A
(2019·黄山高一检测)
On one of her trips to New York several years ago, Eudora Welty decided to take a couple of New York friends out to dinner. They settled in at a comfortable East Side cafe and within minutes, another customer was approaching their table.
“Hey, aren’t you from Mississippi? ” the elegant, white-haired writer remembered being asked by the stranger. “I’m from Mississippi too. ”
Without a second thought, the woman joined the Welty party. When her dinner partner showed up, she also pulled up a chair.
“They began telling me all the news of Mississippi, ” Welty said. “I didn’t know what my New York friends were thinking. ”
Taxis on a rainy New York night are rarer than sunshine. By the time the group got up to leave, it was pouring outside. Welty’s new friends immediately sent a waiter to find a cab. Heading back downtown toward her hotel, her big-city friends were amazed at the turn of events that had changed their Big Apple dinner into a Mississippi.
“My friends said, ‘Now we believe your stories, ’” Welty added. “And I said, ‘Now you know. These are the people that make me write them. ’”
Sitting on a sofa in her room, Welty, a slim figure in a simple gray dress, looked pleased with this explanation.
“I don’t make them up, ” she said of the characters in her fiction these last 50 or so years. “I don’t have to. ”
Beauticians, bartenders, piano players and people with purple hats, Welty’s people come from afternoons spent visiting with old friends, from walks through the streets of her native Jackson, Miss. , from conversations overheard on a bus. It annoys Welty that, at 78, her left ear has now given out. Sometimes, sitting on a bus or a train, she hears only a fragment(片段) of a particularly interesting story.
