I’d like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to Mary Pallon, Patricia Piazza Murphy, and Liz Friar of the Rodney History and Preservation Society for sharing their knowledge and recollections; Forrest Galey of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for her tireless assistance; Charles L. Hughes for guest editing this special issue; and the editors and anonymous readers at Southern Cultures for their helpful suggestions.
- Eudora Welty, The Robber Bridegroom (Garden City: Doubleday Doran, 1942); Welty, “At the Landing,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980; first published in The Wide Net and Other Stories, 1943); and Welty, “Some Notes on River Country,” Harper’s Bazaar 78 (1944), 86–87 and 150–156; Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019); and Stephen Best, “Neither Lost nor Found: Slavery and the Visual Archive,” Representations 113, no. 1 (2011): 150–6.
- Series 29a, Box 135, Eudora Welty Collection, Mississippi Department of Archives and History; Annette Trefzer, Exposing Mississippi: Eudora Welty’s Photographic Reflections (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), 92; Eudora Welty, One Time, One Place: Mississippi in the Depression, A Snapshot Album (New York: Random House, 1971), 108; and Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty Photographs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), picture #27; Suzanne Marrs, The Welty Collection: A Guide to the Eudora Welty Manuscripts and Documents at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 118.
- Jefferson County is just south of Claiborne County. Welty misidentified the location of the photograph in One Time, One Place but corrected her error in Photographs; Mary Carol Miller, Lost Mansions of Mississippi (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), 30.
- Harriet Riley and Ashleigh Coleman, “Haunted by a Ghost Town: The Lure of Rodney, Mississippi,” Mississippi Folklife, August 11, 2019, http://www.mississippifolklife.org/articles/haunted-by-a-ghost-town-the-lure-of-rodney-mississippi, accessed March 24, 2022; Eudora Welty, “At the Landing,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 241; Mary Hughes Brookhart and Suzanne Marrs, “More Notes on River Country,” Mississippi Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1986): 507, 508.
- Steven Noll, Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 1–3; Eudora Welty, Eudora Welty Photographs (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), xxvii.
- Kelly Gomez, “Ghosts of the Mississippi: The Forgotten Town of Rodney,” The Forgotten South, https://theforgottensouth.com/rodney-mississippi-ghost-town-history-tour/, accessed March 25, 2022; Thirteenth Census of the United States, 1910 (NARA microfilm publication T624, 1,178 rolls); Mississippi, US, Compiled Marriage Index, 1776–1935; and 1900 US Census; Census Place: Beat 5, Jefferson, Mississippi; Roll: 812; Page: 1; Enumeration District: 0089; FHL microfilm: 1240812; “Jefferson County,” The MSGenWeb Project, https://www.msgw.org/jefferson/census/rodney1930.html, accessed March 25, 2022.
- The first institution in the South for people with cognitive disabilities did not open until 1914, nearly one hundred years after similar institutions in the North. Steven Noll, “The Public Face of Southern Institutions for the ‘Feeble-Minded,'” The Public Historian 27, no. 2 (2005): 29; N. B. Bond, “The Physician and Mental Ills in Mississippi,” Social Forces 4 (1925): 329; Whitney E. Barringer, “The Corruption of Promise: The Insane Asylum in Mississippi, 1848–1910,” (PhD diss., University of Mississippi, 2016), 205; Ellisville, Biennial Reports of Eleemosynary Institutions 1931–1933, 57–58.
- Lennard J. Davis, The Disability Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1997), 10; and Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York University Press, 2006), 10; Kim E. Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012), 21–22; Walter E. Fernald, History of the Treatment of the Feeble-Minded (Boston: Press of Geo. H. Ellis Co., 1912), 2–4; Albert Deutsch, The Shame of the States (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948), 132–34, and James W. Trent Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 258; Noll, “The Public Face,” 29.
- Elizabeth Mehren, “Eudora Welty: A Life of Stories: 78-Year-Old Novelist Finds Strength and Continuity in the Written Word,” Los Angeles Times, November 13, 1987, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-11-13-vw-14019-story.html, accessed March 26, 2022; Susan V. Donaldson, “Making a Spectacle: Welty, Faulkner, and Southern Gothic,” Mississippi Quarterly 50 (1997): 567–583; Carol Ann Johnston, Eudora Welty: A Study of the Short Fiction (New York: Twayne, 1997); Matthew R. Martin, “Vision and Revelation in Eudora Welty’s Early Fiction and Photography,” Southern Quarterly 38 (2000): 17–26; William Solomon, “The Rhetoric of the Freak Show in Welty’s A Curtain of Green,” Mississippi Quarterly 68 (2015): 167–187; Annette Trefzer, “Welty’s Place in the Undergraduate Theory Classroom,” in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-first Century Approaches, ed. Julia Eichelberger and Mae Miller Claxtson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 122–131; and Keri Watson, “Picturing Difference and Disability in the Classroom,” in Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-first Century Approaches, ed. Julia Eichelberger and Mae Miller Claxtson (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 101–108. Whereas Harper Lee’s Boo Radley, William Faulkner’s Benjy, and John Steinbeck’s Lennie reinforced stereotypes about the South and disability (including that they were backward, depraved, dependent, and incompetent), Welty offered a different view of life in the South; Eudora Welty, “Lily Daw and the Three Ladies,” in The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 5; Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays (New York: HarperCollins, 2021), 88; Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 1; and Cartwright, Peculiar Places, 51; Mitch Frye, “Astonishing Stories: Eudora Welty and the Weird Tale,” Eudora Welty Review 5 (2013): 75; Tobin Siebers, Disability Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
- Thomas Fahy, “Worn, Damaged Bodies in Literature and Photography of the Great Depression,” Journal of American Culture 26, no. 1 (2003): 15; Ryan Lee Cartwright, Peculiar Places: A Queer Crip History of White Rural Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press, 2021), 59; Works Progress Administration, WPA Workers’ Handbook (1936), np; Cartwright, Peculiar Places, 65.
- Robert Bogdan, Picturing Disability: Beggar, Freak, Citizen and Other Photographic Rhetoric (Syracuse University Press, 2012); Cartwright, Peculiar Places, 51; Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 120; Jina B. Kim, “Toward a Crip-of-Color Critique: Thinking with Minich’s ‘Enabling Whom?,'” Lateral 6, no. 1 (2017): np; Welty, Eudora Welty Photographs, xv.