And the final story in The Wide Net (and thus the collection itself) concludes with the portrait of a young woman who is rejected, and is forced to face absolute desolation and a serial rape. But they remain children, and act their age. Williams dive is not a baptism for the faint-hearted. Right after he got back, though, some of his old friends met him at a local tavern and asked him if it were true that he had run away from the fight. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. It was perfect for riding out on the sand dunes at night, and for taking friends to the honky-tonks to hear one of our classmates wail out his versions of the old standards of Hank Williams and the brand new songs of Jerry Lee Lewis. (qtd. I saw it 26 years ago and I wish it was on tonight. To me, there is more irony than history in the name William Wallace. She continues several pages later: It is our inward journey that leads us through timeforward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling. The Pearl River is the prime example in The Wide Net and therefore the source of selfhood that will save William Wallace. They marvel over the snake, but seem to feel satisfied by their feast. Myth and meaning in that book are indivisible. Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. He is more at ease with the helpless wild creature of the woods than with Hazel at home. The town was a typical Florida collection of frame houses, shady streets, and sandy alleys held together by a compact center of brick banks, churches, cafes, shops, and one movie theater, on the western side of the river within walking distance of the ocean to the east. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. 1 Robbie is right to be frightened. 182)reassures the reader that all will be well, at least for the time being. The web value rate of bigpicture.net is 49,209 USD. But the town itself was lively and busy and relatively sheltered from the poverty and misery that remained a plague throughout the greater South even in the 1950s. The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. Her reaction is more than understandable. No wonder Eudora Welty was ready to lash out if anyone else showed the same dimwittedness as the reviewer in. The strongest proof of identity is the capacity to change, to slip from one role to another if necessary, to pass through the modes of being that nature and time demand, but always to remain at one with oneself. 31He was the county judge, famous for his fairness in court, and loved by everyone who knew him, thus by the entire town. A reality that is, perhaps, a level or two beneath the conventional mode of realism. The narration continues to speculate how (who knew?) 2023 . He was a black deputy who had saved Hurstons letters and manuscripts from a fire after her death. 36There is one more story about my grandfather that I need to relate. After all, for William it is only October and the baby will not be born until April (fall and rebirth go hand in hand in this story). note:when citing an online source, it is important to include all necessary dates. Then group returns to town, everyone carrying their heavy strings of fish. Shortly after I finished graduate school and began to read more widely about the South I learned that Zora Neale Hurston had lived her last years in my home town, and was buried there. Here time, also, is subject to confluence. 6It would not be amiss at this point to give a brief account of what happens in The Wide Net. It might help set the stage for those of you who have never read it, or who, like me before I took it up again, may have to struggle to remember the details of an earlier reading. [] Any day now the change will come. , notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. Robbie worries about lightning. Twain, Mark. She had just published a masterpiece of modern realism in which dream and the inner world are as vividly brought to life as the outside, but this is an affirmation of the living human mind, not an evasion. Aeneas needs the golden bough to allow him to safely travel through the underworld to find his father. Wives and girlfriends would be gathered under the windows, and the banter and singing between them and the men in jail are impossible to exaggerate. I had suspected something like this as a boy, but now it was confirmed. But even children are sensitive to the boundary between the real and the fictional, and would hate to hear their father repeat the soliloquies of Hamlet from breakfast to bedtime even if he made a living as an actor. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. In my town there were cattle ranches and orange groves to the west, and a small fleet of shrimping boats chugging back and forth on the Indian River to and from the Atlantic. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. online is the same, and will be the first date in the citation. Walking down Orange Avenue he stopped in each of the three barber shops to tip his hat and say hello, and then picked up his daily cigar at the post office. When I was invited to speak about the myth of the South, the thought of Weltys The Wide Net, came to my mind in a flash. But I could not remember that it had revealed the slightest interest in the South as a subject of focus or reflection. 15The story ends with Hazel calling his name from the bedroom. and I believe I could find stories, old ones & new ones, and beliefs and songs and violent events all over the place to show what the life here is, to my belief Think of all the people who would be in my bookwonderful Indians to start with, and the Indian tales are beautiful and dramatic and very touching some of themand Aaron Burr & Blennerhassett, and Lafayette, and Audubon, and Jefferson Davis, and the bandits and Lafitte the pirate, and all kinds of remarkable people. The father of the white boys is rumored to have drowned in the Pearl River, and the father of the black boys had been struck by lightning and, as Robbie cries out during a storm, was dead three days, dead as that-there axe (Welty. I walked with him often on his way to his office in the courthouse down by the river. The Wide Net and Other Stories. 5I do not mean to suggest that I find anything of myself in William Wallace, nor in his search for Hazel. eNotes.com But there were no old plantations or slave quarters, and no signs to mark the battles of the Civil War since there had been no battles. There seemed to be a force in the family that drove it to act or speak out, with or without the common consensus. In those days the post office had a small shop that sold tobacco and newspapers. Are there many other collections of the time framed with a stronger cry against the harsh realities of human fate? Other than Old Doc, the characters making up the search party include two sets of young brothers, the white boys, Brucie and Grady Rippin, and the black boys, Sam and Robbie Bell. After all, for William it is only October and the baby will not be born until April (fall and rebirth go hand in hand in this story). She is in her early twenties (an age we might give to William Wallace) when she discovers the gift of memory, and in her seventies when she confirms it: Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists. Later in the story a violent storm with a blast of wind covers the entire search party with wet leaves. the second is . Robert Fitzgerald. William Wallace has done the real catching, unless of course, it has been Hazel herself. Perhaps nature itself, the mother of all myth, is the true heart of the story. Whenever Walter Scott is mentioned in the context of the South, Mark Twains theory of the Civil War and the southern imagination immediately leaps to mind. Grady is already a sort of father to Brucie. He possesses an old mans horde of lifelong certitudes. In. What impressed me most was the incongruity of seeing such a stark inscription on a Baptist tombstone. There is, however, a simpler explanation, of the South to be sure, but leaving the story still uncomplicated by history. The grown-up Doyles and Malones are fixed in their undefined identities forever. In many respects he cherished the community as much as his family, but it had to be the whole community, white and black. But the history of the South itself came to me mainly through the stories I heard in my family. Still, if I should apologize, I do. One was the Florida artist A.E. Doc doesn't believe that Hazel would have drowned herself, but he lends the men the net just the same. I had not forgotten the references to history and to historical figures in some of the stories of The Wide Net and Other Stories, notably First Love, and A Still Moment, to name the most powerful. The only shade was provided by a long tin shed next to the sludge bin. Rereading The Wide Net brought many of these memories back to mind, and it brought back to mind too my dismay in Chapel Hill at fitting them into a theory of myth, or even at weaving them into a common pattern of southern identity. Eudora Welty is comically playing on the popular refrain that such a collection of rural men and boys could be found only in the Deep South. Sometimes referred to as a "network of networks," the Internet emerged in the United States in the 1970s but did not become visible to the general public until the early 1990s. . 27Even as I write, the memories come flooding, but two or three should be enough to make my case. But the real proof of his character came at noon, when we all stopped to have lunch. [Anthony Herrera; Rachel McPherson; Marcus Viscidi; Kyra Sedgwick; Barry Tubb; Tim Ransom; M Josef Sommer; Glen Roven; Eudora Welty;] -- Set in rural Mississippi, the story focuses on the turbulent relationship of a young married couple, William Wallace and his wife Hazel, in the American South in 1933. Weltys mother refused to have a copy in her house. 10The Malones are like horses, and the Doyles are never without their dogs. Faced with the most serious crisis of his young life, William at least has the resourcefulness to ask help from one of his friends from the night out, Virgil Thomas, and they set out to borrow the wide net from Old Doc, and to gather other members of the community to help drag the river. William Wallace is beset on all sides by distractions, advice, omens, signs of all sorts. N 102 Library of America Series. 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