Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [158]
At the College of St. Teresa in Minnesota, O’Connor told a student interviewer, of writing black characters, “I don’t understand them the way I do white people. I don’t feel capable of entering the mind of a Negro. In my stories they’re seen from the outside.” This tack, while it was a type of artistic racism, worked well for her; Alice Walker, for instance, felt that O’Connor’s keeping her distance “from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit,” sparing the world more stereotypes. Certainly in “Everything That Rises,” her “one-and-a-half point of view” is reserved for Julian and his mother. Yet in its treatment of a burning social issue, as well as Julian’s acute heartbreak over his mother’s stroke, after she is slugged by the irate black woman with her red pocketbook, the story was a departure. “The topical is poison,” Flannery explained her choice. “I got away with it in ‘Everything That Rises’ but only because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”
By the time that “Everything That Rises Must Converge” appeared in New World Writing in October 1961, and won the O. Henry Award the following year, Flannery was much further along in her views on the pace of integration. While never giving up playing “Tarfeather” to her “Raybutton,” Flannery would write Maryat in November 1962, “I’m cheered you like the converging one. I guess my mama liked it all right. My stories usually put her to sleep. She’s accepting all the changes in her stride.” And, in 1963, well in advance of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, O’Connor wrote a friend, “I feel very good about those changes in the South that have been long overdue — the whole racial picture. I think it is improving by the minute, particularly in Georgia, and I don’t see how anybody could feel otherwise than good about that.”
In addition to taking her title phrase from Teilhard, Flannery identified with his habit of writing for the ages. “As long as he lived,” she told Betty, “he was faithful to his Jesuit superiors but I think he must have figured that in death he would be a citizen of some other sphere and that the fate of his books with the Church would rest with the Lord.” Likewise in her talks on the “Catholic Novelist,” Flannery claimed that she would swap “a hundred readers now” for “one in a hundred years.” As Teilhard wrote for a time when evolution would be universally accepted, so O’Connor wrote for a moment when she was sure the races would converge. No matter what routines she did privately, in her stories she always presented blacks with dignity; indeed, in The Violent Bear It Away, only “a Negro named Buford Munson” finally gives the uncle his Christian burial. In literature, as in life, she clearly believed “love to be efficacious in the loooong run.”
Chapter Ten
“Revelation”
During her next visit to Andalusia, in the summer of 1961, Caroline Gordon gave Flannery a jolt when they discussed, as they always did, her latest writings. As in most of their other visits, Caroline stayed in the left room on the second floor, and Ashley Brown, her “chauffeur,” was assigned the “upstairs junk room.” Because they were arriving on a Friday afternoon, when the O’Connors dined at Sanford House, Flannery left Louise instructions to let them in. Ashley, as usual, brought along a few bottles of sherry, much appreciated by Regina. “We got along right from the beginning,” says Brown. “Regina was not given to having intellectual conversation at the dinner table. But she was a Southern lady of a certain generation I was extremely familiar with. Not too many people were permitted to wash dishes, as I was, after dinner. It was all very easygoing.”
Ashley’s task was to keep Mrs. O’Connor occupied while Caroline and Flannery went off to discuss theology and literature. Even Caroline was impressed by the depth