For Crying Out Loud, or “The Truth Is Something Worse, I Ain’t Said What Yet”

Abstract

We must at least consider the possibility that Eudora Welty’s African American characters are not just secret agents, oblique, liminal, spiritual, ironic, or even mysterious, as we might once have believed. While elements of each of these choices exist in Welty’s textual universe, we also have clear evidence of much less mediated African American rage, power, and artistic dominance. With howls (Exum, Powerhouse), pumped fists and knives (Man Son, Root M’Hook and others), icepicks (Ruby and Dove) piercing screams (Delilah), and banging pots (Luella), African American personae express an unsettling lexicon of narrative punctures that question conventional notions of plot and character development.