Delta Wedding

Delta Wedding is the second novel written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American author Eudora Welty. Developed from the short story “Delta Cousins,” rejected by three different magazines, Welty expanded the tale into a novel under the working title Shellmound. Delta Wedding first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly before being published as a novel in 1946. Set at the Shellmound Plantation in the Mississippi Delta, the story charts the leisurely lives of the extended Fairchild family for a week in September of 1923. With little plot to speak of, most of the action is centered on the wedding ceremony of seventeen-year-old Dabney Fairchild and thirty-four-year-old plantation manager, Troy Flavin. As the enormous Fairchild family comes together to celebrate the marriage, the charms, customs, social mores, secrets, loyalties, and whimsical eccentricities of the American South are seen through the eyes of a visiting nine-year-old niece, Laura McRaven.

The story begins in September 1923. Nine-year-old Laura McRaven boards the Yellow Dog train from Jackson, Mississippi to Shellmound Plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Laura has been invited to the wedding of her cousin Dabney Fairchild, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Battle and Ellen Fairchild, and Troy Flavin, a plantation manager twice her age. Laura’s recently deceased mother was a Fairchild. Unbeknownst to her, Laura’s invitation to the wedding doubles as a tacit tryout to become a permanent part of the Fairchild family. Laura enjoys the “special-ness” of being an only child but secretly longs to be part of a larger whole.

Laura arrives at Shellmound and is overwhelmed by the number of relatives included in the extended Fairchild family. The town is even named Fairchilds. Indeed, Battle and Ellen alone have eight children, with a ninth on the way. Their prettiest and second eldest daughter, Dabney, is poised to marry a man twice her age. Dabney’s fiancé, Troy Flavin, oversees Shellmound, the cotton plantation owned by Battle. Troy hails from the hills of Mississippi, which, along with his red-hair, advanced age, and lowly position as plantation manager, makes him unsuitable in the eyes of certain family members.



As is stated early in the story, the Fairchilds make it a point "to keep their kinfolk and their tragedies straight." This sense of tight-knit loyalty extends to Battle’s brother, George, whose marriage to Robbie Reid, a non-Delta native and clerk at the Fairchild general store, also raised eyebrows among certain family members. Even Ellen, the Fairchild matriarch who hails from Virginia, is leered at suspiciously and perceived to be uppity by some. Certain Negro servants, many of whom are invited to the wedding, receive better treatment than outsiders at Shellmound, simply because they are native Delta folk.

As the wedding approaches, the daily mundane lives of the Fairchilds are detailed in great length. Welty painstakingly describes the environs of the plantation fields, the Mississippi Delta, the Yazoo River, the town of Fairchilds, the plantation protocols, the various interrelationships between the gigantic Fairchild family, and the preparations leading up to Dabney and Troy’s wedding ceremony. The atypical structure of the novel does not adhere to the template of a beginning, middle, and end. Nor does the story have a clear-cut protagonist. Instead, Welty takes her time cataloging the quotidian life of the Fairchild family members as they prepare for a monumental event. Perspectives shift, and the deliberate pace of the novel is meant to reflect the languid tempo of the deep American south.

In another episode detailed at length, Uncle George, an admired lawyer from Memphis, is nearly left by his wife, Robbie, following an incident with the Yellow Dog train. George’s niece Maureen gets her foot caught in the trestle of the railway, and George is forced to rescue her just before being struck by the train. Robbie, witnessing the near-accident, becomes upset with George for risking his own life and potentially turning her into a widow. But Robbie’s anger is really a thinly veiled attempt to hide her sense of alienation, serving as an excuse not to face the judgmental Fairchild family. As Robbie sees it, she cannot compete with the love and adoration bestowed upon George by his own close-knit family. As a result, Robbie chooses not to attend the wedding.



Laura deeply rues not being part of the wedding ceremony, but one of the children falls ill at the last minute, and Laura’s wish comes true. She participates in the procession, giving her a sense of inclusion. Dabney, who expresses elation for her impending nuptials, also voices anxiety about leaving her family and farm for the first time in her life. After the wedding, Ellen asks Laura to stay and permanently live at Shellmound. Laura, ecstatic to be considered part of the Fairchild family, knows she must return to her non-Fairchild father in Jackson. Following their honeymoon, Dabney and Troy return to reside at Marmion, a nearby estate owned by the Fairchilds. As the novel concludes, all seems right to Dabney, especially in the way her family has accepted Troy into their family as one of their own.

Eudora Welty, an American essayist, short story writer, and novelist, won a number of awards during her career. The Order of the South honor was bestowed on her in 1973, and her final novel, The Optimist’s Daughter, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1973. Welty was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980, and in 2004, her house in Jackson, Mississippi was declared a National Historic Landmark.