The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Saturday, February 22, 2025

Storytime: Eudora Welty wrote “A Visit of Charity” in 1941. There may have been an element of autobiography. If so, she captured the dank desperation we have all felt when visiting a nursing home–here called Old Ladies’ Home–heard the rasp of its residents’ decompensating lungs, smelled the slipperiness of its one-way floors, longed to leave as soon as we got there, the mirror of our future proving too unbearable for any charity. Welty grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. She knew a house by that very name, and must’ve walked by it many times and went inside fewer times. The Mississippi Department of Archive and History has a 1967 postcard reproduction of the actual Old Ladies Home, the one above this piece (without the possessive apostrophe Welte  added with grammatical fustiness, unless it was her editors’ corruption), with this explanation: “Old Ladies Home, 2902 West Capitol Street, Jackson, Mississippi 39209. A home established in 1902 for 95 elderly ladies without children or sufficient means of support. Maintained largely by the generosity of citizens within the State and friends outside who are concerned with the welfare of these ladies.” Mississippi State’s Scholars Junction has more details: “Chartered in 1902, constructed in 1908, the Old Ladies Home was long a Jackson landmark. This hand-colored image reveals structural additions to the original building. In 1902 Samuel Livingston gave 2 acres between Livingston Park and Cedarlawn Cemetery for the site of the Old Ladies Home. The women of Mississippi raised the money, and the building was completed in 1908. It was a magnificent 2-story brick building lighted by electricity, immediately on the street car line, and accommodating 40 aged women. Additions were made through the years to house more ladies, but by 1987 the Home was found unsafe and the residents moved elsewhere. The building was razed in 1991. The title of the card is printed in red along the upper edge of the image.” That’s the postcard appearing below, from back when it cost a penny to mail one (penny postcards first went on sale in 1873, a price that held, amazingly, until Jan. 1, 1952, according to this delicious history of the postcard by the postal service.)  “A Visit of Charity” is about 14-year-old Marian, “the little girl” (adolescence’s imperiousness had yet to emerge in 1941) is a Campfire Girl. (Unlike Old Ladies Home and penny postcard, Camp Fire is still around, but as a coed organization. Its only chapter in Florida is in Lakeland.)  Forgive the endless tangents, but I find all this fascinating, this being the archeological dig that the opening lines of a short story can turn out to be even before we get to its literary beauties, though rare is the story that manages literary power on a vacuum of archeology. “A Visit of Charity” is that story of endless layers. Marian is visiting the Old Ladies Home for utilitarian rather than charitable reasons. “I have to pay a visit to some old lady,” she tells the desk nurse, “any of them will do.” Marian knows none of them. The old ladies have no names, only a value: three points for her Camp Fire Girl ledger. Four if she brought flowers (she brought a potted plant) and double if she brought a Bible and read from it to the ladies (no Bible). From the opening lines, the story has three recurring sensations: coldness, whiteness and sheep. Welty repeats the word “sheep,” usually as a simile, four or five times. Walking with Marian down a hallway that smells “like the interior of a clock,” the pair hear it: “an old lady of some kind cleared her throat like a sheep bleating.” The nurse shoves Marian in that dark room and its two darker (but white-skinned) convicts, who proceed to nearly terrorize Marian with their merciless bickering and bleating. One of them is called Addie. We never learn what the other one is called. The bleating sheep hates the flowers, the other one likes them. They bicker about that, and about the time when someone read to them from the bible. The nameless one claims it’s Addie’s birthday and she’s mad about that. Addie protests. It isn’t. Nothing is, anymore for Addie. But Marian finally sees her as more than a point and asks her how old she is. “Now she could see the old woman in bed very closely and plainly, and very abruptly, from all sides, as in dreams. She wondered about her–she wondered for a moment as though there was nothing else in the world to wonder about. It was the first time such a thing had happened to Marian.” But Addie is now crying: “It was a sheep that she sounded like–a little lamb.” Marian escapes the room and flees out of the building, stopping by a bush where she’d hidden something. A red apple. She jumped on a bus “and took a big bite out of the apple.” With the image of the old woman reduced to a little lamb and of the bite at the red apple, the story goes from spectral to scriptural. Addie’s Eden has long been over. Marian’s may have just ended.  Charity is like the ceiling Marian looked at when she was shoved into the room, “like being caught in a robbers’ cave,  just before one was murdered.”

—P.T.

 

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If, then, this is true—that books are of very different types, and that to read them rightly we have to bend our imaginations powerfully, first one way, then another—it is clear that reading is one of the most arduous and exhausting of occupations. Often the pages fly before us and we seem, so keen is our interest, to be living and not even holding the volume in our hands. But the more exciting the book, the more danger we run of over-reading. The symptoms are familiar. Suddenly the book becomes dull as ditchwater and heavy as lead. We yawn and stretch and cannot attend. The highest flights of Shakespeare and Milton become intolerable. And we say to ourselves—is Keats a fool or am I?—a painful question, a question, moreover, that need not be asked if we realized how great a part the art of not reading plays in the art of reading. To be able to read books without reading them, to skip and saunter, to suspend judgment, to lounge and loaf down the alleys and bye-streets of letters is the best way of rejuvenating one’s own creative power. All biographies and memoirs, all the hybrid books which are largely made up of facts, serve to restore to us the power of reading real books—that is to say, works of pure imagination.

–From —Virginia Woolf, “How Should One Read a Book?” Yale Review, Sept. 1, 1926.

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