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I DROVE WEST TO ARKANSAS for the Six Bridges Book Festival in Little Rock this past weekend and avoided Helene’s destructive path from the Florida coast to the southern Appalachians. Sadly, as I say in my book, Baking in the American South, the South is accustomed to tragic weather: ‘’Land and climate in the South differ from the rest of America. Sandy Gulf coastlines, snaky bayous, black-soiled farmland, lush river deltas, family farms where fig trees grow as tall as houses, and mountains encircled in a smoky blue haze define our land…The region was prone to storms and used to drought and all the vagaries of weather over which people had no control.’’ And they still don’t. At last count, nearly 100 people have died across Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee as a result of Hurricane Helene, according to CNN reports. And while widespread flooding has taken out roads and power across five states, eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina were in Helene’s line of fire. A portion of Interstate 40 along the North Carolina/Tennessee line simply washed away. The North Carolina Department of Transportation posted, ‘’all of western NC should be considered closed.’’
That includes tourist-friendly Asheville but also Boone, Banner Elk, Black Mountain, Hendersonville, Lake Lure, Morganton and so many other picturesque mountain places where homes, communities, and businesses have been destroyed. I learned from my book research that mountain people don’t easily give up. Even if Mother Nature washes away buildings, these folks rarely budge. Their roots run deep. And yet, it’s gut wrenching to look at these photos and think about the elderly and the children hungry and alone. This is the most tragic weather event in the western North Carolina area since July 25, 1916, which was known as the Great Flood, or as the local newspaper called it, ‘’a night of tempest and terror.’’ There are ways to help.You can make donations to the Red Cross and Salvation Army to help people affected by Helene throughout the Southeast region. Or, donate to local food banks such as the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest NC. Also to Beloved Asheville, a nonprofit created to put love into action, and Boone-based Samaritan’s Purse, responding to need in the NC counties of Ashe and Avery and as well as Johnson County in Tennessee. It has been assisting three hospitals in the area with search and rescue and getting oxygen to patients with no power. In addition, you may donate to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund, World Central Kitchen, and Mercy Chefs, all credible organizations. To quote North Carolina chef William Dissen (Chefbillyd on Instagram), the damage—‘’it’s biblical.’’ He told Southern Living magazine: "This is the worst flood of our lifetimes…Please send prayers. We will need your help to rebuild."
WHILE OXFORD BELONGED TO William Faulkner and New Orleans to Tennessee Williams, Jackson still belongs to Miss Welty, even 23 years after her death. While I’d read some Eudora Welty in high school and knew of her acclaim as one of the South’s best novelists, photographers, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Optimist’s Daughter (1972), I didn’t really know her. I didn’t appreciate the beauty in her words and photos and hadn’t lived long enough to realize they were saturated with truth. I hadn’t lived in Mississippi. I wouldn’t have believed that eccentric people, and mean and hateful people, have something in common with all of us, but Welty believed that. It was the morning of the 13th of September that I visited her home for free. On the 13th of every month admission is free because Welty’s birthday was April 13, 1909. She thought of little things like that in 1986 when she donated her home, papers, paintings, photographs, art, linens, furniture, draperies, and thousands of books to the state of Mississippi.
In 1925, at age 16, Welty, her parents, Christian and Chestina, and her two brothers, Edward and Walter, moved into a new Tudor Revival-style house designed for the family by a Fort Worth, Texas, architect named Wyatt C. Hedrick. Her house is considered one of the most intact literary houses in America in terms of its authenticity. And yes, it looked a bit like my home when I’m in the middle of a book project. Books are stacked on every surface, and clippings of paragraphs lay on the dining room table, ready to patch together into a short story, which is the way she fashioned her books much like a seamstress assembles a dress.
Her bed looked freshly made. Her electric typewriter was on the desk in the bedroom as it always was, in front of the window overlooking Pinehurst Street. From here with the windows open she could hear the music from the choral classes of Belhaven College across the street. And long after her father died in July 1931, and her brother Walter’s death in 1959, and her mother and brother Edward’s deaths in 1966, she sat here and wrote prizing-winning novels. Her father’s death was caused by an ill-advised blood transfusion for leukemia. The blood donor had been her mother, and as a result she blamed herself for her husband’s death and found solace in the backyard garden, which would grow, bloom, deteriorate, die, then be reinvigorated by volunteers after Welty’s death in 2001. When I visited, the garden was well groomed but not at its summer peak. There were coreopsis, lilies, zinnias, but no roses or camellias. And I found the night-blooming cereus looking pretty lonely on the side porch.
Welty was a founding member of The Night Blooming Cereus Club, a group of acquaintances dedicated to this particular member of the cactus plant family that blooms white once a year. Whenever the plant was about to bloom, a club member would take out a newspaper ad to announce it, and its members would flock to the home for bourbon and conversation. Its name came from the song of the time…“Life is just a bowl of cherries. Don’t take it ‘cereus’, life’s too mysterious.’’
In the early 1930s, after her father’s death, still holding the dream of becoming a published author, Welty worked for a Jackson radio station, the Memphis newspaper writing a society column, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA), to help support her family. The WPA gig was part of the New Deal program created during the Great Depression, and Welty was a photographer who captured images of everyday life and also collected recipes and stories along the way. The Mississippi WPA was part of a nationwide project intended to employ people and also produce a book on regional foodways across the United States. But after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States' entry into World War II, funding for the project was pulled and funneled into the war effort and those recipes and stories were never published. I spoke with Substack author Pat Willard of America Eats!, who has studied Welty’s work with the WPA, and she wrote a 2009 book on what was called the America Eats project. ‘’Eudora had a different path in the WPA. She was pegged as an adminisrator and also a photographer,’’ Willard says. ‘’For America Eats they sent her out to take photos and Introduced her to the pastor’s wife or someone well to do in the community, but she also talked to and took photos of ordinary people walking down the street and in stores.’’ She would speak to rich and poor and she came away with recipes for beaten biscuits and mint juleps, for example. ‘’Then she comes back to the office and said I had all these experiences, and they want her to write this booklet about who she met and recipes,’’ Willard adds. ‘’She frames it as why Southern food is of the people.’’ ‘’Eudora knew these stories were personal histories. She sank into it,’’ Willard says. ‘’She was a trained writer. Others on the project were just out of work and needed a job. But she developed these characters that she would use in her novels for the rest of her life.’’
From the pink-iced gingerbread stage planks (gingerbread cookies with pink-tinted icing) at Fairchild’s Store in Delta Wedding to the frozen tomato salad served at Shellmond, the Fairchild family’s home, you can taste the food in Welty’s novels. Ann Romines, retired Eudora Welty scholar at George Washington University, said ’’recipe-writing was a significant motif in Welty’s life and career. ‘’ But unlike Laurel Hand of The Optimist’s Daughter, Welty did not burn her mother’s jotted recipes that had accumulated over the years. She complained about them because they didn’t contain enough instructions. It was in her mother’s kitchen she sat on a stool and watched her mother make homemade mayonnaise and spoonbread and remembered what she saw. On the book tour drive through Mississippi, I had listened to the author herself read The Optimist’s Daughter and Sally Darling read Delta Wedding. Compared to the flat, boring roads of West Tennessee and Mississippi, Welty must have known her undulating phrases, melodic metaphors, the descriptions of what people enjoyed for dinner would make passing the time all the more pleasing and carry me straight into Jackson. - xo, Anne Have you visited the Welty House & Gardens? Do you have a favorite Southern novelist? Do you love coconut cake? P.S. Eudora, the documentary, will air this fall on Mississippi Public Broadcasting and will hopefully reach the rest of the country. For a detailed look inside the rebuilding of Miss Eudora’s gardens, I recommend this book: One Writer’s Garden, by Susan Haltom and Jane Roy Brown (2011), with photos by Langdon Clay. I wrote about Mashula’s Coconut Cake in early 2023, and I’m happy to share the recipe once again. It comes off the pages of Delta Wedding and was created by Ann Romines, retired Eudora Welty scholar at George Washington University. And a VERY HAPPY 100th birthday, President Jimmy Carter!
Won’t You Join Me in a Biscuit Class?Let’s bake some biscuits on Nov. 7! I’ll be teaching the virtual class along with Milk Street and demonstrating three recipes for biscuits from my new book. Here is how to sign up. The price is $29.95, but as a Between the Layers reader, you can sign up and receive 15% off with the code BUTTERY15. THE RECIPE: You’re on the free list for Anne Byrn: Between the Layers. If you’re liking what you’re reading, why don’t you become a paying subscriber for more recipes, stories, and content.
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