Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden by Eudora Welty

First published: 1940

Type of plot: Fable

Time of work: The 1930's

Locale: Cane Springs, Mississippi

Principal Characters:

• Little Lee Roy, a clubfooted black man who was once in a carnival sideshow
• Steve, a young man who was Lee Roy's barker for the sideshow
• Max, the man who takes Steve to see Lee Roy at his home in Cane Springs

The Story

Practically the entire story "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden" is presented as a dialogue between Steve, a young man who once was the barker for the sideshow in which Little Lee Roy, a clubfooted black man, was presented as Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden, and Max, a man who runs a café near Lee Roy's home and who brings Steve to see him. Occasionally, Lee Roy himself enters into the conversation, but primarily the story focuses on Steve trying to explain to Max why he continued in the barker's job. Ostensibly, Steve has come to find Lee Roy and give him some money, or something, and thus expiate his sin against the humanity of the clubfooted black man. Once he finds him, however, he takes little note of him at all, directing his attention primarily to Max, ignoring Max's repeated question about whether this man is the same as Keela. The only thing on Steve's mind is to tell his story.

Steve has come to find Little Lee Roy, the story soon makes clear, not to make any reparation but, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, to implicate someone else, to force Max to understand the meaning of the situation and to make him care. In horrified accents, Steve tells of Keela/Lee Roy biting chickens' heads off, sucking their blood, and then eating them raw. In his anxious state, Steve says, "I was the one was the cause for it goin' on an' on an' not bein' found out—such an awful thing. It was me, what I said out front through the megaphone."

Steve then tells how one man came to the show and exposed the fraud and freed Lee Roy. He insists, however, that he himself did not know the show was a fraud, that he did not know Keela could tell what people were saying to "it." He says he has been feeling bad ever since and cannot hold on to a job or stay in one place. The fact that he still refers to Keela/Lee Roy as "it," however, and that he does not see that his continuing to work for the show was immoral regardless of whether the so-called freak was an outcast Indian maiden or a clubfooted black man, indicates that Steve still has not faced the nature of his guilt. He seems puzzled that the man who freed Lee Roy could have studied it out and known something was wrong. "But I didn't know," Steve says. "I can't look at nothin' an' be sure what it is. Then afterwards I know. Then I see how it was." He insists that Max would not have known either, that he, too, would have let it go on and on just as he did.

When Max says he bets he could tell a man from a woman and an Indian from a black person, Steve hits him in the jaw and knocks him off the steps. Max makes no attempt to fight back, and Steve explains his action by saying, "First you didn't believe me and then it didn't bother you." Then, without ever admitting that he has actually found Lee Roy, Steve says that he has to catch a ride someplace. The anticlimactic conclusion of the story is reached when Lee Roy's children come home and he tells them that two white men came to the house and talked about "de old times when I use to be wid de circus," to which his children reply, "Hush up, Pappy." The final irony—that what for Steve has been a horrifying experience of his own guilt is for Little Lee Roy a memory of the days with the circus when he was the center of everyone's attention—does not erase the responsibility of the white man for setting up the freak show and exploiting the black man. It is, after all, such moral indifference—Steve's, Max's, and even Lee Roy's—that is at issue here.

Bibliography

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