Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [108]
During the same few weeks that Erik made his surprising first appearance at Andalusia, on the cusp of April and May 1953, Milledgeville also put itself briefly, and sensationally, on the map of current events with an incident O’Connor later described as “the most melodramatic event in the history of the bird sanctuary.” In honor of its sesquicentennial, the town mounted a weeklong celebration, catering exclusively to the white population, full of nostalgia for its antebellum glory days: a pageant climaxing with the Secession Convention; the printing of a half-million dollars’ worth of Confederate twenty-dollar bills; a tour of antebellum homes, including the Cline Mansion; men forced to grow whiskers and sideburn chops, and women to wear hoop skirts. Yet civic pride suffered a blow on Saturday, May 2, when the grocer and moneylender Marion Stembridge, briefly put in stocks for refusing to grow the requisite beard, shot two of the town’s most prominent lawyers — one had prosecuted him for the murder of a black woman, though he avoided serving a prison sentence. Stembridge then turned the gun on himself.
This double homicide and suicide made a lasting impression on Pete Dexter, then a pupil at Peabody Elementary, where he was a student of O’Connor’s high school classmate Deedie Sibley. He had once even been taken on a class trip to Andalusia. “I remember there were cowbells on the front door because I broke those,” says Dexter. “In the barn, I put a girl’s head where you put the cow’s head for milking, so she couldn’t get loose.” As his Boy Scout leader was one of the lawyers killed, and his stepfather, a science teacher at Georgia Military College, had also opted out of growing a beard, the shots reverberated with the young boy. Although his family left Milledgeville later that same year, Dexter was faithful to the facts of the original case when he went on to write his own account in the novel Paris Trout, winner of a 1988 National Book Award.
The crime evidently resonated with Flannery, too. Pete Dexter had not read her story “The Partridge Festival,” turning on the same event, before he wrote Paris Trout, but neither had many of O’Connor’s readers. Her farcical tale of Singleton slaying five members of the Partridge City Council, then being incarcerated in Quincy Asylum, was printed in March 1961 in Critic, a low-circulation Catholic journal specializing in book reviews. Although she portrayed her mother as oblivious to her fiction, Regina’s objections when she read an early draft, begun six years after the event, obviously registered: “my mother still didn’t want me to publish it where it would be read around here,” she wrote Cecil Dawkins. Yet she did proudly inform the novelist John Hawkes, “Quincy State Hospital is actually two miles out of Milledgeville, the same only bigger.” Of its apparent model, Milledgeville State Hospital, an institution for the insane, Langkjaer recalls, “She liked to point it out as being in the neighborhood, with a smile on her face.”
She certainly did not indicate to the Fitzgeralds at the time that “the most melodramatic event” had made much of an impact on her imagination. Her letter of May 7, written five days after the killing, and following the town funerals of the two victims and the cancellation of the Sesquicentennial Grand Ball, was filled mostly with news of Erik. The only other development she shared was an exchange of letters with Brainard and Frances Cheney, Nashville friends of the Fitzgeralds and the Tates: “The Cheneys said that when they went to St. Simons they would stop by to see me so I am hoping they will.” After Andrew Lytle declined, Brainard Cheney had contributed a perceptive review of the “theologically weighted symbolism” of Wise Blood in Washington and Lee University’s literary quarterly, Shenandoah, and Flannery