Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [166]
Early in the fall, the dry spell finally broke. Flannery had been suffering from increased fatigue, diagnosed as severe anemia, for which she was treated with an iron preparation. She was spending more of her afternoon hours in the waiting room of Dr. Fulghum’s office a few blocks from Baldwin County Hospital, on the edge of Milledgeville. Here in his cramped, twelve-by-twelve reception room, with chairs set along the walls, and dominated by a sunburst wall clock, she began gathering impressions of country types and their small talk that felt like a story to her, about Mrs. Ruby Turpin, one of those “country women . . . who just sort of springs to life; you can’t hold them down or shut their mouths.” She later told Cecil Dawkins of her “reward for setting in the doctor’s office. Mrs. Turpin I found in there last fall.”
As the story she titled “Revelation” opens, an imposingly “stout” Ruby Turpin arrives with her “somewhat shorter” and compliant husband, Claud, at a doctor’s office. He needs treatment for a leg ulcer, caused by a cow kick, and she sets him down beneath a sunburst clock. Taking in a roomful of all strata of white folk, Ruby busies herself with some demanding mental arithmetic about the relative social worth of “white-trash” versus “colored people who owned their homes and land,” while studying a lineup of shoes that includes red high heels, bedroom slippers, and Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks. The wearer of the Girl Scout shoes turns out to be Mrs. Turpin’s nemesis. For as she indulges in cliché-ridden chat, this college student, reading Human Behavior, beans her with the thick, blue textbook, lunges at her throat, and, while being wrestled down by a nurse, delivers the “revelation”: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.”
In the character of this deranged girl, Flannery found a way to pencil in a private joke to Maryat that was not truly hurtful, because it was so exaggerated and comic in its bold outlines. Like her friend Mary “Maryat” Attaway, daughter of Grace Lee, the Mary Grace in “Revelation” is a Wellesley student; and as Flannery borrowed a funny anecdote from her as a trigger for “Everything That Rises,” so a childhood memory of Maryat’s provided the vehicle of violent grace in this story. Maryat had once greatly entertained Flannery by recounting “how in the 6th grade I threw a book ostensibly at a boy who ducked and it hit my detested teacher.” Knowing full well Flannery’s refractory method, Maryat was not at all put off by the satire. When her young niece Mary Dean Lee asked why Flannery “made Mary Grace so ugly,” Maryat wisely answered, “Because Flannery loves her.”
The stretching into new territory, or “larger things,” occurs in the second part of “Revelation,” when Claud and Ruby Turpin return home from the doctor’s office. In a rare glimpse of marital intimacy, husband and wife take a nap together, while Ruby anguishes about why she had been “singled out for the message . . . a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman.” Compared to Job, and in a letter to Maryat to “a country female Jacob,” Ruby goes off to shout at God across a hog pen while she “scoots” down the pigs. Having been reading, over the summer, the Arden editions of Shakespeare’s plays, ordered for a dollar apiece, O’Connor lets Ruby soliloquize, “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” And then, peering into the dusky sky, Ruby “gets the vision,” a topsy-turvy correction of all she believed:
a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.
Flannery completed “Revelation