{"content":[{"text":"From One Writer’s Imagination","bbox":{"left":0.369002,"top":0.091347,"width":0.2619970000000001,"height":0.016779000000000002}},{"text":"By Suzanne Marrs","bbox":{"left":0.421569,"top":0.126195,"width":0.15686099999999997,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"Welty’s story “The Whistle” is based on actual events. A friend of Welty’s lived in","bbox":{"left":0.205882,"top":0.161347,"width":0.651776,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"Utica, Mississippi, a truck farming center near Jackson, and Welty occasionally visited her","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.18771,"width":0.711641,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"there. In the thirties, during an overnight stay, Welty heard a piercing whistle warn local tenant","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.213771,"width":0.7448190000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"farmers of a coming freeze. The uncle of Welty's friend, in fact, was the man who owned the","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.239832,"width":0.7276910000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"tenants' land and who sounded the whistle. Though she had heard the whistle from the comfort","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.266195,"width":0.7430220000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"of a fine house, the next morning Welty encountered visible signs of a poverty and a","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.292256,"width":0.662147,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"desperation she had never imagined: the fields were covered with clothes and bedclothes,","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.318316,"width":0.700715,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"anything the tenants could muster to protect their fragile crops. At her own home Welty had","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.344377,"width":0.7209079999999999,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"often gone out into the night to cover the camellias she so loved to grow, but never had her","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.370741,"width":0.7127810000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"actions been crucial to her family's very existence. The distinction between her sheltered life","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.396801,"width":0.7254690000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"and the lives of Mississippi's tenant farmers left an indelible impression upon her, and it soon \n inspired the plot of a story.1","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.422862,"width":0.732184,"height":0.04283999999999999}},{"text":"Plot, Welty has written, “forms a kind of metaphor. . . . But a living metaphor. From the","bbox":{"left":0.205882,"top":0.492862,"width":0.690524,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"simplest to the most awesomely complicated, a plot is a device organic to human struggle \n designed for the searching out of human truth.”2 Certainly plot in “The Whistle” forms a kind","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.518923,"width":0.7340450000000001,"height":0.04283899999999996}},{"text":"of metaphor. The warning whistle wakes Jason and Sara Morton in the middle of a long, cold","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.571347,"width":0.731859,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"night. It commands them to rise and go into the moonlit fields. It requires that they use the","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.597407,"width":0.7084540000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"pallets on which they sleep and the quilts they need for warmth to cover their tomato plants; it","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.623468,"width":0.7378290000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"requires that even the clothes from their backs be removed and placed on the plants. The","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.649529,"width":0.69363,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"whistle represents an arbitrary and alien force, and Jason and Sara feel helpless and vulnerable","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.675892,"width":0.7410019999999999,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"in response to it.","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.701953,"width":0.129612,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"That arbitrary and alien force, as W.U. McDonald has argued, is in large part a \n sharecropping system. The whistle “is known everywhere as Mr. Perkins’ whistle.”3 And Mr. \n Perkins is the man who owns what was once the tenants’ land and reaps the profits from it. He","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.745589,"width":0.7400359999999999,"height":0.06920300000000001}},{"text":"need not come into the fields himself; he merely blows the summoning whistle. His power as","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.824074,"width":0.7308209999999999,"height":0.01677899999999999}},{"text":"landowner seems absolute, and Jason and Sara’s labors have left them without the energy to","bbox":{"left":0.147059,"top":0.850135,"width":0.7214800000000001,"height":0.01677899999999999}}],"images_bbox":[],"images_bbox_not_text_overlap":[]}