This short musing is in response to Eudora Welty’s Mississippi short story “The Burning.” If you haven’t read it before, you can purchase it as apart of her collected works from a local bookstore in Jackson, MS, at this link - https://www.lemuriabooks.com/The-Collected-Stories-of-Eudora-Welty-p/9781328625649.htm. Every Mississippian should read this story.
But here is a quick plot overview. The Union is taking over Jackson, pillaging homes and stores for valuables before burning them to the ground under the direct orders of General Tecumseh Sherman. Two soldiers with a white horse enter a plantation home named Rose Hill, where two sisters named Theo and Myra live alongside their slave Delilah and Myra’s illegitimate son Phinny (it is unclear whether he is Black or white). Theo’s husband has died in the war, and her son is missing in action. Despite warnings to leave, Theo elected to hide the notice from Myra and stay at Rose Hill, certain they would never come.
But the soldiers come. And the soldiers torch the home after carrying out all valuables. Theo, Myra, and Delilah watch from the yard before heading out into the ruins of Jackson. Phinny, Myra’s son, never exits the house and dies in the fire. Theo and Myra commit suicide by hanging themselves from a tree, and Delilah escapes to start a new life. A short rumination on the house:
Miss Theo cannot see the difference. The Union soldier who trampled in through the front door with his white horse and orders to burn the plantation home from General Sherman himself, well, let him say it, he has a line. A line in the sand, a line in the centuries-old purposefully burned dirt of the fields surrounding the mansion of widows, husband and son gone to the war with one dead and the other on the way.
“Burnin’ up people’s further’n I go yet.” the Northern arsonist says. “I see no degree,” the widow Miss Theo snarks back, a parting shot from the grave of the wealth and social capital she is buried within. The torches, their orange fire, their hundreds of degrees of heat, melt the wooden baseboards and staircase, the columns, the plaster flowers on the roof. Theo and Myra, they push themselves out to the field. And physically, they are safe.
But their souls are not. The South is not. The South is within them, the South is within that house, and as the flames hollow out the kitchen, the doorway where their slave Delilah stood post, Theo and Myra die. Welty painted the house as their defense, as their representation. And they breathe in the sunny afternoon of its destruction, but no air escapes. They stumble away from the land, into the ruins of Jackson. But no footprints follow.
They are Ghosts. Ghosts of the House, Ghosts of the South. A sack of bones, the house’s murder has left them defenseless. Fire with no oxygen.