Journal 3 Welty and O'Connor: Travis Hearn

Welty's "Where is the Voice Coming From?" and O'Connor's "Everything that Rises Must Converge" both tell stories of white people living in the time soon after the dissolution of slavery, in the case of Welty probably before 1900, but O'Connor's is probably closer to the 1920s-50s. This tie is the only thing they have in common, however, as each take radically different views of the integration of slaves and their descendants into white society. I read "Where is the Voice Coming From?" first, a short story of a white person disgruntled with black requests for equal time. It is told from the point of view of the outraged, violent, racist, and uneducated white person who remains unnamed, and seems to be neutral or anti-abolition; it is hard to distinguish in a story that short. In contrast, "Everything that Rises Must Converge" is told by one Julian, a liberal, college-aged white boy, who has by his own admission "a first-rate education" and is "free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts", and his story is most definitely for black advancement. While the two stories together play off one another well, Julian has his own foil, his mother, a relic of a bygone era, who is well-meaning but still stuck in the notions of politeness held by her grandparents.

Interestingly, both stories have very little concept of politics or sin. The unnamed narrator in Welty's story feels no remorse for committing murder, his wife does not berate him for it, and he only haphazardly cares about the legal consequences, believing himself uncatchable. No behavior is "bad", and the worst thing the narrator cares to talk about is the heat, which he bemoans often. O'Conner's characters do not have such a detached view of their actions, but they don't really plan politics and they don't sin, since they all believe they are doing the right thing. Julian finds himself in the right when he belittles his mother, who cares for him in his unemployment, and she thinks her casual racist actions are quite alright, because that was how she was raised. Still, given that Julian is the eye through which the reader sees the story, her actions are presented as being "bad", no so much for their themselves, but because he opposes them. In the end, he suffers the loss of his mother, which could be punishment for his association with black people and his poor treatment of her, giving the story a significantly different tone, or more likely it is symbolic of the death of old ideals.

An interesting tidbit, while both stories are fiction, the "Where is the Voice Coming From?" is based on actual events, the murder of NAACP leader Medgar Evans by Byron de La Beckwith in Jackson, Mississippi.