce standards of conduct within the white community. Women who defied conventions for their gender especially risked having their conduct compared to that of black women or were told that they risked rape by black men. Either case resulted in social ostracism that deprived the wayward young woman of the privileges that whiteness entailed. According to Laura Edwards, during Reconstruction the Oxford Torchlight "scattered its references to African American women liberally through its pages, where they appeared as the inversion of the elite ideal: promiscuous seductresses, heavy drinkers, hard fighters, ignorant housekeepers, and inattentive mothers" (1997, 135). And Nell Irvin Painter points out how the threat of rape by black men was used to reinforce white community solidarity: