3rd Assignment: The Little Store

Welty tells first about where the location of everything was that she remembers. She tells first about how her mother was an independent person never needing to go to the store for herself or buying extra groceries. She tells about her mother being a "thrifty homemaker, wife, mother of three, and a woman that did all of her own cooking." The girl is telling about how her mother sent her down to the Little Store and she would volunteer to go. She explains how one of the farmers around there had a song to bring with him that went...
"Milk, milk,
Buttermilk,
Snap beans-butterbeans-
Tender okra-fresh greens...
And buttermilk."

The girl explains how she enjoys the trip to the store by jumping-rope, hopped its length through mazes of hopscotch, played jacks in its islands of shade, ride in circles down the sidewalk with her Princess bicycle, and skated it back and forwards. She tells how she would play out there with her brothers and friends as long as "first dark" lasted. Then she tells about how she and another boy that lives on that street were fighting the flu epidemic and she made a joke poem about the boy going to heaven with the influenza. She upset her parents with this a great deal.

Then she tells about how the Little Store. She tells about the make-up of the store itself and then the inside of how it is very hard to focus on what you went there for because of all the different things there. She tells how Mr. Sessions knows exactly what you are going to get and how to help you out. She tells how he would weigh you everytime you went in and remember what you weighed before so you could subtract and announce how much you'd gained. That is his way of goodbye. The way she tells about the store comes off in a very positive and cheerful way. Any reader can tell that she feels nicely toward this place. At one point she says "I believed the Little Store to be a center of the outside world, and hence of happiness..."

She reinforces her childlike perspective by telling about everything a child is thinking when they see everything that goes on. Her total obliviousness of the world and the things that go on that she did not understand at the time. Something happens to Mr. Sessions family that she did not really know existed and when she asked what had happened to her parents they only responded "until the time comes for you to know." She also explains how the sewers are a dark scary place she would use to go home on the times she was afraid to just walk home. It was the hard way to go home but she enjoyed it.