Mississippi Quarterly

In the early 1960s, the racially segregated world of Mississippi was undergoing groundbreaking changes. In 1962, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi, a school that was then a whites-only institution. This triggered a white supremacist backlash to which black Mississippians responded with protests on campus, economic boycotting of white businesses, sit-ins, etc., and racial tension inevitably started to build up in the city. The next year, Methodist pastors wrote and endorsed “Born of Conviction,” a statement calling for “no discrimination because of race, color, or creed” and, more specifically, for the integration of public schools (Reiff). The statement further spurred controversies and caused those pastors to be ousted from local religious circles. Amidst the politico-cultural strife regarding the racist education system, Millsaps College, a Methodist institution in Jackson, where Eudora Welty was invited to lecture and served as a board member, came face to face with “the problem of the color line” that W. E. B. DuBois had famously defined decades before. Although there were faculty members who openly rebuked the institutional racism and asked Millsaps to desegregate, the school was rather hesitant to make any controversial changes or declarations against the racist paradigm. In 1963, before hosting the Southern Literary Festival, Millsaps College officials expressed to Welty, who was invited as a guest speaker, that they “feared conflict” that could be caused by having an integrated audience (Marrs, “Fateful Stage” 77). As a response, Welty invited black scholars and students from Tougaloo College to attend in order to call out Millsaps’ conservative, complacent, and racist stance on apartheid, and more specifically, its earlier refusal to admit black students and a professor to the school’s theatre production on April 2, 1963 (Marrs, “Fateful Stage” 77; [End Page 201] A Biography 299). After delivering the seemingly apolitical lecture she had promised the school, Welty read her short story “Powerhouse” (1941) to the integrated audience.

“Powerhouse” was an unexpected work for a white southern woman writer living in the Jim Crow era.¹ Alfred Appel boldly suggests that “Powerhouse” is considered “the best story about Jazz” (102). Indeed, the story is inspired by an actual performance by jazz pianist Fats Waller that Welty attended. To capture what she had observed and felt during the experience, Welty wrote the story in one sitting; she reimagined Waller’s one-night-only ragtag big band performance in Jackson in the form of a fictional jazz musician, Powerhouse, as he stages a one-night performance in Alligator, Mississippi. In her attempt to faithfully transcribe the impression she had received from Waller’s jazz aesthetics, Welty forms her story in an almost improvised and conversational style (Bates 82). Looking at her biography, however, it can be easily concluded that Welty was also very much interested in black American culture. In spite of coming from a white middle-class family from segregated Jackson, Mississippi, Welty paid close attention to southern black communities and constantly tried to incorporate their presence in her works. Suzanne Marrs suggests that Welty’s college years spent in New York City familiarized her with Harlem artists. There, she “frequented music stores in the black business district,” and often attended jazz performances at the Cotton Club and Small’s Paradise (Marrs, “Fateful Stage” 75). In short, she was an avid outside observer of black American cultures.

Perhaps because of Welty’s well-known relish for jazz, literary critics commonly propound jazz and blues aesthetics as hermeneutics to read “Powerhouse” and its sociohistorical and literary significance. Daniel Burke, for instance, focuses on dramatic elements in the blues performance such as “the rapid tempo and exclamatory excitement,” which build up to the mysterious charisma and “volcanic energy” of Powerhouse (170, 174). Kenneth Bearden more directly foregrounds the improvisational characteristics in jazz and blues aesthetics and connects [End Page 202] it to the Signifying Monkey trope to read the subversive characterization of Powerhouse. Through the manipulation of language and his tale of Uranus Knockwood, Powerhouse becomes a trickster figure who employs sexual innuendos as an inside joke to poke...