Moon on a Silver Spoon

Eudora Welty

Eudora Welty, born in 1909, is among America's most foremost writers, often focusing on the strange ways of life in rural Mississippi. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize, and her Collected Stories (1980) has been widely acclaimed. In this selection from her autobiography. One Writer's Beginnings (1984), Welty uses delightful descriptions and stories from childhood to tell how she developed her love for reading.

On a visit to my grandmother's in West Virginia, I stood inside the house where my mother had been born and where she grew up.

"Here's where I first began to read my Dickens," Mother said, pointing. "Under that very bed. Hiding my candle. To keep them from knowing I was up all night."

"But where did it all come from?" I asked her at last. "All that Dickens?"

"Why, Papa gave me that set of Dickens for agreeing to let them cut off my hair." she said. "In those days, they thought very long, thick hair like mine would sap a child's strength. I said No! I wanted my hair left the very way it was. They offered me gold earrings frist. I said No! I'd rather keep my hair. Then Papa said, 'What about books? I'll have them send a whole set of Charles Dickens to you' I agreed." My mother had brought that set of Dickens to our house in Jackson, Miss.; those books had been through fire and water before I was born, she told me, and there they were, lined up—as I later realized, waiting for me.

I learned from the age of two or three that any room in our house, at any time of day, was there to read in, or to be read to. My mother read to me. She'd read to me in the big bedroom in the mornings, when we were in her rocker together, which ticked in rhythm as we rocked, as though we had a cricket accompanying the story. She'd read to me in the dining room on winter afternoons in front of the coal fire, with our cuckoo clock ending the story with "cuckoo," and at night when I'd got in my own bed. I must have given her no peace.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that storybooks had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them—with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms.

Neither of my parents had come from homes that could afford to buy many books, but though it must have been] something of a strain on his salary, my father was all the while carefully selecting and ordering away for what he and Mother thought we children should grow up with.

Besides the bookcase in the living room, which was always called the library, there were the encyclopedia tables and dictionary stand under windows in our dining room. There was a full set of Mark Twain and a short set of Ring Lardner in our bookcase, and those were the volumes that in time united us as parents and children.

I live in gratitude to my parents for initiating me—and as early as I begged for it, without keeping me waiting-into knowledge of the word, into reading and spelling, by way of the alphabet. They taught it to me at home in time for me to begin to read before starting school. I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned the Lord's Prayer, and your father's and mother's name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.

My love for the alphabet, which endures, grew out of reciting it, but before that, out of seeing the letters on the page. In my own storybooks, before I could read them for myself, I fell in love with various winding, enchanted-looking initials at the heads of fairy tales. In "once upon a time," an "0" had a rabbit running it as a treadmill, his feet upon flowers.

In my sensory education I include my physical awareness of the word. Of a certain word, that is; the connection it has with what it stands for. Around age six, perhaps, I was standing by myself in our front yard waiting for supper, just at that hour in a late summer day when the sun is already below the horizon and the risen full moon in the visible sky stops being chalky and begins to take on light. There comes the moment, and I saw it then, when the moon goes from flat to round. For the first time it met my eyes as a globe. The word "moon" came into my mouth as though fed to me out of a silver spoon. Held in my mouth the moon became a word. It had the roundness of a Concord grape that Grandpa took off his vine and gave me to suck out of its skin and swallow whole, in Ohio.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I supposed it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

When I was six or seven, I was taken out of school and put to bed for several months for an ailment the doctor described as "fast-beating heart." I never dreamed I could learn away from the schoolroom, and that bits of enlightenment far-reaching in my life went on as ever in their own good time.

An opulence of storybooks covered my bed. As I read away, I was Rapunzel, or the Goose Girl, or the princess in one of the Thousand and One Nights who mounted the roof of her palace every night and of her own radiance faithfully lighted the whole city just by reposing there.

My mother was very sharing of this feeling of insatiability. Now, I think of her as reading so much of the time while doing something else. In my mind's eyes The Origin of Species is lying on the shelf in the pantry under a light dusting of flour—my mother was a bread maker; she'd pick it up, sit by the kitchen window and find her place, with one eye on the oven.