Jitney and Fodder: Meeting Eudora Welty When I Was Very Young

I first met Eudora Welty in the Jitney Jungle line on Fortification Street.  I knew who she was because my mother was the secretary and transcriptionist for her doctor's office around the block.  I also knew about Eudora because I wanted to be a writer.  I wrote my first book, Ghost Thirteen, at the age of seven.  It was written in pencil on scraps of paper and clumsily stapled and glued together.
Momma officially introduced me to Eudora one day at the clinic where she kindly signed my used copy of The Golden Apples which I had purchased from Lemuria.  We kept it in Momma's office for the possible eventuality that we might cross paths some day when I spent "sick" days with Momma.  Eudora intently looked me in the eyes and asked me my name.  "Jilleen Elaine" I answered.  She wrote it out and commented that mine was one of the prettiest names she had ever heard.  Only later, having read The Golden Apples and some of her short stories, did I realize that Snowdie and Stella-Rondo were some of her other favorites.
As a teenager, lucky enough to have an Ole Miss alumni for an English teacher, I took a Southern Studies class and was encouraged to read other southern authors, Faulkner, Barry Hannah, Elizabeth Spencer, Flannery O'Connor and Shelby Foote, etc.  I was also fortunate enough to travel up to Oxford to see Faulker's world and Square Books and it filled me with wonder and hope.
Eudora once read The Wide Net somewhere in Jackson, maybe Newstage Theatre?  She also spoke to the crowd about what it was like writing in the old days, with bits and scraps of paper tacked together and the constant barrage of ideas that were born out of the everyday vernacular she studied from the people in her midst.  Her WPA job allowed her to see many different sides of rural life and poverty and it would seem many of her most memorable characters were spontaneously generated out of her lifelong interactions with some very real and strange human beings.  The beauty and profundity of her observations is related with such precision and relevancy... it's why we can see ourselves and others in her words.  Eudora's photos were also marvels of perspective and timing and show her eye for setting.
Several years before she passed away, while I was still in High School, I met her at a booksigning and was able to get a signed copy of One Writers' Beginnings, one of few books I have ever read again and again. Welty was a powerhouse of philosophy and emotion, and the power is still in her words.
Yesterday I met Carolyn Brown, author of A Daring Life.  Carolyn Brown approaches the germ of Welty, in her collaboration of previously unpublished photos of Eudora, thoughtful prose through research and conversations with those who knew her best.  Brown lovingly treats Eudora with the reverence she deserves and does so concisely, so that Eudora might be known by old and young readers only just beginning to experience the very complex and mysterious woman and her many great works of American literature.