Post # 9

So on Wednesday I’m going to be discussion leader and I’ll be talking about the Medgar Evers pieces and Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From.” The first piece I read was Welty’s and I definitely thought it was the most engaging of the three. For me, the first paragraph was very significant because it seemed to reveal a lot about the main character. He tells his wife she doesn’t have to look at the “black nigger face no longer,” which seemed to me to demonstrate his need to control not only his wife but also to degrade Evers and by extension assert himself as superior (which would be another form of control). I mean obviously his wife is capable of shutting off the television if she wants but the fact that he tells her she can hints at his need to create the world he wants to live in, to ultimately have control over his community. As Abbey mentioned in her blog the stylistic choices that Welty makes bring this character to life—more specifically his word choice highlights that he is not only uneducated but also has this weird very illogical way of thinking. For instance, he gets the idea to kill this man from the mere act of turning off the TV. Further pointing to his bizarre mind set is his assertion that Evers will never be equal to him because he’s now dead. So obviously Welty wants readers to understand first that this killer gives his act little or no thought beforehand and then after the killing takes pleasure in the fact that he has asserted himself as perpetually above this black man (who is probably one of the only black men in close proximity to this guy who has ever asserted his intelligence and humanity so forthrightly). Finally, another thing that interested me was the repetition of the “hot” theme, which I think, really helps to reinforce not only the tensions but also the urgency that the killer felt and also the tremendous threat that Evers posed to this man’s way of life. Maybe the hotness shows that the situation in this town was so charged that one spark could ignite it. Anyway we can discuss this more on Wednesday.