Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [155]
Soon afterward, Flannery discovered that she had lost a bet with the nuns. She had wagered a pair of peacocks that they would never find a publisher for their memoir. Robert Giroux was interested, though he admitted that his author’s “Introduction” to A Memoir of Mary Ann, not the nuns’ writing, finally swayed him. In this eloquent essay, as fine as her best stories, dated December 8, she seized an opportunity to weave together her feelings about the girl forever fixed at the age of twelve; the “mystery” of disease, hers and Mary Ann’s; the long shadow of Hawthorne, to whose memory the book was dedicated; and the hope for meaning that she found spelled out so compellingly in Teilhard. Indeed she made Mary Ann a human face for Teilhard’s meditation on illness: “She and the Sisters who had taught her had fashioned from her unfinished face the material of her death. The creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare his death in Christ. It is a continuous action in which this world’s goods are utilized to the fullest, both positive gifts and what Père Teilhard de Chardin calls ‘passive diminishments.’”
BY THE BEGINNING of 1961, Flannery was at work on a new story for which she was using as a title yet another popular phrase of Teilhard’s, “everything that rises must converge,” which summed up the priest’s notion of all life, from the geological to the human, converging toward an integration of the material and the spiritual, not to mention an integration of the scientific theory of evolution and the theological dogma of Incarnation, of God made man. Giroux remembered sending her a French anthology of Teilhard’s writings, with a section titled “Tout Ce Qui Monte Converge.” After Teilhard’s death, the French mint struck a medallion in his honor, stamped with his aristocratic profile and this mystical axiom. Writing to Roslyn Barnes, a young Catholic convert at Iowa, to whom she sent a copy of Teilhard’s Divine Milieu, Flannery mentioned her “story called ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge,’ which is a physical proposition that I found in Père Teilhard and am applying to a certain situation in the Southern States & indeed in all the world.”
This “certain situation” was a coy reference to political events creating big headlines in early 1961, as forces of change loosely filed under the label “the sixties” took hold in the South, across America and the world, and indeed throughout the Roman Catholic Church. Dovetailing with aggiornamento, or the spirit of renewal, introduced by John XXIII, was the election and inauguration on January 20 of a young Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, whose candidacy Flannery supported, judging that “I think King Kong would be better than Nixon” and scorning JFK’s opponents of “the secularist-Baptist combination, unholy alliance.” She told Cecil Dawkins, “All the rich widows in M’ville are voting for Nixon, fearing lest Kennedy give their money to the niggers.”
In the South, much politics was racial politics, and the “certain situation” O’Connor was addressing in lofty Teilhardian terms was the civil rights movement. In December 1955, Rosa Lee Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white man on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama, her dramatic gesture helping to force an issue obviously overdue: within days of her nonviolent resistance, fifty thousand black citizens walked to work in Alabama’s capital city in a bus boycott lasting 381 days, led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr. In the fall of 1957, nine black teenagers integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as thousands of National Guardsmen patrolled in the schoolyard.