Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [111]
Having arrived in Georgia from West Germany, the Matysiak family had just spent six years as refugees, following the father’s incarceration during World War II in a German labor farm as a prisoner of war. “They had what were called ‘camps’ for people living in Germany who were not natives,” recalls Al Matysiak. “We moved from camp to camp.” A “jack-of-all-trades,” the father’s application to immigrate to the United States was finally accepted in 1951, and they wound up in Gray, Georgia. They traveled twenty miles each Sunday morning to the nearest Catholic church, Sacred Heart, where they met Mrs. O’Connor. By the fall of 1953, alert to reasonably priced labor, Regina had them resettled at Andalusia, and Alfred enrolled in Sacred Heart School, his presence at a school service noted in the Union-Recorder: “The boys in white marched in procession. Alfred Matysiak was the leader of the boys.”
The Matysiaks were hardly an unusual case. Life magazine reported in July 1945, “In the American and British zones of liberated Europe there had been discovered about 6,700,000 Displaced Persons. . . . More Poles, Balts and Yugoslavs elect not to go home, fearing the Communist domination of their fatherlands. In one group of 3,500 Poles, it was reported, only 19 chose to go back to Poland now.” The Displaced Persons Act of 1948, signed by President Truman, allowed entry of 400,000 of these DPs over a four-year period, against the opposition of many conservative Southern congressmen, including Texas Representative Ed Gossett, who viewed them as “subversives, revolutionists, and crackpots of all colors and hues.” Because half were Roman Catholics, Bishop William Mulloy testified at a 1948 congressional hearing, “It is our Christian duty and moral obligation to remove the displaced persons from their present plight.”
Milledgeville already had its share of such displaced families, with the active involvement of Father John Toomey, working through the Catholic Resettlement Commission. The first of these immigrants, the Jeryczuks, with two children, had arrived in July 1949, rating a feature story and picture in the Union-Recorder: “Displaced Family Arrives on Farm from Poland.” After briefly stopping at the parish house of Father Toomey, they had been escorted to a three-room shack on the Thornton dairy farm. Preparing in December 1951 for another displaced family that never finally moved to Andalusia, Regina and Mrs. Stevens sewed curtains for their windows from flowered chicken-feed sacks. Flannery reported to the Fitzgeralds that when Regina complained that the green curtains did not match the pink, Mrs. Stevens, “(who has no teeth on one side of her mouth) says in a very superior voice, ‘Do you think they’ll know what colors even is?’”
The Matysiaks were put up in a four-room shack beyond the lower pond, with no running water and a wood-burning stove. As Jan’s English was broken, and Zofia spoke only Polish, Al, having picked up English at school, served as the family translator. His father, a short man who wore plastic-frame glasses, possessed lots of technical skills. After an old John Deere tractor broke down, he astonished Regina by taking the motor apart. “Miss O’Connor could not believe it,” remembers Al Matysiak. “She said to him, ‘That thing will never work again.’ But Daddy got her to order new parts, put it back together, and it worked just like new. Daddy could fix most anything.” As an official 1951 governmental study of such displaced laborers in the South noted, “They need much less supervision than native Negro workers; they take better care of machine and farm implements — in fact, one employer complained jokingly, ‘They are such darn perfectionists.’”
Al Matysiak does not remember much direct contact with Flannery, who struck him as a distant presence. “If I talked with her it was very, very little,” he recalls. “I’d see her occasionally at a distance. She was really, I don’t want to say fanatic, but she loved different types of fowl, and feeding them in the pens.