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The House of Edna Earle: Boarding Houses in Welty's South
By Dan and Emily Sanders I say to people who pass through here, 'Now just a minute. Not so fast. Could you hope to account for twelve
bedrooms, two bathrooms, two staircases, five porches, lobby, dining room, pantry and kitchen, every day of your life, and still be out there looking pretty when they come in?
—Edna Earle in The Ponder Heart Bill Simmons has called Mississippi home for most of his 83 years, and he knows Eudora Welty. He never lived in anything like the Beulah
Hotel of The Ponder Heart, but he thanked the heavens for boarding houses like them every day of his young life. "My sixth-grade teacher lived in one, and every day I had the honor of fetching her lunch
from it—which got me out of class fifteen minutes early," he recalls with a laugh. Simmons also remembers a man living in a neighborhood boarding house during the 1920s who was a veteran of the Confederacy:
"I tried so hard to wheedle Civil War stories out of that man." Whether it was just sparing a schoolboy a few minutes in a cramped and muggy classroom, or a place for a wandering salesman to live for awhile, the
boarding house was as much a part of American life a half-century ago as the video store is today. Yet it was in the South of Eudora Welty, with its more patient pace of life, where boarding houses took deepest
root. "Even in the small towns, there were one or two of them," says Simmons. "It was a very essential part of Southern life." Houses like the Beulah are almost unheard of today, so the remembrances of
Southerners like Simmons are essential to appreciating Welty's novel. In the 1940s America of The Ponder Heart, air travel was rare and dangerous. The interstate highway system was only a vision, and
automobiles crawled over narrow, pocked roads; the automatic transmission was still years away from widespread availability. Railroads remained the dominant mode of travel, and even they were severely restricted
during wartime. All this made for a vastly less mobile society than what we know today. "It was a slower type of lifestyle, when things were simpler," says North Carolinian Steve Hill. "People had time
to slow down, enjoy things around them. When they arrived in a town, people were content to find a boarding house and stay there." These houses were like anything else—there were good ones and bad
ones. When luck awarded someone with a house as well-run as Edna Earle Ponder's, there was affordable shelter and a chance to meet some interesting folks; when darker fortunes prevailed, the house proved that
Sartre was right when he wrote, "Hell is other people." Most often, boarding houses were landing pads for reshuffled lives in a nation with few options for women and the unskilled. All Under One Roof: Boarding House Lifestyles Today, Steve Hill runs a boarding
house—one without guests. It's a national historic site once owned by Julia Wolfe, whose dictatorial rule of a boarding house was immortalized by her son Thomas in Look Homeward Angel. For
real-life boarders, the houses amounted to a short course in human relations. "You got a smattering of lifestyles other than your own, a lot of people brought together under one roof," claims Hill. Amy Byra
learned this firsthand, living in a house in Jackson, Mississippi—Welty's hometown—during the Second World War. "It was crowded, with all the soldiers in town, all their wives and kids. We had a recruiting
officer for the Navy, four Army Air Force men sharing a room, a couple of 4F's (men rejected for military service because of disabilities), a young married couple in one, and two old men in another," she
remembers. "There were three girls in my room. People were pretty packed in." For another Mississippian, Ruby Anders, a boarding house in neighboring Louisiana comprised her first city experience after
growing up in a very small town. "I was twenty just before the war, working for the phone company down in Baton Rouge," she says. "I made ten dollars a week, but then they started taking out taxes.
Social Security, you know. So my weekly salary was cut to $9.85." Boarding house rent took another four dollars.Not far from Ruby Anders in Hattiesburg, Dr. Betty Drake recalls, "These were usually big,
old, two-story houses, the kind with lots and lots of rooms. If the landlady was not nosy, did not read your mail, and provided good food and a clean house, those were her main selling points." In the
classic mode of Upstairs, Downstairs, the help lived on the first floor, those they served on the second. As a young girl Dr. Drake lived in a boarding house run by her aunt in Memphis, where
The Ponder Heart's
doomed Bonnie Dee Peacock flees after she leaves Daniel. "My aunt preferred male tenants; she said they were less trouble. I had a little business going, the boarders would give me a dime a week to wash their socks." Most of these profits were invested in movie magazines. "This was when movie stars dressed for glamour, not all tacky
like you see today," Drake says. "I'd cut out the stars' pictures and make paper dolls." In a nation that had yet to appreciate half its labor force, boarding houses provided a rare economic
opportunity. "In the 1920's and 1930's, it was about the only option an unmarried woman had, to run a boarding house," asserts Drake. Bill Simmons agrees: "Typically it would be run by a widow as a
means of supporting herself." In most cases, the woman either could not afford the upkeep to stay there alone, or simply found herself with too much house for one person. She would usually be assisted by one
or two workers, most often African Americans, helping with cooking and cleaning, just as Edna Earle has Narciss and Big John Beech. Running a boarding house meant long, hard hours. Most houses included maid
service, and there were constant telephone messages to take, repairs to be made, mail to sort, bills to pay. Above all, upwards of twenty people had to be fed two or three times a day without a microwave oven or a
large grocery market nearby. "All the cooking was from scratch," reminds Simmons. Chickens had to be slaughtered and plucked, potatoes had to be peeled, and biscuits had to be baked. Dr. Betty Drake
remembers traipsing with her aunt and the African American couple working for her to farmer's markets in Memphis, lugging home fresh food for the boarders. "Things had to be done 365 days a year, it was a very
hard way to make a living," Drake claims. In a competitive business like a boarding house, the food was the landlady's secret weapon. "The food was good, and there was a lot of it," recalls Ruby Anders. "I
used to wonder how they could cook all of it, and make it so good." Drake assents, "Oh yes, it was good, typical Southern cooking, lots of vegetables, homemade bread, homemade pies and cakes, beef and pork
roasts." Bill Simmons still remembers the splendors of the fresh apple pie at the house his family ate at on occasion, saying simply: "It was hearty." In an era where a worker was judged more by what
he or she could do with their hands than with their mind, the aroma of home-scratch cooking after a long day's labor must have been welcome indeed. The house's porch often served as its social center. "This
being the South, it was warm most of the time," says Amy Byra. "Of course there was no air conditioning, the lady running my house wouldn't even let you have a fan in your room, the electricity cost too much, she
said. Anyway, we were used to the heat, we were all from farms. We'd all sit on the front porch and talk. That's how I met my husband, he was one of the soldiers staying there, we got married after the
war." When Edna Earle mentions the Beulah's porches—five of them!—it reveals a pre-television society in which neighbors served as a prime source of support and entertainment, not the font of annoyance they
frequently are today. There were sacrifices, of course. Privacy was usually an early casualty of boarding house living. Amy Byra found this out when she fell in love. "Mrs. Grimes, the widow running
the house, she said she didn't want me dating a soldier," she says scornfully. "I told her I didn't think it was any of her business. She says she doesn't want us 'carrying on,' I said we didn't 'carry on,'
we'd just go to the movies, but there was gossip around the house, so I moved out." Ruby Anders also recalls a life with few secrets. "There was this one married couple, every single day after lunch they
went up to their room and . . . everybody in the house knew what they were doing," she giggles. Impact of World War II The Second World War and the deep changes it wrought in American life were a major factor in the boarding house's demise. Claims Betty Drake, "There are jobs for women
now. When I was in high school, no one gave much thought to educating girls. The war opened that up. People discovered that women could do things besides clean and wash and do dishes." Before the
war, says Amy Byra, "Girls didn't live in apartments. It wasn't considered proper for a girl to live that way. People thought she should be in a house, with somebody to look after her." Steve Hill pegs
another reason: "The boarding house declined when roads and automobiles improved in the years after war, and people got a higher degree of mobility." The "new highway" that Edna Earle laments early in the novel is
a stake aimed at the Beulah's heart. Life is getting faster. People are seeing more of the world and craving rapid change. An unthinkable Mississippi, a notorious place of Freedom Riders and their
foes, of mayhem and flames, is soon to come.Today, the closest thing in Mississippi to the Beulah Hotel might be the Fairview Inn in Eudora Welty's hometown of Jackson, but it's a distant relation. Bill
Simmons' opulent, columned colonial revival home—entered in the National Register of Historic Places—is now a posh bed and breakfast. Simmons is now in the ninth decade of a fascinating life. "My curriculum
vitae is about as crooked as the Mississippi River, all kinds of twists and turns," he laughs as he ticks off his careers: studies in France when World War II broke out; an agent for the Office of Strategic
Services (the forerunner of the CIA) with a role in the D-Day campaigns; postwar State Department work; an import-export enterprise in Indochina before it became known as Vietnam; the oil and gas business; now an
innkeeper. The other day he attended his sixty-fifth-year high school reunion, where he chatted with Ms. Welty's sister-in-law, a classmate from long ago. Staying at Simmons' house will set you back a bit
more than the four dollars a week Ruby Anders paid to board in Baton Rouge, but Ms. Anders doesn't recall her room having its own library and a whirlpool tub, either. Does Bill Simmons agree with Edna Earle when
she says early in The Ponder Heart, "It's true that often the people that come in off the road and demand a room right this minute, or ask you ahead what you have for dinner, are not the people you'd care to
spend the rest of your life with at all"? Mr. Simmons is too much of a gentleman to answer that, but his fondness for the Beulah Hotels he knew as a younger man seem to make him a contented proprietor of the
Fairview Inn. Yes, it's very different from the Beulah. But it's a very, very different country than the one that he and Edna Earle were young in.
Dan Sanders is a writer who lives in Santa Monica, California.
Emily Sanders is a music teacher in Manhattan Beach, California.
Related activities for this essay can be found in the Run Your Own Boarding House lesson plan.
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