Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [13]
Q: From whom do we learn to know, love, and serve God?
A: We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches us through the Catholic Church.
O’Connor later revisited this set piece of her childhood in her story “The Enduring Chill,” when a large, red-faced country priest, blind in one eye and introducing himself as “Fahther Finn — from Purrgatory,” examines Asbury, an arty intellectual who has been living too long in Manhattan. To the primary question, “Who made you?” Asbury replies, “Different people believe different things about that,” and to “Who is God?” he says, “God is an idea created by man.” Channeling some of the no-nonsense faith of the priests and teaching nuns of St. Vincent’s, Father Finn grumbles, “You are a very ignorant boy.”
A flash of the contrary girl O’Connor was on her way to becoming was revealed as early as the first grade. Each Sunday, a mandatory children’s mass was held in the basement of the cathedral, and the nuns devoted several minutes on Monday mornings to addressing their attendance records. With the support of her parents, she always attended the later adult mass. Indeed, when the children’s mass was once shifted from eight to ten a.m., the O’Connor family chose to switch to the earlier mass. Each Monday morning, Leonora Jones, another first-grader, whose family lived near a golf course outside town, and Mary Flannery, who lived near the church and had no such excuse, would be lined against the blackboard to explain their absences. As Jones recalled of her bold classmate, “She’d stand there and tell sister, ‘The Catholic Church does not dictate to my family what time I go to Mass.’ I was five and she was six, and I knew she was different.”
In the third and fifth grades, O’Connor was taught by Sister Mary Consolata, “just off the boat” from Ireland, and installed as a teacher while still very young. “When we were in the third grade, Sister Consolata used to give Mary Flannery a real hard time about her compositions,” recalled a classmate who lived a few doors down at 302 East Charlton Street. “She said that she always wrote about ducks and chickens and she said she never wanted to hear about another duck or a chicken.” Though discouraged by the nun in her obsessive fixation on birds, the young girl was getting lots of outside support, not only from Katie Semmes, a bird lover herself, but also from her uncle Dr. Bernard Cline, a bird-watcher, who was later profiled in the Atlanta Constitution for keeping a “backyard quail farm.” Yet Sister Mary Consolata remained unimpressed. “Nothing remarkable at all about her as a student,” she later observed curtly. “She was a little forward with adults.”
O’Connor did more than write stories starring chickens to antagonize Sister Mary Consolata. Though braces were rare, during the Depression, because they were expensive, Mary Flannery, like Mary Flemming in her untitled early story, had a mouth “full of wire where her teeth were being straightened and there were small rubber bands that hooked onto the top and bottom and had to be changed twice a day.” Lillian Dowling, one of twenty-six third-graders crowded in a class picture with O’Connor, everyone outfitted with Mickey and Minnie Mouse ears and shoes — Disney having just formed the original Mickey Mouse Club in 1929 — remembers that she sometimes “pulled the rubber bands and let them sail across the room,” or caked them with peanut butter. One day, she brought snuff to school after observing black servants at home pull out their bottom lips to insert a pinch. To discourage others from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes bring castor oil sandwiches.
If Sister Mary Consolata remembered O’Connor as an “unremarkable” student, she was most likely thinking of her performance in either Arithmetic or Spelling. O’Connor did much better in English, and in her social science classes, Geography and History, which were folded into the school’s classical curriculum after the second grade.