• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Yet her new story, “Greenleaf,” was as much myth as tranche de vie, its scrub bull, let loose from his pen by the unreliable tenant farmers, the Greenleaf boys, sporting a hedge-wreath on his horns, “like some patient god come down to woo her.” Flannery had recently befriended Ben Griffith, liking his review of A Good Man in the Savannah Morning News — “Stories of Gifted Writer Acquire Stature of Myths” — for having “brought out a lot of points I wanted to see brought out.” And “Greenleaf” almost seemed written to prove his theory about the mythic, folkloric elements in her work. For although the bull in the story was a composite of one down the road “that was always getting out and running his head through the fender of the truck” and the O’Connors’ more pleasant Paleface, by the time Mrs. May is gored her bull is at least Zeus, the metamorphosing übergod of Greek myth, if not Christ, the horned unicorn of medieval tapestry: “the bull had buried his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover, before her expression changed. One of his horns sank until it pierced her heart and the other curved around her side and held her in an unbreakable grip.”

As Flannery was completing the story, she received news that she treated as if it were as much an epiphany as the quake of the bull’s body against Mrs. May. Betty Hester informed her in January that she was going to be baptized. “I’m never prepared for anything,” Flannery quickly reacted. “All voluntary baptisms are a miracle to me and stop my mouth as much as if I had just seen Lazarus walk out of the tomb.” Overlooking her six months’ worth of arguments for faith, from Aquinas, Maritain, and Guardini, she adopted the posture of someone who had been holding back, not wanting “to stuff the Church down your throat.” In honor of her March 31 baptism, Flannery sent a finished copy of “Greenleaf,” just accepted by John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon Review, to be published in the Summer 1956 issue, and to earn her a first “1st Prize” O. Henry Award, chosen that year by Paul Engle and Constance Urdang.

Finished by the start of April 1956, as well, was her talk on literary freaks, for the American Association of University Women in Lansing, Michigan. So three weeks later Flannery set off again on the crutches she was calling her “flying buttresses.” The trip involved a plane to Detroit, where she was met by her hosts, Alta Lee and Rumsey Haynes at ten thirty p.m., and taken to their home as a guest for four nights. Finding that she had a talent for such “intellectual vaudeville,” she had already delivered addresses locally: in Macon, for a Women’s Book Review Group; in Atlanta, at a Pen Women tea and for the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. But this trip marked the first of the out-of-state appearances — often physically demanding — that she began making across the nation on a mission to explain her work in speeches painstakingly rewritten for each occasion.

Alta Lee Haynes was surprised by the modesty of her guest. “There she was, so young and smiling, and fresh despite the late hour and the long trip,” she remembered. “Her crutches, we’d all worried about them, seemed to enhance, to set off her attractiveness. . . . Half way up the stairs I learned a lesson in etiquette. Rumsey was leading the way, Flannery was navigating expertly, and I was following — chattering friendly inanities. Each time I said a word Flannery would stop and turn completely around to face me. Finally I saw the light and stopped talking. . . . Her behavior was consistently gracious.” In her talk at Eastern Lansing High School, O’Connor said that modern writers must often tell “perverse” stories to “shock” a morally blind world. “It requires considerable courage,” she concluded, “not to turn away from the story-teller.”

Soon after her return home, Betty Hester officially asked Flannery to serve as “sponsor” for her final step of acceptance into the Roman Catholic Church, her confirmation, scheduled for the following