Where Is the Voice Coming From? (1963). Content and Description

An interior monologue given from the perspective of the imagined assassin of African-American civil rights activist Medgar Evers, this four-page story was written in a single night after Evers’s shooting. “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” recounts a famous tragedy that increased Americans’ awareness of the Civil Rights movement, brought to light the violent response to this movement, and presented the American public and the world with one of the many horrific moments in the long history of African-American suffering. Although Welty does not name the man killed, he is clearly Medgar Evers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader who led a boycott campaign against white merchants and helped desegregate the University of Mississippi.

After investigating the murder of Emmett Till and serving as one of the leaders of the NAACP, Evers was the target of many threats in the weeks prior to his murder, when he was shot in the back of the head in his driveway just after returning from a meeting with NAACP lawyers. While this story is well known and recognized for its artful reimaging of the event, Welty does not provide an intervening narrator—someone who might interpret the murderer’s actions and question his perspective. In choosing to render the story from the perspective of a racist, bigoted killer who often uses the racial epithet nigger, and who chooses to murder and does so without remorse, Welty leaves the reader in a complicated situation, one where we must supply the moral corrective ourselves.

Of course, as with many cases in literature where authors do not supply such a perspective and deliberate moral cues, the story is open to interpretation, filled with ambiguity. While ambiguity and paradox may be at the heart of literature, these very characteristics place a great deal of responsibility on the reader and often engender surface-level criticisms that overlook the way the story transcends historical reporting and reflects the nature of man’s inhumanity to man. Thus, in this case, the story was contested early on for its racist language and bigoted perspective.

In responding to such claims about ethical responsibility not only in her works but also in other southern American writers’ works, Welty outlined in 1965 her conception of fiction and what fiction writers seek to accomplish:

The ordinary novelist does not argue; he hopes to show, to disclose. His persuasions are all toward allowing his reader to see and hear something for himself. He knows another bad thing about arguments: they carry the menace of neatness into fiction. Indeed, what we as the crusader- novelist are scared of most is confusion.

Great fiction, we very much fear, abounds in what makes for confusion; it generates it, being on a scale which copies life, which it confronts.

It is very seldom neat, is given to sprawling and escaping from bounds, is capable of contradicting itself, and is not impervious to humor. There is absolutely everything in great fiction but a clear answer. (New Yorker)

Thus, indirectly, Welty justifies the aesthetic, formalistic, and narrative strategies she employs in “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” The story renders a time of civic unrest in America by presenting it through the imagined interior of a cold-blooded killer. While the story may refrain from making a commentary, it is a testimony both to the power of literature and to the many social concerns with which literature trades. As a work that captures its turbulent time, it brings to life a worrisome chapter in our nation’s narrative. As a work of literature that forces us to enter a racist mind, inhabit its world, and ultimately make sense of it, “Where Is the Voice

Coming From?” places the awesome responsibility of understanding history and drawing ethical conclusions about its meaning on us.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Given the story’s historical significance as a record of a turbulent time in America’s past, consider its title. Write a well-developed essay on the significance of the story’s title.

2. Evaluate Welty’s creation of the persona in this story, itself an interior monologue. Is the language in this monologue believable, realistic? After answering that question, write an essay that analyzes the specific word choices and colloquial expressions that help create this perspective. Evaluate whether Welty’s style here relies on stereo - typing or whether the style achieved has captured the usual sorts of complexities and contradictions we associate with being human.