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production, which remained steady throughout the spring of 1954, Erik’s last as a textbook salesman in the Southeast territory. In that season’s Kenyon Review, John Crowe Ransom published O’Connor’s latest story, “A Circle in the Fire,” the setting again a doctored photograph of Andalusia. Like a pair of opposite body types out of one of her college cartoons, in this savage tale of vandalism the widowed owner, Mrs. Cope, is “very small and trim,” the foreman’s wife, Mrs. Pritchard, “large . . . her arms folded on a shelf of stomach.” Two indistinguishable black workers shuffle in and out of the action, commenting as they go. Once more relying for material on bits found in the newspaper, O’Connor has Mrs. Pritchard patter about a woman giving birth to a baby in an “iron lung,” based on a front-page article in the Atlanta Journal headlined, “Baby Born in Grady Lung!”

The innovation in “A Circle in the Fire” is its portrait of the artist as a twelve-year-old girl, Sally Virginia, with “a large mouth full of silver bands,” peering down onto the action mostly from a second-floor windowsill; and three delinquent teenage boys who wreak havoc, letting loose a black bull and eventually setting an entire farm ablaze. Crackling along with their arson is a subtext of adolescent sexuality, inseparable from violence and danger. Like Walt Whitman’s woman bather peering at nude boys at a swimming hole in Song of Myself, Sally Virginia hides behind a pine trunk, “prickle-skinned,” staring out at the naked boys as they splash in a nearby cow trough. In a moment fraught with threat, the three culprits, back in trousers, on the way to commit their crime, pass by “not ten feet from where she was standing, slightly away from the tree now, with the imprint of the bark embossed red and white on the side of her face.”

When Ben C. Griffith, an English professor from Mercer University, visited Flannery and asked about a possible connection between the story’s sexual hint and the ensuing violence, she was surprisingly receptive. “He remarked that in these stories there is usually a strong kind of sex potential that was always turned aside and that this gave the stories some of their tension,” she wrote Betty Hester, “as for instance in A Circle in the Fire where there is a strong possibility that the child in the woods with the boys may be attacked — but the attack takes another form. I really hadn’t thought of it until he pointed it out but I believe it is a very perceptive comment.” Yet she made clear to Hester that any such attack would not be a crime of “passion,” but of “revenge” on Mrs. Cope.

The incipient violence of the story, though, isn’t entirely an indication of sexual repression. Fires were indeed an ever-present danger much remarked on by Mrs. O’Connor at Andalusia, with all its flammable pine. An article in the Union-Recorder warned, “Baldwin Faces Forest Fire Season with Great Caution,” and advised “the greatest care with matches and cigarets.” Delinquents from the nearby Boys Training School were perceived of as a threat by mother and daughter alike. “The reformatory is about a mile away and the lads escape about this time of year,” she told a friend. “Last week we had six one day, one the next, and two the next. They track them down through the woods with other reformatory boys. We would much prefer they use dogs.” In 1951, Georgia was ranked highest in the nation in the rate of lynching and other murders, often a solution to farm conflicts — 18.23 per 100,000 people, against a national average of 4.88.

Written at almost the same time as “A Circle in the Fire,” and serving as its companion piece, was “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” Its protagonist is again a twelve-year-old girl challenged by adolescent sexuality — this time in the guise of two visiting fourteen-year-old Catholic schoolgirl cousins. As the younger girl sharply observes, “All their sentences began, ‘You know this boy I know, well one time he . . .’” The girl’s fascination mounts as Joanne and Susan date two Church of God boys and whisper of a hermaphrodite exposing