• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

O’Connor sometimes led a friend or two upstairs in the family house to her secret attic, a third floor kept for guests. In a remote bathroom, she liked to sit back in a large bathtub supported on porcelain feet, disconnected from any plumbing, and have her friends read aloud from her latest works. Sister Jude Walsh, a former principal of St. Vincent’s, tells of Marguerite Pinckney, a child with a flair for performance, who went along with Mary Flannery’s wishes as they sat together in the dry tub: “But then Marguerite would get miffed because in the middle of a paragraph Mary Flannery would say, ‘Stop right there. Would you read that over again?’ I guess even then she was attuned to how something was expressed. Marguerite would be annoyed because she saw no reason to stop the flow of the story.”

Within a year of founding the Merriweather Club, Mary Flannery made a minor leap from fantasy into satire. Rather than writing about a family of ducks, she wrote about the members of her own family. Relying on her talent for mocking adults, she created a little collection of vignettes titled “My Relitives,” which her thrilled father helped her have typed and bound. The series of portraits were so finely drawn, and uncomfortably close to life, that the relatives given this treatment by their mischievous daughter, cousin, or niece either hesitated — or simply refused — to recognize themselves. As Regina O’Connor once told an Atlanta journalist, “No one was spared.” Reaction was strong enough that O’Connor brought up the scandal to her friend Maryat Lee twenty-five years later: “I wrote a book at the age of ten, called ‘My Relatives.’ Seven copies were printed and distributed by me. It was in the naturalistic vein and was not well received.”

AT THE START of the sixth grade, Mrs. O’Connor abruptly pulled her daughter from St. Vincent’s and enrolled her in Sacred Heart School. The switch was a minor scandal on Lafayette Square. A former Marist boy has recalled, even though he and his friends knew neither mother nor daughter, “We heard stories about Mary Flannery O’Connor leaving St. Vincent’s and transferring out to Sacred Heart.” Though her new school was located in a modern brick building on the corner of Abercorn and 38th streets, run by the more formally educated Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, who taught Regina in high school in Augusta, the move to a school in a different parish was highly unorthodox.

Mrs. O’Connor may well have been responding to her daughter’s annoyance with the nuns at St. Vincent’s. In her fifth and final year at the school, O’Connor’s absences had mounted to twenty-four. There was talk as well that the mother was more partial to the “lace-curtain” population in the more genteel Thomas Square neighborhood of clapboard houses — some rather grand, built between the late nineteenth century and the beginning of World War I — than to the “shanty” mix in the downtown school. “We were a rough and ready bunch at St. Vincent’s in the old days,” Sister Consolata has readily admitted. The Dowling sisters also transferred that year to Sacred Heart, possibly swaying Mrs. O’Connor’s decision. But one of them, Lillian, has remarked, a bit coyly, that their friend’s move really stemmed from “the strictness of a certain nun.”

Katie Semmes’s shiny, black electric car was pressed into service to make the mile-long trip from Lafayette Square to 38th Street, a direct drive south on Abercorn. One of only two left in Savannah, such electric models had been popular in the teens and early twenties, especially among women, because they ran on rechargeable lead acid batteries, no hand-cranking required. Each weekday morning, Mary Flannery took her place in its open carriage, with a bench in the back, two seats in front, and a vase of artificial flowers fixed to the side. Mrs. O’Connor stood commandingly in the rear, steering with a tiller, in her veil and duster and long gloves. “It reminded me of a Toonerville Trolley that you see in cartoons,” says