Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. Its going to turn from hot to cold, and we can kill the hog thats ripe and have fresh meat to eat. They were later given to the University of Florida. [] Any day now the change will come. Subscribe. The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty. He did not smoke the cigar, he chewed it, and as a boy it was best to stay on his windward side. It syncs contacts, emails, and events from email tools to Salesforce. 39These were some of the memories humming in my head when I began reading the books about Southern myth in Chapel Hill. 1 Mar. In fact, it is not a baptism at all. Ben Forkner, Converging Toward the Human: Myth and Theory in "The Wide Net" (and me),Journal of the Short Story in English, 67|2016, 125-140. and I believe I could find stories, old ones & new ones, and beliefs and songs and violent events all over the place to show what the life here is, to my belief Think of all the people who would be in my bookwonderful Indians to start with, and the Indian tales are beautiful and dramatic and very touching some of themand Aaron Burr & Blennerhassett, and Lafayette, and Audubon, and Jefferson Davis, and the bandits and Lafitte the pirate, and all kinds of remarkable people. Lush, precise, and unpredictable in every line, The Wide Net is one of the greatest odes to the natural world ever written. The name of Edna Earle comes from the heroine of the most popular novel in the South after the Civil War, St Elmo by Augusta Jane Evans. When they reach the river Old Doc remarks that the world has been turned to gold by the autumn sun: today, in October sun, its all goldsky and tree and water. There is certainly no question that Williams dive to the bottom of the river brings him up a new man. History Of The Internet. Finding an Edna Earle in The Wide Net is like finding a magnolia tree in Mississippi, and should not force us to go back to St Elmo, heaven forbid. Downtown black and white mingled and spoke with each other every day. But the shifting, or loss of identity, is a constant threat. I say this because when The Wide Net and Other Stories came out as a single volume in 1943, Time Magazine published a review that claimed that the stories were about as human as a fish. Eudora Welty was never much affected by reviews, good or bad, but this one raised her hackles, and she wrote to Diarmuid Russell: I saw the Time review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. Soon, people begin to ask if the fish are for sale, and William Wallace sells them. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightnin drawed a pitchfork right on our grandpappys cheek, stayed till he died (Welty, Collected Stories 183). William goes out one night with two friends, gets drunk and lies all night in a ditch playing the harmonica. He plays his role well, lost in his own performance, an unstoppable gramophone of platitudes, talking just to hear himself talk, but sometimes, almost despite himself, repeating nuggets of wisdom that bear directly on the quest itself: Were walking along in the changing-time. 179). Sunlight was scarce and each turn of the river took one deeper into a ripe darkness smelling of frog spawn and wild magnolia. The second is the date of When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. To begin with, the southern world I grew up in, a small coastal town in Florida in the years after WWII, was not all that representative of the South. 25I began this paper with a confession. Robert Fitzgerald. His grandfather had been branded by the devil in a storm, Lightnin drawed a pitchfork right on our grandpappys cheek, stayed till he died (Welty. New York: Signet Classics, 1961. The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. 45Of course writing her autobiography is a proof of that power, but Eudora Welty goes further. But they remain children, and act their age. Right before it begins in force, a holy-ghostly benediction or aeolian charma wind touched each man on the forehead (Welty. There is the miraculous catch of fish, and the hymns William and Virgil hear while walking back home: They were having the Sacred Harp Sing on the grounds of an old white church glimmering there at the crossroads, far below. When William arrives alone at his house, he sees something he had never seen, a rainbow at night (Welty. The storm in The Wide Net seems bent more on celebration than punishment, however. 180). Weltys mother refused to have a copy in her house. The shock will take a little time to absorb, but he has now found himself, and is beginning to embrace his new role as a father. She claims that she was hiding when he read her letter, and he spanks her, insisting that she say she'll never do it again. Hazel is pregnant, and William is baffled by her changing attitude (she would not speak and her eyes glowed). The strands are all there: to the memory nothing is ever really lost (Welty, One Writers Beginnings 90). And finally, on the last page, memory is evoked again, this time in words to be engraved in stone: Of course the greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the human memorythe individual human memory. As for me, being known as his grandson allowed me, and my two cousins who lived in his house, special status among the blacks, and a carelessness about crossing the color line. It was written forty years after The Wide Net but I was gratified to find her speak of myth and memory in a way that confirmed what I thought I had found in the story. 5I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. This was not because it was dangerous, or unseemly; it was simply against the code. But Hazel is no rabbit as Virgil makes clear: Anybody can freeze a rabbit, that wants to he says, and promptly chases the rabbit away: Was you out catching cotton-tails, or was you out catching your wife? (Welty, Collected Stories 172). eNotes.com will help you with any book or any question. He loves to pontificate, and spends most of the day talking and giving advice. Delta Wedding in 1946. The human drama is my main concern, however, and the one day in the life of William Wallace, wild as it is, is much easier to summarize. This paper reviews the history, the goals, the organisation and the components of CSNET (the Computer Science Research Network). Now a host of biblical allusions begin to prevail over the Greek and Roman. originally published: New York : Harcourt Brace and Company 1943 We offered this copy of the first edition in our Catalog 119. reference info. 28What was missing in this southern town was southern history, or at least any striking display of history. In the afternoons my friends and I would go down to the icehouse where sacks of ice were filled for the professional fishing boats. I had fished and hunted in the great inland swamps, and had built rafts of giant bamboo to ride with my friends down the St Lucie River, surely as haunting and as hidden away as the Pearl River in The Wide Net. The alligators slept with the water lilies and the night-blooming cereus, and the Spanish moss fell in thick curtains on both banks. In. Had he suspected down there, like some secret, the real, the true trouble that Hazel had fallen into, about which words in a letter could not speak Or in a myth, I cannot help adding. 26I am ready to plead, however. Sweet-gum red, hickory yellow, dogwood red, sycamore yellow. As I have already mentioned, my grandfather lies at the heart of these memories. The river never seems the same, yet even when William Wallace forgets its name, its ageless identity is never in question: The winding river looked old sometimes, when it ran wrinkled and deep under high banks where the roots of trees hung down, and sometimes it seemed to be only a young creek, shining with the colors of wildflowers (Welty. The more common it is, however, the less likely it can be seized upon for special consideration. It has been a delightful day of adventure on the river for the Malones, the Doyles, and the others (including the reader), but the wide net (a sort of local myth itself) has caught nothing, except a haul of fish, a big eel, old shoes, the baby alligator, and a string of beads. It did not cost much to have a horse and a small motor boat. Now us got scales, Sam cried out. It was a huge success, a romantic tome so overwritten and full of adjectives that Eudora Welty in her autobiography says her mother told her it used to be recommended to take it out with a chair when watering the roses. The Wide Net (185) :Eudora Welty Breaking up of the party Discussed by Jenna Campbell William Wallace Jameson Hazel In old 1300s Great war hero of Scotland Williams Wife 3 mths Pregnate Virgil in the wars for Scottish Independence Conflicted main character, Best friend of William almost like his voice of reason Also In Dante's Inferno 38I do not want to leave the impression that my grandfather was in any sense a rebel or an outsider. Like the theater, like the wearing of masks, like the playing of games, myths are ways of trying out the world, testing other lives, often for the sheer joy of forgetting our own predicament. Salesforce has a wide range of tools that can be integrated with it to boost productivity. County judges are elected, and he never lost an election because there was never any opposition. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. And I found a note to myself slipped in the pages of my old single volume edition of the collection relating Eudora Weltys initial concept of writing a fictional history of the Old Natchez Trace. Sam wore them around his head, with a knot over his forehead and loops around his ears, and Robbie Bell walked behind and stared at them (Welty. 8The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. 183). But I learned too that the family prided itself on having been against slavery, and on having never owned a slave. Usually there would be shade trees to stretch out under and cool off, but there were none here. The workers, all black men, would let us sit on the blocks of ice waiting to be crushed. The Chamber also achieved 4-star accreditation in 2018, an honor achieved by only 204 of the 7,022 chambers in the country. I did recall that it had fascinated (and puzzled) me by mixing together a multitude of myths and legends, reaching far and wide in time and in place, including the local and the regional. review but they say those things just because I happen to live in the southbut nobody else had better say I am unhuman (qtd. It runs in our family, Robbie says (Welty. It is more of a distraction than a signpost, unlike, I would be the first to admit, the names of Virgil and Hazel, more fixed in their roles.2 If we must look for hidden meanings, perhaps the symbolical would be a better avenue to explore than the historical. Since in the South, as I had finally learned in Chapel Hill, history tends to breed myth as a kind of natural law, I needed at least to consider the question. The group that William finally collects is a motley one, all male, but they are of a kind. And we fished for the same fish from the same piers in the inlet. They all carried their classic illustrations. It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. Here is the same confused hodgepodge of myth and fable we can find in The Wide Net. They are the wonderful fictions out of which an adult life finally emerges, but never forgets. She ends. It seemed odd to me too when I began thinking about the challenge of adding anything new to a debate that as we all know began long before the South became the South. It begins with the story of a deaf boy whose parents have been killed or captured by the Indians and who is left abandoned in the end, completely alone: He did not know how far he had gone on the Liberty Road when the posse came riding up behind and passed him. In The Wide Net, William Wallace must make his own way, and history, southern or otherwise, mythical or not, does not provide him (or the reader) with any guidelines. Among everything else, he was generous almost to a fault. What impressed me most was the incongruity of seeing such a stark inscription on a Baptist tombstone. 184). It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors. Later on I was given an army jeep salvaged from the war. Beginning as a folktale of the barely possible innocence of a perennial boy with a cow-lick, at a loss and turning in circles, the story right in the middle changes skin, and the boy and the narrative miraculously transform themselves into a one-of-a-kind human triumph. My grandfather, as I will discuss later on, was one of the reasons I had trouble with the grand southern myths I discovered at the university. Still, casting around for something to say about the way the South (from within and without) seems to have been designed, destined, or doomed, to generate a mythic vision, or visions, often in contradiction with each other, my thoughts could not help going back to The Wide Net.. In Life on the Mississippi, one of Eudora Weltys favorite books, Twain makes the outrageous, though irresistible, claim that Scott and his historical romances helped cause the Civil War by promoting a mythical vision of history, and by shaping the southern character: It was Sir Walter Scott that made every gentleman in the South a Major or Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations Sir Walter Scott had so large a hand in making the southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible (266). [] Old Jack Frost will be pinching things up. Note: When citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. The Wide Net has been one of my favorite stories for at least forty years. [] Magnolia and live-oak never die. An Edna Earle is the narrator of Weltys novella, . I was not surprised he had been a good friend of Hurston, but I never found any reference to him in the standard biographies. Physically, he was everything the legend had promised. Her reaction is more than understandable. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of The Wide Net and Other Stories, notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. Hazels name evokes the Celtic symbol of wisdom and the source of life hidden in underground water. When the search party spies a large water snake, a local legend everyone knows as the King of Snakes, William Wallace stares him down. Hickory tree there will be yellow. I grew up during segregation, but the racism was subdued, and codified down to a syllable and a glance. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. Soon, a storm comes, and the lightning strikes trees around the group as they watchit is rather exhilarating. William Wallace Jamieson, the first words of the story, and a name I will return to, is a young man who has been married to his wife, Hazel, for a year. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? But I digress, drifting with the memory. She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. 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