White Girls (13 page)

O’Connor was the only child of Regina Cline and Edward O’Connor, a real estate agent who aspired to be a writer. Both parents were descended from Irish Catholic immigrants, and Mary Flannery began her studies at the St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls. Even as a child, she had a merciless view of things, and her plain speech won her unwelcome attention from the Sisters of Mercy who provided her instruction. She grew up loving birds and she favored chickens with
mismatched eyes or crooked combs. When she was five, she raised a “frizzled” chicken (its feathers grew backward), which she taught to walk backward. A New York-based newsreel company that specialized in natural phenomena heard about the bird and sent a crew to O’Connor’s home to film it—“an experience that marked me for life,” she said later. The crew’s visit provided her with the first approval of her obsession with the grotesque as it lives beside the normal: a frizzled chicken striding backward in the yard while Mother airs out a tablecloth and Father closes the shed door, ax in one hand, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck with the other.

American genius often feeds on its own environs, and O’Connor was no exception. “I’m pleased to live in Baldwin County in the sovereign state of Georgia, and to see what I can from here,” she told one interviewer. She knew where her material was, and had known it since she was twelve. By then she had discovered the tone of her voice, too, its lyrical flatness and its wildly leaping humor. (“If I...tried to write a story about the Japanese, the characters would all talk like Herman Talmadge,” she once said.) O’Connor was already slipping verse under her father’s napkin at the table and rejecting books that didn’t satisfy her interest in the heretical. “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book,” she wrote in her copy of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. In a copy of
Georgina Finds Herself
, by Shirley Watkins: “This is the worst book I ever read next to Pinocchio.” About her early reading, O’Connor wrote to a friend in 1955:

The only good things I read when I was a child were the Greek and Roman myths which I got out of a set of a child’s encyclopedia...
The rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S. The Slop period was followed by the Edgar Allan Poe period which lasted for years and consisted chiefly in a volume called
The Humerous Tales of E.A. Poe
. These were mighty humerous—one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses and consequently married his grandmother by accident; another about a fine figure of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece, artificial teeth, voice box, etc. etc.

From the beginning of her reading life, O’Connor preferred stories that were direct in their telling and mysterious only in their subtexts. She clearly despised the lack of clarity which she believed came with Northern liberalism, and which she lampoons with her intellectual characters, who always function in a kind of godless oligarchy. In many of her stories, intellectuals are depicted as grumpy poseurs, mean and homely failures who can’t get on with life and are often driven into the ground by its brutality. O’Connor was like her chicken, walking backward, staring at others as she removed herself from them.

In 1938, after Edward O’Connor was appointed a zone real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration in Atlanta, Regina and Flannery moved into the Cline family house in the nearby town of Milledgeville, where Edward could visit on the weekends. There was no parochial education for Flannery in Milledgeville, the home of the state insane asylum. (She eventually graduated from the experimental Peabody High School.) And, soon after the move, Edward’s health began to deteriorate. He was suffering from lupus, a disease in which the body attacks its own tissues, destroying itself. Fifteen
years after her father’s death, in 1941, O’Connor wrote to her friend Elizabeth Hester, a clerk at a credit bureau in Atlanta and a frequent correspondent during the last nine years of O’Connor’s life, whose identity was only recently revealed:

My father wanted to write but had not the time or money or training or any of the opportunities I have had...Anyway, whatever I do in the way of writing makes me extra happy in the thought that it is a fulfillment of what he wanted to do himself.

That fulfillment came relatively quickly. In 1945, shortly before completing her A.B. at the Georgia State College for Women, O’Connor was admitted to the State University of Iowa with a scholarship in journalism. O’Connor had clear, pale skin, a heart-shaped face, lively eyes, and a thick Georgia accent. In a letter to the editor Robert Giroux, Paul Engle, then the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, recalls meeting her that fall and being unable to understand her speech: “Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote: ‘My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?’” Engle continued:

Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive...Sitting at the back of the room silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing class with their loudness.

O’Connor rarely if ever discussed her “bisnis”—her religion, her writing, her Southernness—with her peers in Iowa. One classmate claims not to have realized that O’Connor “really did believe in evil and damnation and redemption” until she produced a story that showed insight into a character’s fall. O’Connor’s parochialism might have been a defense, the armor she used to shield herself from other people, but she also seemed to view it as someone else’s problem; she knew who she was and where she was going. Iowa, at least, provided her with a new perspective on the cryptic idea of home.

At the end of her first year at Iowa, O’Connor published her first story, “The Geranium,” in
Accent
. The story focuses on an enfeebled man named Old Dudley who is living up North with his daughter and her family but wants to go back home to the South to die, near the “niggers” who are kinder to the old man than his own children. O’Connor reworked the story several times after its first publication, but already, at twenty-one, she had found many of her mature themes: the skewering of tradition, the erosion of one world that, disastrously, comically, is the weak foundation of the next, and the spectacle of blacks and whites regarding each other across a divide of mutual outsiderness. O’Connor was not a polemicist, but her work is implicitly political given the environment she drew from—the South during its second failed attempt at Reconstruction, otherwise known as Integration. As she wrote in an essay titled “The Regional Writer,” “Southern identity is not really connected with mocking birds and beaten biscuits and white columns any more than it is with hookworm and bare feet and muddy clay roads.” Indeed, she was at times violently critical of Tennessee Williams’s and Carson McCullers’s work, because
she felt that they played on clichéd images of the region. “An identity is not to be found on the surface,” she wrote.

O’Connor’s vision of the postindustrial South—with its Winn-Dixie stores, its automobiles piled up in the junkyard of the Lord—as a modern version of the fall was all her own. But what fall? What loss of innocence? That of the slaves who became indentured servants and then “niggers,” and who dot her pages like flies? No: in O’Connor’s fictional universe, the whites in power are the only ones who can afford to be innocent of their surroundings. O’Connor’s most profound gift was her ability to describe impartially the bourgeoisie she was born into, to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order. In “Revelation,” a 1964 story, she described Mrs. Turpin, a woman who occupies herself “with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself”:

If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said?...She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.”

When Mrs. Turpin gets into a fight with a young white woman from Wellesley while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, her sense of propriety is upset; meaninglessness yawns before her like a great black hole. O’Connor allows us to see what Mrs. Turpin’s pride hides from
her: how the blacks who work for her condescend to her, how they hide their intelligence so that she won’t be tempted to interfere in their lives. One of them asks Mrs. Turpin about the bruise she incurred during the fight and, before she can explain, continues,

“Ain’t nothing bad happen to you!” the old woman said. She said it as if they all knew that Mrs. Turpin was protected in some special way by Divine Providence. “You just had you a little fall.”

Mrs. Turpin describes the scene in the doctor’s office:

“She said...something real ugly,” she muttered.

“She sho shouldn’t said nothin ugly to you,” the old woman said. “You so sweet. You the sweetest lady I know.”

“She pretty too,” the one with the hat on said.

“And stout,” the other one said. “I never knowed no sweeter white lady.”

“That’s the truth befo’ Jesus,” the old woman said. “Amen! You des as sweet and pretty as you can be.”

Mrs. Turpin knew exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it added to her rage. “She said,” she began again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath, “that I was an old wart hog from hell.”

There was an astounded silence.

“Where she at?” the youngest woman cried in a piercing voice. “Lemme see her. I’ll kill her!”

“I’ll kill her with you!” the other one cried.

“She b’long in the sylum,” the old woman said emphatically. “You the sweetest white lady I know.”

“She pretty too,” the other two said. “Stout as she can be and sweet. Jesus satisfied with her!”

Jesus is, perhaps, not as satisfied as Mrs. Turpin. No reader can help but be amused and disturbed by this passage, which is representative of O’Connor’s subtle observation of a world that was not her own but that informed every inch of the one she inhabited. Blacks may have spent much of their lives on the margins, but she understood the ways in which they entered the circle. The theatrical modesty and duplicity exhibited by these blacks who are an audience for Mrs. Turpin’s troubles—despite the fact that she will never be one for theirs—are all just a part of the Southern code of manners.

O’Connor delighted in portraying the forms of domestic terrorism. It is a Catholic tenet that God judges by actions, but virtually all her white woman characters judge by appearances. O’Connor greatly admired Faulkner. “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down,” she remarked of Southern writers’ relationship to the Master. But there is no Faulknerian Snopes in O’Connor’s fiction. What she describes is far more evil: the nice lady on the bus who calls you “nigger” by offering your child a penny; or the old woman who loves to regale her grandchildren with stories about the “pickaninnies” of her antebellum youth. These are women who wouldn’t know grace if it slapped them in the face—which it often does. And why would any black person want to belong to the world that these women and their men have created?

For O’Connor, writing about integration was a way of exposing the dangers of clinging to the fiction of power. But like Faulkner, O’Connor herself had difficulty assimilating the push toward integration that took the region so suddenly and violently in the fifties and sixties. She clung to the provincialism she satirized, and she was sometimes clumsy at conveying real life among blacks beyond her own circles—their class distinctions, their communication with one another apart from whites. The one false note in “The Displaced Person” (1955), for instance, comes when two black workers discussing the woman they work for fall into a kind of rural Amos ’n’ Andy routine: ‘“Big Belly act like she know everything.’ ‘Never mind...your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.’” A curtain falls over O’Connor’s insight—and her ear for speech. Luckily, she rarely tried to cover this ground, probably a prudent decision, given the murky and not altogether constructive works of some of the white liberals who did.

O’Connor received her MFA in June of 1947, and Engle arranged for a fellowship that allowed her to stay at Iowa for another year and begin work on her unsettling first novel,
Wise Blood
. Hazel Motes, O’Connor’s Evangelical hero, wears a blue shirt and a black hat and has white skin that crackles like pork rind in the hot Southern sun. He may look like a standard preacher, but he’s not like any the good citizens of his adopted town, Taulkinham, have ever heard of. An itinerant prophet, he believes only in his own church, “The Church Without Christ...where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Motes is a backward innocent, raised a Baptist, who, instead of accepting Christ into his life, decides to be him. By denying Jesus, he turns his back on those who came before
him and who no doubt learned much of their discourse from the black preachers whose rhetoric soaks the Southern soil. But Motes has a grudge against Jesus: He equates Him with sin, or more specifically with the sins that he himself has committed and cannot escape—not in the eyes of his relatives, rotten with fake piety, who believe that only the Lord can wash him clean and are no better than niggers who think that the Lord will make them white.

Of
Wise Blood
, the writer and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman said, “Whatever caused Miss O’Connor to choose Protestant Fundamentalism as her metaphor for Catholic vision, it was a brilliant choice... It freed her from the constraints of good taste.” O’Connor’s humor lay in such paradoxes—in being an alienated Catholic in a world of Bible thumpers, a single girl in a society of matrons. “It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, but in this the Southern writer has the greatest possible advantage. He lives in the Bible Belt,” she wrote, and went on: