Their individual features, under the distinctly different hats they wear, remain undistinguishable, hidden by the darkness of their silhouettes against the sky. We are shown the backs of the wagon–and the backs of its three occupants–as the wagon moves toward the vanishing point of the flat Mississippi horizon, and the distance between the wagon itself with its occupants and the photographer/viewer is so pronounced that only the silhouetted outlines of the three figures against the dying light can be detected. It is an image, though, that seems to be on the verge of eluding the gaze of both the photographer and the viewer of the picture. South–a black family of three in a mule-drawn wagon set against a broad and empty horizon at twilight. But it also raises questions about the success with which that yearning can be fulfilled in a world defined by the rigid barriers and racial obsessions of Jim Crow segregation.ĢAs the final photograph in this collection, Home Before Dark captures an image that had by the Depression become almost iconic of the U.S. Home Before Dark as the last photograph in the collection brings attention to that yearning to know, which Welty also linked implicitly with the originating impulse of her fiction-“imagining yourself into other people’s lives,” as she noted in her essay Looking Back at the First Story (15). Dating as far back as the early 1930s, the photographs in this collection are organized into the seemingly simple and straightforward categories of “Workday,” “Saturday,” “Sunday,” and “Portraits,” categories that on the face of things seem to reflect Welty’s description of the camera in One Writer’s Beginnings as “a hand-held auxiliary of wanting-to-know” (84). “Home Before Dark, Yalobusha County, 1936, ” One Time, One Place, p. 117, with the gracious permission of the Eudora Welty Foundationġ Home Before Dark, a haunting “snapshot,” as Eudora Welty consistently termed her photographs, of a black family on their way home in a mule-driven wagon, serves as the concluding picture in the 1971 book of 100 photographs published under the title One Time, One Place (4).
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