The Walker family was forced to move once again-this time to New Orleans, where her father found a job teaching at New Orleans University. Once, she recalls, “three little white boys jumped on me and beat me on my way home.” 9 Despite these challenges, she was heartbroken when the Central Alabama Institute, where her parents both taught, burned down.
EUDORA WELTY STORY SERIES
After living in a series of dormitories, rented rooms, and Methodist parsonages, the Walkers bought a small house, which Walker describes as “a real achievement.” 8 It was located outside the city limits, and she was required to walk “a long way through a white neighborhood on the paved streets to the car line at Dabbs Drugstore” and then take the trolley car downtown to get to school. 7 Walker continued her schooling, but it was not as convenient for Walker as it was for Welty to get to school. never cared for life in Mississippi,” and she was relieved when the family returned to Birmingham. Meridian was not a happy place for Margaret’s mother, however. I stayed that year in the first grade but I read with the fourth grade children.” 6
Walker started school at age five at Haven (like Welty, she learned to read quite young and was ready for school before most of her peers) and remembers her time in Meridian as “happy. Walker’s father moved his growing family to Meridian, Mississippi, when he and his wife were both offered teaching positions at the Haven Institute, a Methodist school. Her parents were Methodist educators, and her father was also a Methodist preacher: he supplemented his meagre pastoral income by teaching. Welty grew up in Jackson she lived in her first house on Congress Street from 1909 to 1925, and it was in this house, located across the street from her elementary school and conveniently near the library and later Jackson High School, that she developed what she calls her “knowledge of the word.” 5 Margaret Walker, on the other hand, was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved several times as a child. They must have sacrificed to give me on my sixth or seventh birthday-it was after I became a reader for myself-the ten-volume set of Our Wonder World.” 3 She also fondly recalls getting her first library card and making trips to the library on her bicycle every day because she was limited to checking out two books at a time: “I coasted the two new books home, jumped out of my petticoat, read (I suppose I ate and bathed and answered questions put to me), then in all hope put my petticoat back on and rode those two books back to the library to get my next two.” 4 Walker’s first house in Birmingham - Department of Archives and Manuscripts, Birmingham Public Library
In her memoir One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty acknowledges the debt she owes to her parents for instilling within her a love of reading: “Indeed, my parents could not give me books enough. Both Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker were born into families where education was given the highest priority.