Naipaul Asks Welty about Rednecks

And it was of the redneck, the unlikely descendent of the frontiersman, that I talked to Eudora Welty when I went to call on her. I had arrived early, and waited on the street below the dripping trees. She was ready early, and could clearly be seen through her uncurtained front window. But I was nervous of knocking too soon....

The frontier was so much in her stories: a fact I had only just begun to appreciate. And she was willing to talk of the frontiersman character.

"He's not a villain. But there's a whole side of him that's cunning. Sometimes it goes over the line and he becomes an outright scoundrel. The blacks never lived in that part of the state. They came over to work on the plantations. Most of the rednecks grew up without black people, and yet they hate them. That's where all the bad things originate--that's the appeal they make. Rednecks worked in sawmills and things like that. And they had small farms. They are all fiercely proud. They dictate the politics of the state. They take their excitement--in those small towns--when the politicians and evangelists come. Scare everybody, outwit everybody, beat everybody, kill everybody--that's the frontiersman's mentality."

I told her the story Ellen had heard as a child about the rednecks to the south of the town where she had spent her summers: the story of traveling salesmen who had been roughed up and hitched to a plow and made to plow a field. Ellen had said that this story had come down from the past; and I had thought of it as a romantic story of the wickedness of times past, an exaggerated story about people living without law. But Eudora Welty took the story seriously. She said, "I can believe the story about the salesmen. I've heard about punishing people by making them plow farms."

We talked about Mississippi and its reputation. "At the time of the troubles many people passed through and called on me. They wanted me to confirm what they thought. And all of them thought I lived in a state of terror. 'Aren't you scared of them all the time?' A young man came and said that he had been told that a Mr. So-and-So, who was a terrible racist, owned all of Jackson, all the banks and hotels, and that he was doing terrible things to black people. It was a fantasy. It wasn't true. The violence here is not nearly as frightening as the Northern--urban--brand."

A frontier state, limited culturally--had that been hard for her as a writer, and as a woman writer? The richness of a writer depends to some extent on the society he or she writes about.

She said: "There is a lot behind it, the life of the state. There is the great variety of the peoples who came and settled the different sections. There is a great awareness of that as you get older--you see what things have stemmed from. The great thing taught me here as a writer is a sense of continuity. In a. place that hasn't changed much you get to know the generations. You can see the whole narrative of a town's history or a family's history."

SOURCE: A Turn in the South, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 1989), pp. 213-214.