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© Eudora Welty Collection
Mississippi Department of Archives and History
One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression: A Snapshot Album
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996).
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"Out front was a clean dirt
yard with every vestige of grass patiently uprooted and the ground
scarred in deep whorls from the strike of Livvie's broom. Rose bushes
with tiny blood-red roses blooming every month grew in threes on either
side of the steps. On one side was a peach tree, on the other a
pomegranate. Then coming around up the path from the deep cut of the
Natchez Trace below was a line of bare crape-myrtle trees with every
branch of them ending in a colored bottle, green or blue. There was no
word that fell from Solomon's lips to say what they were for, but Livvie
knew that there could be a spell put in trees, and she was familiar from
the time she was born with the way bottle trees kept evil spirits from
coming into the house--by luring them inside the colored bottles, where
they cannot get out again. Solomon had made the bottle trees with his
own hands over the nine years, in labor amounting to about a tree a
year, and without a sign that he had any uneasiness in his heart, for he
took as much pride in his precautions against spirits coming in the
house as he took in the house, and sometimes in the sun the bottle trees
looked prettier than the house did." --- Eudora Welty
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Eudora Welty--a
snapshot into her art
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