BIOGRAPHY
Jackson is now a city with more 70% of Afro-American people, while in the 60s it was the other way round; so the city has experienced considerable changes in demography and, accordingly, in politics.
Eudora Welty lived all her life in Jackson, save when she studied at Columbia University, New York.
She had a calm life in Jackson, despite all the racial problems, so her stories contrast vividly with the stories by Faulkner or by Richard Wright.
As a child, she was an insatiable reader, and she wrote her stories without any particular encouragement. She started writing for a Southern magazine and then, thanks to the persistence of a literary agent, for the Atlantic Monthly and for The New Yorker.
She won the Pulitzer Prize when she was 64 years old for her novel The Optimist Daughter.
She wrote mainly short stories, but also novels and her autobiography. Besides, she was a photographer and published a book of photographs about the Great Depression.
SUMMARY, by Josep Guiteres
Jason and Sara Morton were a married couple, both 50 years old, who leased a farm belonging to Mr. Perkins, who lived in Dexter, a town that handled the farmers’ business in the surrounding area.
The Mortons’ farm consisted of a house where the couple lived, and a farmland where they worked, primarily growing tomatoes.
The weather and climate descriptions depicted winters as bitterly cold, chilling to the bone; springs with changeable weather but usually very cold, producing hard frosts that left the fields completely white; and summers with good weather, the time when the farmers in the region, including the Mortons, transported their tomatoes to Dexter from where they were distributed to different parts of the country.
The place where the Mortons lived was solitary and isolated.
It was a spring night, and the Mortons went to bed, just like any other night, but it was bitingly cold. The only sounds were Jason’s breathing and the crackling of the wood in the fire. Sara lay awake, thinking about the couple’s lives and the weeks passing without exchanging a single word between them. Their lives were so monotonous that they had nothing left to say to each other. They were tired, poor, enduring hardships and loosing part of their harvest because of the frost. She remembered the town of Dexter during the harvest season, when farmers arrived by different routes with carts full of beautiful tomatoes to be loaded onto trains bound for Florida: it was a festive atmosphere: music, drinks, tomato fights. But now, the fire died out, and despite the cold, Sara fell asleep.
In Dexter, there is a large whistle that they blow when frost threatens; the locals call it Mr. Perkins’ whistle.
Tonight, the whistle blew. The lights in the houses of the region came on, and men and women came out of their homes into the fields to cover the plants to keep them from freezing. Sara woke Jason up, and they went outside and covered the plants with blankets. Jason used his jacket and Sara covered the rest of the plants with her dress.
They went back inside the house. Since it was very cold, Jason poured kerosene on a small pile of firewood and lit it. Then he added a cherry log. When the wood burned down, Jason placed a chair with a broken seat on top, followed by the 30-year-old kitchen table.
When the fire died down, Sara said, “Jason”, and he said, “Listen…”, and they fell silent again. Outside, as if trying to extract something more than their lives, the whistle continued to blow.