Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [113]
“Her mother was probably traditional in her view of blacks, and Flannery more liberal,” says Langkjaer of the attitudes toward race relations behind these scenes. “She made it very clear to me that she was opposed to the way the ‘Negroes,’ as they were called then, were treated, and I had a strong feeling that she looked forward to the day when things would be different.” Virulent racism was certainly rampant in Milledgeville; in the fall of 1952 the Klan burned a cross on an outlying field of the O’Connor farm while initiating three new members. Alice Walker briefly attended a segregated elementary school in Milledgeville, housed in a former state penitentiary, its execution chamber barely disguised. Yet unlike her mother, an Eisenhower supporter, Flannery voted, in 1952, for Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Democrat, identified with integration. “I remember standing in the playground,” says Pete Dexter’s sister, “and a friend saying, ‘Well, if Stevenson gets elected, we’ll have to go to school with nigrahs.’”
As an ambitious tale of manners and race, “The Displaced Person” soon led O’Connor into political material with global implications, which required her to widen her scope beyond the perimeters of the wire fencing and wooden pasture gates of Andalusia. To establish a historical time line, without being ponderous, she relied on outdated March of Time twenty-minute documentary newsreels, popular in movie theaters in the thirties and forties. Obviously having seen one of these news features, such as “What to Do with Germany” (October 1944), “18 Million Orphans” (November 1945), or “Justice Comes to Germany” (November 1945), the fictional Mrs. Shortley “recalled a newsreel she had once seen of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap. . . . Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, ‘Time marches on!’” Stubbornly misusing the concentration-camp footage as evidence to further “suspicion” regarding the family she insisted on calling “the Gobblehooks,” Mrs. Shortley concludes of the displaced family, “If they had come from where this kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others?”
That December, Flannery received in the mail a prayer card that helped her to feel her way to the end of a first draft — a process of divination she once described as “following my nose more or less.” Included, as a Christmas gift, with her Catholic Worker subscription, which had arrived regularly since her first conversations with Erik, was “A Prayer to Saint Raphael,” beginning, “O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us: Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for.” Touched by this nineteenth-century prayer, written by the French Catholic Ernest Hello, for the archangel Raphael — popularly considered a patron saint of friendship and marriage — Flannery would recite its invocation daily for the rest of her life. As she explained to a friend about Raphael, who guides Tobias to his wife Sarah in an apocryphal book of the Old Testament, “He leads you to the people you are supposed to meet.”
“The prayer had some imagery in it that I took over and put in ‘The Displaced Person,’” Flannery wrote of its concluding vision of a heavenly home, “the business about Mrs. Shortley looking on the frontiers of her true country.” For at the climax of the story, the Shortleys — like the Stevens family, consisting of a father, mother, and two daughters — drive off in a jalopy, displaced by the Poles, as Mrs. Shortley, spouting Holy Roller prophecies, suffers a stroke, and finds herself, in death, finally placed. Borrowing from the prayer for its concluding line, O’Connor, pulling out all the stops, writes of the daughters, “frightened by