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By Root 1464 0

qualified him for an executive post in many a Southern college: Robert E. Lee, nicknamed “Buzz.” Although he fulfilled some of the expectations raised by his famous name, such as the flourish of ending a public talk with the supposed last words of the Confederate general — “Strike the Tent!” — Lee was actually a tall, handsome young man, in his midthirties, with moderate social views. He was hardly as liberal, though, as Guy Wells, president during O’Connor’s college years, who once inspired a Klan cross-burning on the front lawn of the Governor’s Mansion for holding an integrated meeting of college administrators. As Flannery told of the Wells incident, “The people who burned the cross couldn’t have gone past the fourth grade but, for the time, they were mighty interested in education.”

When Dr. Lee was appointed by the Regents, though, Flannery was far less involved in the day-to-day life of the college she used to refer to, in shorthand, to Betty Boyd, as “the institution of higher larning across the road.” She kept up friendships with her teachers Hallie Smith and Helen Greene, and English Department chairwoman, Rosa Lee Walston, as well as the librarians who hosted her signing party. She had a nodding acquaintance with faculty who lunched at Sanford House. But the Governor’s Mansion only truly returned to her ken when the new college president invited his sister, Mary Attaway Lee, or “Maryat” — quickly to become the least likely and most challenging of Flannery’s new friends — and their mother, Grace Barbee Dyer Lee, of Covington, Kentucky, to visit him, his wife, and their three little children for Christmas 1956.

Thirty-three-year-old Maryat Lee had a compelling résumé. Having grown up in their Kentucky family home, presided over by her lawyer-businessman father, Dewitt Collins Lee, she attended National Cathedral School, in Washington, DC; studied acting at Northwestern University; and graduated, in 1945, from Wellesley College, majoring in Bible History. Moving to New York City, she worked for the anthropologist Margaret Mead and earned an MA at Union Theological Seminary, where Paul Tillich directed her thesis on the origins of drama in religion. Already an activist, Maryat put theory into practice in her 1951 production, Dope!, a street play in Harlem, covered by Life, and published in Best Short Plays of 1952–53. By the end of 1956 she was living a consummately unconventional life in a walk-up tenement, with a bathtub in the kitchen, at 192 Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, between Prince and Spring streets.

Unlike Flannery, who adopted in public the cover of a prim, Southern lady, camouflaging what everyone agreed were “highly unladylike” thoughts, Maryat’s appearance was every bit as extreme as her thinking and writing. Nearly six feet tall, with a long face, strong “Lee chin,” and hazel eyes, she strode the streets of Milledgeville outfitted in pants, boots, a black overcoat, and an imposing Russian lamb’s wool hat. “Maryat was the ultimate bohemian aunt who would show up wearing these outrageous clothes in the middle of the night, carrying brown bags with cans of beer, which were illegal, as it was a dry county, and my father was not allowed to have any liquor in the house, as president,” remembers her niece Mary Dean Lee. “Hers was a larger-than-life, charismatic personality. Whenever she visited, it was very exciting for me.”

Feeling oppressed by the holiday season spent in the antebellum mansion, and beset by family dramas that she helped stir up, Maryat was longing, three days after Christmas, to return north. “I remember that I was feeling churlish,” she recalled, “having been dined and ‘punched’ by my fun-loving sister-in-law for a solid week of parties — dinner parties, luncheon parties, even breakfast parties of forty people — and not having upset the apple cart by word, frown, or deed.” Yet she received a note from Barbara (“Charlye”) Wiggins Prescott, a poet at Macon’s Wesleyan College, where Maryat had briefly taught speech and drama, telling of O’Connor in worshipful tones. On the same day,