Delta Wedding-A Book Review

  

    "It was actually Uncle George who had shown her that there was another way to be--something else...Uncle George, the youngest of the older ones, who stood in--who was--the very heart of the family, who was like them, looked like them (only by far, she thought, seeing at once his picnic smile, handsomer)--he was different somehow. Perhaps the heart always was made of different stuff and had a separate life from the rest of the body. She saw Unlce George lying on his arm on a picnic, smiling to hear what someone was telling, with a butterfly going across his gaze, a way to make her imagine all at once that in that moment he erected an entire, complicated house for the butterfly inside his sleepy body. It was very strange, but she felt it. She had then known something he knew all along, it seemed then--that when you felt, touched, heard, looked at things in the world, and found their fragrances, they themselves made sort of a house within you, which filled with life to hold them, filled with knowledge all by itself, and all else, the other ways to know, seemed calculation and tyranny..."

--pg. 42, Delta Wedding

    It is not often that you come upon a book that holds within itself eveything books are supposed to be. Books that seem to hold within themselves all of the elements of why fiction is so important to humanity. I would say for me it only happens about once a year, maybe two, but never more than twice a year. I would easily say that, Delta Wedding, by Mississippi author Eudora Welty is that type of book. I would also say that authors don't write books like this much anymore; if at all. If they do, please point me towards them, but until then, I will rest in my assumption. 

  Delta Wedding is a book about a mundane event, a wedding, that occurs thousands of times all over the world everyday. However,as eluded to in the quote, Welty writes about this wedding and all who are involved by writing about the surface details by mixing it with the complex; which is just like life itself. The book is about the complexities of family life. The book is about how a place defines you and shapes who you are and who you will become. The book is about how interconnected places and families are. The book is about how a close family comes together an an event like a wedding and everyone places all of their hope, dreams, regrets, and desires upon the bride and groom and hope that the future is brilliant and bright for them and hoping that the troubles of the world will elude them for as long as possible. 

  In short, Delta Wedding, is about the wedding of Dabney Fairchild, the second child of Battle and Ellen Fairchild. The wedding is the main plot, but there are many side plots taking place in parallel with the main plot. The wedding is held deep in the Mississippi Delta on the cotton plantation of the Fairchilds, Shellmound. Welty does an almost flawless job of going from live action, to the insides of people's minds, and back to conversations and descriptions without skipping a beat. She also does an amazing job of showing the beauty of chaos within a family at an event like a wedding where everything is going wrong, but it goes on without a catch. Each character is vividly portrayed with a full cast of side characters that don't seem to ever have to exit the stage, but wander in and out as would actually happen in real life. 

   I have read many reviews of this book and most of them spend most of their words talking about how the black characters are dealt with and how they are portrayed. I think we have come to a dangerous place when we judge the literature of yesterday by the morals or public thought of today. No, I don't want the African-Americans of this country to be treated unfairly or less than, but I also DO NOT want the South to have to further give up its identity. The South is one of the only places I've ever been/lived that has been forced to give up its heritage, its traditions, and most of what is good about this place. I'm glad that Welty wrote the book about the 1920's in the 1940's and let it stay there. I would trade a million PC written books for a book that is about lives that were lived in real places. History is full of suffering. Suffering is not good, but it has made everything much better today. We would not know freedom without slavery. We would not know peace, if we had never known war. We wouldn't know the warmth of an embrace, had we never yearned to be loved. The book is about this. 

  "Ellen at Battle's side looking ahead, they were comfortable and silent, both, with their great weight, breathing a little heavily in a rhythm that brought them sometimes together. The repressing fields, the repeating cycles of season and her own life--there was something in the monotony itself that was beautiful, rewarding--perhaps to what was womanly within her. No, she had never had time--much time at all, to contemplate...but she knew. Well, one moment told you the great things, one moment was enough for you to know the greatest thing."

                     --pg. 317, Delta Wedding




   Happy Reading and only read good books,


      David