SOURCE: "The Metaphor of Race in Eudora Welty's Fiction," in The Southern Review, Vol. 22, No. 4, October, 1986, pp. 697-707.

In the following essay, Marrs discusses certain aspects of African-American culture that Welty portrays in Delta Wedding and The Golden Apples including: "separateness despite intimate contact, a consequent and paradoxical freedom from white conventions, and a once common belief in ghosts and magic potions."

During the 1930s and early 1940s Eudora Welty was almost as busy with her camera as with her typewriter. She photographed scenes and faces, tried to sell a book of her pictures, and gave a one-woman photographic show in New York City. A primary subject of these photographs was black life in Mississippi: a fortune teller in exotic costume, bottle trees designed to ward off evil spirits, a slave apron with a whole mythology stitched upon it, a black state fair parade, a "Colored Entrance" to...