Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [156]
Yet while her Teilhardian phrase rang with the obvious implication of integration, Flannery’s own position had shifted from the shocking contrariness of the girl who wrote from the point of view of black characters in her high school stories and decried the segregated buses she rode to Atlanta as a graduate student, to one of complex ambivalence. She had returned to settle in a society predicated on segregation and had taken on its charged voices and manners as the setting of her fiction. Certainly her mother was given to sharp racial comments, enough for the Gossetts to remember Flannery warning guests not to bring up the race issue. William Sessions has recalled a Thanksgiving dinner where her uncle Louis angrily slammed down a copy of Life magazine, featuring a photograph of Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston washing the feet of a black man during a Maundy Thursday service.
Throughout the late fifties, Flannery had not seemed especially interested in coverage of the civil rights movement in the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal, her main sources of news (she did not own a television set until March 1961, when the sisters gave her one as thanks for her work on Mary Ann). She rarely discussed related political events. Yet eventually she came face-to-face with such topical issues, beginning mostly at the Trappist Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, also a favorite retreat of Dorothy Day. Indeed Bill Sessions had driven Day from Conyers to the Atlanta train station, following her visit to Koinonia, an interracial community in Americus, Georgia, where in 1957 she had survived a drive-by shooting. The incident prompted Flannery to voice her mixed feelings to Betty: “All my thoughts on this subject are ugly and uncharitable — such as: that’s a mighty long way to come to get shot at, etc. I admire her very much. I still think of the story about the Tennessee hillbilly who picked up his gun and said, ‘I’m going to Texas to fight fuhmuh rights.’ I hope that to be of two minds about some things is not to be neutral.”
Another visitor to Conyers, and another befriended by Bill Sessions, was John Howard Griffin, a white journalist who darkened his skin and wrote an account of his experiences traveling for six weeks through the Deep South in Black Like Me (1961), a classic study of racism. A Roman Catholic convert, Griffin wrote in his book of meeting “a young college instructor of English — a born Southerner of great breadth of understanding. . . . We talked until midnight. He invited me to go with him to visit Flannery O’Connor the next day.” Griffin declined, feeling that he should spend his few remaining hours in the monastery. Less charitably, telling Maryat of the near meeting, Flannery wrote, “If I had been one of them white ladies Griffin sat down by on the bus, I would have got up PDQ preferring to sit by a genuine Negro.” She told Father McCown that she would be delighted to see Griffin at Andalusia, but “not in blackface.”
Like the broader Catholic Church, the great old enemy of the Klan, which was dispensing teachings on racial justice, the monks at Conyers were supportive of the civil rights movement. Though generally conservative, Paul Bourne, an Englishman educated at Yale, was certainly liberal on this issue. And so O’Connor’s monk friends were alert to the paradoxes of her attitude. “I would call Flannery a cultural racist,” says one Conyers monk. “It wasn’t that she didn’t know they were children of God redeemed by the blood of Christ. Of course she knew that. But the vocabulary she used was typical Southern white. Paul said so. I never heard her. Her mother was worse. Flannery tempered it some. She did not hate black people. But she did resent the whiteys from the North coming down and telling us how to handle our problems with the blacks.”
Leonard Mayhew, then an Atlanta priest, who occasionally visited her, sometimes bringing along his sister, the New York editor Alice Mayhew,