A version of this post first appeared on August 31, 2008.
Eudora Welty’s essay “The Little Store” takes us with her, as a child, to a neighborhood grocery, what we’d call a convenience store today. It’s a story about the lost world of childhood and it captures turn-of-the-century Jackson, Mississippi. All she conveys is suffused with meaning for her, but Welty avoids sentimentality by showing instead of telling readers what to feel. The store’s realm is one of children on errands and of a kindly grocer who waits for them to “make up their minds.” But Welty steadily pours vinegar into the essay’s nostalgic soup until, by the end, we’re horrified with her by the violent, mysterious fate of the shopkeepers.
I like to assign this essay to students every year or two, so I can reread it, one of America’s greatest essays—or at least one of my favorites. Early on are a series of remarkable paragraphs full of tactile and sensory detail that bring to life the store, the children, and the grocer. Here’s the first:
Running in out of the sun, you met what seemed total obscurity inside. There were almost tangible smells—licorice recently sucked in a child’s cheek, dill-pickle brine that had leaked through a paper sack in a fresh trail across the wooden floor, ammonia-loaded ice that had been hoisted from wet croker sacks and slammed into the icebox with its sweet butter at the door, and perhaps the smell of still-untrapped mice.
Early on, too—just before the essay’s only emphasizing line break—are these foreshadowing lines:
Setting out in this world, the child feels so indelible. He only comes to find out later that it’s all the others along his way who are making themselves indelible to him.
II.
One day on the store’s stoop little Eudora encounters an organ grinder and his monkey, exotic and jarring presences. Here, in the essay’s only true scene—the rest is artful, visual summary—they break the illusion of normalcy. But they’re quickly fused in her mind with the benign store—as are all the objects and people and activities on her store trips connected—and with the adventure of going there.
Except she didn’t think the store had a life of its own. And she never wondered about those who owned the store and lived above it, though she was steeped in the changing stories of everyone else in her neighborhood.
People changed through the arithmetic of birth, marriage and death, but not by going away. So families accrued stories, which through the fullness of time, in those times, their own lives made. And I grew up in those.
But I didn’t know there’d ever been a story at the Little Store, one that was going on while I was there.
The patient storekeeper and his shadowy helper (his wife, his sister, his mother?) wore black eyeshades, Welty realizes in hindsight: “It may be harder to recognize kindness—or unkindness, either—in a face whose eyes are in shadow.” The wallop soon comes as the essay, her innocent girlhood, and the store end together in terror and mystery and violence and people “who simply vanished.”
We weren’t being sent to the neighborhood grocery for facts of life, or death. But of course those are what we were on the track of, anyway. With the loaf of bread and the Cracker Jack prize, I was bringing home the intimations of pride and disgrace, and rumors and early news of people coming to hurt one another, while others practiced for joy—storing up a portion for myself of the human mystery.
The climax’s impact is felt and lingers because the preceding narrative has prepared us to comprehend the enormity of the loss.
Welty (1909–2001) sent me with this haunting little essay to One Writer’s Beginnings, a memoir of her sensibility growing within the gift of her stable, happy family. She makes clear that what impelled her work was the love inculcated there. Not that her future spared her, as artist or woman, her allotment of human pain.
Discussing one of her short stories, about a girl who learns in painting to frame scenes with her hands, only to see unwelcome reality thereby intrude upon her inner dream of love, Welty writes, affirming the mystery that seems her work’s motif:
The frame through which I viewed the world changed too, with time. Greater than scene, I came to see, is situation. Greater than situation is implication. Greater than all of these is a single, entire human being, who will never be confined in any frame.
(“The Little Store” is available in a paperback collection, The Eye of the Story: Selected Essays and Reviews, and is included in the Library of America’s Eudora Welty: Stories, Essays & Memoir.)
Thanks, Richard. Though I’m a big fan of Welty, I’ve read The Little Store, but I will now. I wish I could take your class.
Richard, Welty truly is my favorite writer! I’m so glad you re-posted this piece. I haven’t read this essay but will. I LOVE her Collected Stories, Delta Wedding, The Golden Apples, Losing Battles, the Optimist’s Daughter, and The Eye of the Story. To me she was the consummate artist and we’ll never see her like again! best, Paulette
Richard, thanks for this. I will read “The Little Store” and more of Welty’s work. Someone so accomplished and yet new to me. See what an engineering education can do to one. Though I’ve had more than 50 years to catch up.
Dave
How can you not love Welty’s sensitivity and fine-honed humanity? Not to mention her misleadingly simple use of words? My question though has to do with the implication (?) that somehow there is a competition between scenes, summary,situation, “implication,” and “the entire human being.” To me, this construction verges on the mystical, and I’m not sure what some of these terms mean. Also, from the craft point of view, don’t scenes and summary play different, and complementary roles? I see no need for any competition–if indeed that was the implication.
I’ve never read The Little Store, but that first paragraph is so rich–sucked, leaked, hoisted, slammed. I adored One Writer’s Beginnings. Thanks for posting.