Inside/Outside the Tent: Native Americans and African Americans on Display in Eudora Welty's "Keela, the Outcast Indian Maiden"

By adding the persona of the female Native American to the disabled African American man, Welty links both African Americans and Native Americans as "outcasts," suggesting that perhaps our "blood guilt" as Southerners is more complicated than black and white. The setting is obviously staged as the two men stop in the middle of the yard, Little Lee Roy elevated above them: "The little man at the head of the steps where the chickens sat, one on each step, and the two men facing each other below made a pyramid" (Stories 50).\n On the other hand, by documenting what has long been unspoken and unacknowledged, Welty advocates for change in society in her own way, unlike the crusader-novelist with his "zeal to reform" (804).