Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [112]
His favorite of the O’Connors was Regina, who filled the role of a surrogate American parent: “She was like my second Mama basically. I would walk from our house to hers and tell her, ‘I don’t feel good,’ and she would take my temperature and give me an aspirin. She loved to ride her car around the farm, two or three times a week, and she’d come get me.” If crossed, though, Regina could “make you feel knee-high to a duck; she could use words to make you feel way, way down.” Erik Langkjaer was present enough for Al to have a few flickering memories of the visitor: “One Sunday afternoon, a car pulled up to the house, and a tall, lanky, nice-looking young fella, dressed nicely, came out. Flannery got in the car, and they came back later that evening. I asked Mrs. Stevens, ‘Who was that man?’ and she said, ‘That’s her boyfriend. They just went on a date.’”
When she began catching glimmers of her new story, though, Flannery wasn’t thinking entirely of the Matysiaks. The situation they dramatized for her was also Erik’s, as his sales trips were a kind of displacement, too. And his homelessness, she felt — like her own homesickness in Iowa City — had a single antidote, a spiritual one. Sitting on the screened porch, drinking her favorite concoction of Coca-Colas laced with black coffee, they often discussed religion. “We did speak about faith, Flannery and I, an awful lot,” says Langkjaer. “I think she found it extremely difficult to understand how anyone could live without faith. When I told her, soon after we met, that I was somewhere between being a watered down Lutheran and an agnostic, she saw this maybe as a challenge to her faith.” Displacement became their inside joke. “Flannery told me she was working on the story,” says Langkjaer, “and couldn’t help thinking of me also as a ‘displaced person.’”
Yet while Erik remained “displaced” in Flannery’s private associations, she started her story, with bold simplicity, almost as an eyewitness account of daily life on Andalusia, even more baldly rendered than “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” Mrs. Shortley, the fictional dairyman’s wife, swipes some of her dialogue directly from Mrs. Stevens. Over the complaints of the farm owner and widow Mrs. McIntyre, about a mix of red and green curtains, she replies, “You reckon they’ll know what colors even is?” The priest sponsoring the Polish family is as “long-legged” a “black figure” as Father John Toomey. The Guizacs, like their counterparts, the Matysiaks, are a family of four: a father wearing glasses “perfectly round and too small”; a “short and broad” mother who can say only “Ja, Ja”; a twelve-year-old translating son, Rudolph, “pausing at odd places in the sentence”; and a younger sister, not Hedwig, but Sledgewig.
O’Connor also introduced two black characters, the old man, Astor, and “the young Negro,” Sulk, who were basically life drawings of Henry and Shot. “The two colored people in ‘The Displaced Person’ are on this place now,” she admitted to a friend. “The old man is 84 but vertical or more or less so.” Having learned from the failures of her high school and college stories with black central characters, she added, “I can only see them from the outside.” Such sketching could result in routines uncomfortably close to those of Stepin Fetchit, the servile, wily character created by the comic movie actor Lincoln Perry in the thirties: “Never mind,” Astor tells Sulk, “your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.” Yet the African American novelist Alice Walker — in 1953, a nine-year-old girl living in a sharecropper shack eighteen miles away in Eatonton