• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Expecting the worst — “a local lady writer” — Maryat, having never read or heard of Flannery O’Connor, complied. When she arrived, dressed in pants and pink tennis shoes, Mrs. O’Connor called for her to come through the front way to avoid the peacock droppings. Looking down quickly at a hole in Maryat’s sneaker, Regina hid her disapproval by politely remarking, “My, aren’t you smaht to be prepared.” She then unlocked the front door from a big ring of keys, commenting as she led her into the dining room that you can’t be too careful these days with “the niggahs.” But “Just as I opened my mouth to address myself to the inference that as Southerners we all accepted what the situation really was,” recalled the outspoken and politically liberal Maryat, “Flannery made her entrance,” preceded by “the soft long swinging crutch thud sound.”

At first sight, Flannery did indeed look the part of a local lady writer, in her conservative dress, stockings, and shiny patent-leather shoes. “She was so awkward in her get-up that instead of leaving, I began to be curious.” Maryat was especially conscious of the author’s “astonishingly beautiful eyes” grazing over her, and quickly looking away when the glances were returned. Still irked at Regina’s racist comment, Maryat announced that she was catching a ride in a few hours to the Atlanta airport with the family of Emmett Jones, the black gardener at the college — a blatant violation of the code that allowed blacks as chauffeurs, not friends. Sensing the shocked response of her mother, Flannery abruptly suggested a walk, and led them, swinging her crutches, through the house, as Regina called after, “Well, yawl watch out for that ole sun.”

Pushing out the unlocked back door, and past Chinese geese, each of which Flannery called “Sister,” as she stroked the orange bumps on their foreheads, and down their soft, stiff necks, the two women paused finally at a pasture fence. As Lee recalled the meeting two decades later, Flannery took the unusual step of sharing some details of her illness, and of her decision to move back home with her mother, as she pulled at the barbed wire in little tugs. The silence following her confidence was broken only by “the croupy cry of a goose, the random buzz of a winter fly.” She then showed Maryat the henhouse that she dreamed of one day furnishing with two cane-bottomed chairs and a refrigerator, as a private office, admitting that “the parental presence never contributes to my articulateness.” The two, of course, also discussed religion. As Lee recalled: “Her words had theological overtones. I asked if she were Catholic. ‘Yes,’ she answered quietly. ‘Really into it?’ ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘Oh,’ I said. Uh-oh, I said to myself.”

Before Maryat left, Flannery handed her copies of a few stories, including “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead,” published in New World Writing. Fearing that she might not like the work, Maryat read one story before leaving for the airport. “I was excited, relieved, impressed — and mystified.” She wrote of her discovery that “although metaphysics was central, there were simply no false moves.” Immediately on returning to Manhattan, she wrote her reactions, and Flannery responded, starting a correspondence that would amount to more than 250 letters. (Maryat addressed one of her first, “In Care of the Henhouse.”) Maryat soon took her place, too, in the world of O’Connor’s fiction, both as a caricature and as a source of anecdotes and themes from current events. An odd couple of friends, Flannery joked of their “kinship between us, in spite of all the differences there are.”

In the middle of January, “Buzz” Lee traveled to Philadelphia to interview potential faculty, and took time to pay a rare visit to his sister in New York. She sent him home with a copy of Dope! to deliver to Flannery, which he did, stopping by the farm on a Sunday evening. As Flannery wrote up the visit for Maryat, “I thought now this is a mighty nice man to come all the way out here to bring