Editor’s Note: Nicolaus Mills is professor of American studies at Sarah Lawrence College. His most recent book is “Every Army Man Is with You: The Cadets Who Won the 1964 Army-Navy Game, Fought in Vietnam, and Came Home Forever Changed.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.
Story highlights
Nicolaus Mills: In 1963, author Eudora Welty wrote a short story after Medgar Evers killed. Dylann Roof's story has echoes of it
It's main character shoots a black man. The Southern culture the murderer has grown up with is at the center of her story
Many would like to learn more about the private life of Dylann Roof, the white 21-year-old from South Carolina charged with the murder of nine black parishioners at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. But there is another way of approaching who Dylann Roof is, and it has nothing to do with his personal biography.
That way was taken more than 50 years ago by Eudora Welty, the Mississippi-born novelist, in the short story, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” that she wrote in response to the 1963 Jackson, Mississippi, murder of NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers by Byron De La Beckwith, a white fertilizer salesman from rural Greenwood.
Evers was shot returning home on June 12, 1963, the night that President John Kennedy gave a nationally televised speech announcing that he would soon send civil rights legislation to Congress (the legislation became the Civil Rights Act of 1964).
At the time, Welty did not know anything personally about Beckwith, but she was confident that she did not need such personal knowledge to write her story.
“I thought to myself, ‘I’ve lived here all my life. I know the kind of mind that did this,’” Welty later observed. “What I was writing about really was that world of hate that I felt I had grown up with.” Welty finished her story in one night and immediately sent it on to the New Yorker, where it was published on July 6, 1963.
Written in the first person and just two-magazine pages long, “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” adopts the point of view of the kind of white Southerner whom Welty imagined would murder Medgar Evers In doing so, Welty places the Southern culture the murderer has grown up with at the center of her story. It’s the matter-of-fact racism of the nameless narrator of “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” that makes him so frightening.
The story begins with the narrator complaining to his wife about an African-American appearing on his television set and asking for “equal time” to express his views. In the narrator’s mind the request is a racial affront, and he sets off to Thermopylae (Welty’s name for the city of Jackson) to kill the man who has made the request, Roland Summers.
Manifesto photos feature Dylann Roof
The route to Thermopylae takes the narrator west on a road named for Nathan B. Forrest, the Confederate general who became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In short order, Summers arrives at his home, and the narrator, who has been hiding, quickly shoots him with his rifle. Then he stands over the body of Summers and tells him, “We ain’t never now, never going to be equals and you know why? One of us is dead.”
The irony of having been unable to get the best of Summers while they lived is lost on the narrator, but as the story progresses, he finds that instead of taking satisfaction in the murder, he is haunted by still more resentments. He hates the fact that Summers’ home has nice grass, sardonically noting the family is sure to have high water bills.
Even when he brags to his wife about the killing, the narrator can’t get the approval from her that he wants. His wife tells him that Summers’ funeral will be on television and that the NAACP, for which Summers worked, is sending someone new to Thermopylae. “Why couldn’t you have waited?” she asks. “You might have got you somebody better.” The last straw for the narrator comes when his wife scolds him for leaving his rifle behind. His carelessness, she fears, will get him caught, and in the meantime it jeopardizes her. She wants a gun in the house for protection.
The story ends with the narrator angry that he won’t get credit for the murder he has committed and hoping for a future in which whites and blacks clash violently in the streets. The civil rights demonstrations that he has watched on his television have left the narrator with a sickening feeling of being on the losing side of history. The arrests of the black demonstrators—especially the young—don’t seem to do any good. They get a free ride to jail and are quickly back on the streets singing. As the narrator observers, “I was already tired of seeing a hundred cops getting us white people nowhere.”
Today, Welty remains a tough act to follow. Her critique of Southern culture is as severe as that leveled by any Southern writer since Mark Twain. Her story, when read with the South’s racial history in mind, doesn’t allow politicians at the national level or in South Carolina to dismiss Dylann Roof as crazy, then continue doing business as usual.
The question is whether in the coming weeks any white, Southern politician will achieve the kind of pitch-perfect understanding of the South Carolina murders that Eudora Welty did with the murder of Medgar Evers.
The decision of South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the grounds of the South Carolina Capitol is, in this regard, good news, as is the fact that the state’s two senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, were standing beside her when she said the Confederate flag “does not represent the future.”
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