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“Why I Live at the P.O” by Eudora Welty tells a funny story about family life in a small town using each other for amusement. The family is at constant odds with one another, but things really seem to fall apart when Sister’s younger sister, Stella-Rondo returns home, “I was getting along fine with Mama, Papa-Daddy, and Uncle Rondo until my sister Stella-Rondo just separated from her husband and came back home again”(Welty 107) Sister states. But I am not convinced that it was the coming home of Stella-Rondo that prompts the problems in the household. Because of her anger and resentment towards the various members of her family, Sister is not a reliable narrator for the story. Therefore, her account of what happened on the 4th and 5th of July is not to be believed.
As the day progresses, so does the rivalry between Sister and Stella-Rondo. The two sisters go back and forth with each other in a game of who said what about whom. Each is fumed by the desire to be the center of attention in the house. Sister is upset with Stella-Rondo for everything from breaking up her relationship with Mr. Witaker by telling him she was “Bigger on one side than the other…” (Welty 107), to being spoiled due to the fact that she is “exactly twelve months to the day younger” (Welty 107). Of course, we don’t know for sure that Mr. Witaker was ever with Sister, since we only have Sister’s version of the story, “Of course I went with Mr. Whitaker first, when he first appeared her in China Grove, taking ‘Pose Yourself’ photos…” (Welty 107).
Contributing to the jealousy Sister feels for Stella-Rondo is the fact that Stella-Rondo “came home from one of those towns up in Illinois and to our complete surprise brought this child of two” (Welty 107). So, not only has Stella-Rondo traveled beyond China Grove, MS, but also she now has a family of her own. She brings back with her a little girl by the name of Shirley-T who, Stella-Rondo insists is adopted and that she can prove it. In Sister’s eyes, Stella-Rondo has not only stolen the man that should have been Sister’s, but she has also stolen the life and family that should have been hers as well.
Sister is convinced that Shirley-T is not adopted and in order to preserve her place in the family, she needs to convince Mama and the other family members as well. Her first reaction to Stella-Rondo saying the child is adopted is “H’m!”(Welty 107). When Stella-Rondo flat out asks Sister what she means by the statement, Sister responds with “I didn’t mean a thing, only that whoever Shirley-T was, she was the spit-image of Papa-Daddy if he’d cut off his beard, which of course he’d never do in the world”(Welty 107). She goes on to say “Of course I noticed at once she looks like Mr. Witaker’s side too. That frown. She looks like a cross between Mr. Witaker and Papa-Daddy” (Welty 107).
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Even though Stella-Rondo never produces the proof she claims to have regarding the adoption, Mama believes her and thinks that the child is a “marvelous blonde” (Welty 107) and that “She looks exactly like Shirley Temple” (Welty 108). Sister is upset with Mama for believing so whole-heartedly in Stella-Rondo, so Sister says to Mama that if it had been her, and not Stella-Rondo who “trotted in from Illinois and brought a peculiar-looking child or two…”(Welty 110) who has now “controlled the diet of an entire family” (Welty 110 ) she would have received a different reception. When Mama disagrees, Sister resorts to the childish tactic of implying that Shirley-T cannot talk. “Mama”, she says, “can that child talk?”(Welty 111). Mama and Sister share a look that, according to Sister, is “horrible” (Welty 111). When Mama flat out asks Stella-Rondo if the child can talk, Shirley-T cannot only talk, but can tap-dance. This only impresses Mama more and tells Sister that she should apologize. “Apologize for what?” Sister says, “I merely wondered if the child was normal, that’s all. Now that she’s proved she can, why, I have nothing further to say”(Welty 111).
As Sister and Stella-Rondo continue the fight for position in the family, it is Sister’s own words that Stella-Rondo uses against her. “The patriarchs of the household, Papa-Daddy and Uncle-Rondo, are the unspoken authorities to whom Sister and Stella-Rondo appeal” (Bougton 05). By telling Papa-Daddy that Sister said she “fails to understand why you don’t cut off your beard” (Welty 108) and telling Uncle Rondo that Sister said “Uncle Rondo certainly does look like a fool in that pink kimono!”(Welty 11), Stella-Rondo succeeds in turning each of these family members against Sister. Papa-Daddy gets upsets at the comment he believes Sister has made and calls her a “hussy”. After all, Papa-Daddy did use his “influence with the government” to get her the job at the P.O. Uncle Rondo gets his revenge by, again according to Sister, throwing “a whole five-cent package of some unsold one-inch firecrackers from the store as hard as he could into my bedroom and they went off” (Welty 11).
While you want to feel sorry for Sister, you just can’t because everything is just so exaggerated and dramatic. She says, “Stella-Rondo just calmly takes off this hat, I wish you could see it” (Welty 107) or “Papa-Daddy l-a-y-s down his knife and fork!” (Welty 108) and “Naturally it’s so suffocating-hot in the house, with all the windows shut and locked….” (Welty 10). When referring to Uncle Rondo’s revenge, Sister states,
Well, I’m just susceptible to noise of any kind, the doctor has always told me I was the most sensitive person he had ever seen in his whole life, and I was simply prostrated. I couldn’t eat! People tell me they heard it as far as the cemetery….It’s usually so quiet here. (Welty 11)
If every family is anything like Sister’s family, I doubt that China Grove is a “quiet” town.
Sister’s version of the story is often confusing and unrealistic, often discrediting herself. “Through her story, Sister reveals her self as a bitter, sanctimonious woman…Sister defeats herself by her own machinations”. (Bouton 0). Throughout the story, Sister not only makes herself look bad, but tries to portray negative images of the other family members with comments like “Mama weighs two hundred pounds and has real tiny feet” (Welty 111), or that Papa-Daddy “sulks” (Welty 107) and that he “must of gone stone deaf” (Welty 10). Even Uncle Rondo, who Sister admits “has been marvelous to me at various times in the past…” isn’t free from her wave of insults. When he passes her in the hall on his way out to the hammock, Sister says “he insisted on zigzagging right on out to the hammock, looking like a half-wit” (Welty 10). “Even as she tries to elevate herself in contrast to her family, she appears petty rather than powerful” (Bouton 0).
When her tactics to once again become the center of attention fail, Sister decides that she has had enough.
And I’ll tell you it didn’t take me any longer than a minute to make up my mind what to do. There I was with the whole entire house on Stella-Rondo’s side and turned against me. If I have anything at all I have pride.
So I just decided I’d go straight down to the P.O. There’s plenty of room there in the back, I says to myself (Welty 11).
But, she isn’t saying this to herself, she is trying to convince us, the readers, the only audience she has left. Trying to convince us that she has been wronged, and somehow needs to justify to us her decision to move to the P.O. The audience, she believes, is her family now. And in reality, the only thing she has left. “Her choice to move to the ‘next to smallest P.O. in the entire state of Mississipi’ punishes the rest of the family…By taking refuge in the P.O., she believes she has triumphed when she has only isolated herself” (Bouton 05). Sister, again exaggerating and being dramatic, rumps threw the house, gathering up all of the things that she believes belongs to her the oscillating fan, the pillow that she did the needlepoint, her charm bracelet from Stella-Rondo’s bureau, etc. When Uncle Rondo offers to “donate my army cot if you got any place to set it up…”, Sister boldly reminds them all of “her position as postmistress of China Grove, Mississippi” (Welty 11). To Sister, this simple statement promotes her status in the family back to one of importance.
But again, this entire story is told by Sister. Peter Schmidt states “Sister’s insults made after the fact” are “private acts of revenge taken during the retelling of the events to make up for her not being able to have her say earlier…thus calling into question the believability of any version of Sister’s story” (11). I agree. Sister is a liar. Editing and changing bits and pieces of the story trying to make us believe that she is actually the victim. I believe that this is not the first, nor that last time that Sister will find herself living at the P.O. But what difference does it make, for Sister wants “the world to know I’m happy” (Welty 115).
Bouton, Reine Dugas. “The Struggle for Agency in Eudora Weltys Why I Live at the P.O.” Arkansas Review A Journal of Delta Studies. Dec001, Vol. , Issue , p01-06.
Schmidt, Peter. “Heart of the story Eudora Welty’s short fiction. Jackson University Press of Mississippi.
Welty, Elizabeth. “Why I Live at the P.O.” The Norton Introduction to Literature. 8th ed. Ed. Jerome Beaty et. Al. New York Norton, 00. 107-116.
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