On a recent sunny Thursday in Jackson, just moments before she was presented with the French Legion of Honor, the great Mississippi writer Eudora Welty found time to update a memory of H. L. Mencken, the sometimes amusing Baltimore sorehead. “When the Tombigbee River rose in 1927,” Miss Welty said in her intimate, low-registered, softly timbred voice, reminiscent of the hushed voices children hear through walls when adults are telling the good stories, “I was a student at the Mississippi State College for Women, and I wrote in the Spectator, which was the student newspaper, that the flood had had a good side to it, since it’d reduced our overcrowding in the dormitories. At the time, we were all packed in our rooms like sardines. And Mencken read my story. What he was doing reading a li’l ole school paper from Mississippi I don’t know. But he took it seriously and wrote in his newspaper that things were in such a terrible shape down in Mississippi that students were just being allowed to float away.”
Miss Welty gazed up at her listener and for a moment seemed to grow grave, which is the deadpan she has always pulled when a story’s funnier than you might be aware. Her pale-blue eyes wandered toward the tall windows of the Old State Capitol Building, where, inside a tiny office under the portraits of bearded past Mississippi governors, she and a few of her good friends were waiting for the solemnities to begin. They were only four blocks from where Miss Welty was born, and only a few more from where she has lived, on Pinehurst Street, the rest of her life. “Of course,” she said, seeming now bemused by how long ago it could’ve been that the Tombigbee flooded, “I guess I didn’t have to be such a smart-aleck.”
The Légion d’Honneur is the highest award the French bestow on anybody. Napoleon conceived it in 1802, and to let you know how seriously the French take it, Sartre is said to have turned it down. Speaking the language is not a prerequisite, but implicitly one senses the French would be tickled if you’d try a few words.
Miss Welty is much studied and cherished by French readers, her acclaim emanating from her luminous, deeply humane, and high-spirited stories, novels, memoirs, and photographs—most set in Mississippi—which the French and a preponderance of Americans agree transcend “Southern concerns” by their capacity to lift barriers that have separated us, causing us to understand our common humanity.
For such an august occasion, the French Republic dispatched its Consul General, a M. Gérard Blanchot, a substantial, suitably urbane but happily talkative man, who, it was reported, had driven over from Atlanta with several cases of Laurent-Perrier in his trunk.
M. Blanchot, by speaking interesting English, managed to charm everybody at the ceremony, which was convened in the dignified House of Representatives chamber and attended by five hundred or so of Miss Welty’s admirers, friends, and relations. In his short, convivial speech, which gave evidence of appreciating the guest of honor in precisely the respectful yet droll way she enjoys conducting her own life, the Consul suggested that although the French were sometimes thought (quite unfairly) to be arrogant, they always had their eye set keenly on “the world’s culture” and so could not possibly ignore Miss Welty.
Others spoke in the historic old room, where in 1860 Mississippi had taken the rash step of seceding from America. A handsome and expensively dressed academicienne talked about how Miss Welty’s rich work had freed younger writers of the South from the confinements of those previously mentioned Southern themes. After that, an exuberant French filmmaker, also expensively dressed, spoke with eloquence about how Miss Welty’s writing was responsible for her own personal reconciliation with her birthplace.
And then Miss Welty, who all this time had sat not at all inconspicuously at the front of the crowd, facing her honorers and listening attentively to the praise, simply got up and at her own speed, wearing a pretty black-and-white silk dress and a look one could only describe as wonder mingled with delight, came forward and let the medal with its bright-red ribbon be pinned on. Following which, everyone in the room, accompanied undoubtedly by the spirits of those not in attendance on that memorable bluebird day, stood up as one, and for quite a few minutes applauded as though the honor were ours, as well. ♦
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