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By Root 1497 0

says, “She never said anything racist, but she was patronizing about blacks, treated them as children. When I was introduced to black workers on the farm, they would take off their hats. I was both a white man and a priest. So they were doing double duty.” O’Connor’s position basically fell close to William Faulkner’s. Segregation was an evil, Faulkner stated; but if integration were forced upon the South he would resist (in one feverish moment, he even said he would take up arms). In his personal life, his behavior toward African Americans was always cordial and kindly, but as one writer has characterized it, it was also “patronizing: he belonged, after all, to a patron class.”

Flannery’s foil in this race business, and a prime motivator of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” the uncharacteristically “topical” story she decided to write and her fictional comment on racial politics in the South, was Maryat Lee. Maryat had been unflagging in trying to bring Flannery around to a more forward position, perhaps even to use her public stature to advance social justice. In April 1959, Maryat met James Baldwin on the street in Manhattan, prior to his leaving for a trip, without a car, through Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. She wondered if Flannery would welcome a visit from the author whose first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, a coming-of-age story about growing up in Harlem, had been published within a year of Wise Blood. Flannery responded politely enough, though quite firmly: “No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on — it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. I have read one of his stories and it was a good one.”

In other letters to Maryat, Flannery was far less polite. In accordance with the name game they began after The Violent Bear It Away, Flannery signed off one of hers “Cheers, Tarklux”; she might well have signed a number of others similarly. For as the two began, comically, to goad each other on the race issue, their little drama escalated rapidly, with Maryat cast as the ultimate Northern liberal, and Flannery a bigoted Southern redneck. Unfortunately, in a number of these letters, many still unpublished, Flannery slipped into her role too easily, her mask fitting disconcertingly well. She turned out to be a connoisseur of racial jokes, regaling Maryat with offensive punch lines.

More productively for O’Connor’s more nuanced fiction, Maryat included in their slapdash correspondence anecdotes of her own misadventures in the shifting world of political etiquette that lodged challengingly with her foil, a.k.a. “Tarconstructed.” She wrote of sitting on the subway next to a “colored” man in an expensive suit who was reading Vance Packard’s Status Seekers, a popular book on social stratification in America. And she recounted, at length, a bus trip north from Milledgeville after her recuperation, in April 1960, when a black woman in “her Easter hat which was purplish red” sat beside her as a political act. Rather than be offended, Maryat offered to save her seat after a rest stop, apparently to the woman’s disappointment, as she soon removed herself to a back seat: “I waved to her to join me, but she looked out the window.”

Flannery adored this cautionary tale about the deflation of puffed-up political idealism by petty human conflicts. If not its entire reason for being, the incident became a central ingredient in “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” her story of priggish, liberal, college-educated Julian escorting his mother, in her “hideous hat” with “a purple velvet flap,” to a weight-reducing class at the Y on the newly integrated buses. Like Maryat, Julian makes a point of seating himself next to a well-dressed Negro carrying a briefcase. And he experiences an inner yelp of pleasure when a Negro woman, wearing an identical “hideous hat” with “a purple velvet flap” seats herself,