Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [103]
Appearing most Friday afternoons on his way to the Cline Mansion — following work at King Hardware Company in Atlanta, then driving back to Bell House at the same hour each Sunday evening after supper — was Uncle Louis, basically a third member of the household. “My round uncle,” as Flannery described the co-owner of Andalusia, paid special attention to planting fig trees all over the property, as he had an appetite for the sweet fruit. One of his favorites, planted near the back door, was evoked in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”: “A fat yellow moon appeared in the branches of the fig tree as if it were going to roost there with the chickens.” Like Regina, who disliked Flannery’s peacocks for eating her Lady Bankshire and Herbert Hoover roses, Louis balked when he discovered their taste for figs. “Get that scoundrel out of that fig bush!” he would roar, rising out of his chair at the sound of a breaking limb.
Just as regular participants in the life of Andalusia, in the category of “adopted” kin, were Misses White and Thompson. By 1953, the two women were fixed in their schedule of closing Sanford House on Wednesdays and driving out to Andalusia on Tuesday night, taking one of the upstairs bedrooms and spending the next day. “That was our weekend,” says Mary Jo Thompson. They would join the O’Connors for meals and afternoon car rides. “Flannery was the only person I know who liked sharp cheese on her oatmeal,” recalls Mary Jo. While Mary Jo never had literary talks with Flannery, they would chat while washing the dishes (Flannery found the warm water helpful for her aching joints). One of Flannery’s favorite topics was Mrs. Weber, a boarder at the Cline Mansion, who likewise helped to clean up after dinner. “Flannery said Mrs. Weber carried on a two-way conversation the entire time with her deceased husband,” remembers Thompson.
The models for many of O’Connor’s observations of the lives of the black tenant farmers — as surely as the Stevens family inspired early vignettes of white sharecroppers — were a few longtime African American workers at Andalusia, living in outlying shacks, and eventually in the nearby, darkly weathered clapboard cottage. Jack, “the colored milker,” as Flannery called him, worked with Mr. Stevens in the dairy; Louise, his wife, was a domestic, who cooked and cleaned, “blundering around,” as she said; Willie “Shot” Manson, the youngest, performed hard farm labor, such as plowing fields. Living by himself in a shanty was Henry, “around here . . . a kind of institution,” as Flannery described the yardman, in his eighties, who once fertilized her mother’s flower bulbs with the calves’ worm medicine. “Wormless they did not come up,” she gleefully reported.
Yet Flannery was adept at shutting herself away during her “set time,” between nine and noon, when she applied herself to her writing. Averaging three pages a day, she told a reporter from the Atlanta newspaper, “But I may tear it all to pieces the next day.” While modest, her desk began to take on the character of a folk sculpture constructed of random parts, utilitarian to her eyes alone. “I have a large ugly brown desk, one of those that the typewriter sits in a depression in the middle of and on either side are drawers,” she wrote, producing a mental snapshot of the assemblage for a friend. “In front I have a mahogany orange crate with the bottom knocked out and a cartridge shell box that I have sat up there to lend height and hold papers and whatnot and all my paraphernalia is around this vital center and a little rooting produces it. Besides which, I always seize on busy-work.”
During the fall of 1952, and through