Eudora Welty and the issue of race

Livvie is one of the stronger stories in Eudora Welty's 2nd collection, A Wide net, in her "Collected Stories," a fairly simple narrative about a young woman (16) who marries a much older man, Solomon?, who takes her to his house in a remote section of the Natchez Trace, Mississippi, where he more or less keeps her imprisoned. Oddly, she seems to like the life and to love him, though without any great passion or reflection. Welty describes the "nice" house over several pages - some of her very best descriptive writing - an extraordinarily precise and surprising collection of details, the palmetto wallpaper, the hen feathers in the jelly jar, the black cap hanging from a peg - she does, after all make this remote house sound cozy and well cared for, but who would want to be there? to live there? There's an edge, a creepiness to this story - and then Solomon gets ill and Livvie tends to him, and she thinks a bit about the wider world, wandering off through the brush and fallen leaves, another beautiful passage - then meets one of the field hands (apparently works for Solomon, but she is never allowed to speak to them), who follows her home, Solomon wakes from near death, sees them, utters a malediction, and dies - and life goes on. Not much to the story, on some level, but on a deeper level it's about a whole life, and about a way of life, not mostly gone, seen and felt from the inside, from Livvie's naivete. It's also one of Welty's few early stories about black people, yet notably there is no interaction among the races - Welty's early stories reflect separation of races in the South in her time, yet they don't really reflect in any way on the issue of race - though later in her career she does.