• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1388 0

her twelfth year she began a journal that amounted to a collection of random rants. Venting injustices, her funny, outraged voice sounds off in its pages, which she bound together, writing a warning hex on the front: “I know some folks that don’t mind their own bisnis.” She complained that her teacher corrected her spelling, but Mary Flannery thought that skill was unimportant. She likewise brushed off the usefulness of most mathematics, such as geometry, which used letters instead of numbers, as well as multiplication tables, and even having to learn to add and subtract. She railed against her dance classes, and mandatory cleaning of her room, which she preferred to keep filled with all of her own “litter.” She confides of her mother, “R. said I was clumsie.”

Reading books was as dear to the little girl as writing and binding them; her approach was just as personal. During the summer of 1937, she traveled with her mother to enroll in a Vacation Reading Club offered by the Carnegie Library of Atlanta, which awarded a certificate to any child reading and reporting on ten books over the summer. According to a library bulletin from the summer before, the most popular books with the twenty-four hundred children who completed the program were Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. O’Connor agreed about Alcott, as she wrote on the flyleaf of her copy of Little Men, “First rate. Splendid.” Mother and daughter stayed with relatives in Atlanta, and spent time with family friend Helen Soul. Back in Savannah, with her inscribed Vacation Reading Certificate, O’Connor wrote a thank-you note to Soul for encouraging her to “read those books,” and ended with a strangely abrupt promise that “Regina says she’ll write you when she has time.”

She kept up this habit of reading and “reporting” as sister activities, becoming her own book reviewer almost as soon as she was a reader. On the flyleaf of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, she wrote, “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book”; on Shirley Watkins’s Georgina Finds Herself, one of a series of “Books for Girls”: “This is the worst book I ever read next to ‘Pinnochio.’” She held on to these opinions into her thirties, when she wrote to Betty Hester, “Peculiar but I never could stand Alice in Wonderland either. It was a terrifying book; so was Pinocchio. I was strictly a Peter Rabbit man myself.” A cousin once bought her a subscription to National Geographic because, whenever she visited her home, she headed straight to the latest issue of the shiny, colorful magazine of global exploration and science. Much of its appeal, O’Connor later admitted, “wasn’t a literary or even a geographical interest. It has a distinct unforgettable transcendent apotheotic (?) and very grave odor. Like no other mere magazine.”

Nothing Mary Flannery was writing, or reading, directly addressed the “ancient” or “weighted” sense she remembered from that year. Yet later on she did evoke these feelings. In a fragment of another early story, an “MF”-style girl named Caulda mourns when her dog trots up carrying in his mouth her pet chicken, Sillow. She thinks of Sillow as her “brother” and fights with her mother to allow her to keep the dead chicken in her bed. Her mother, annoyed at the carcass that “was stiff already and he smelled some,” tries to scare her by telling her that the man in white she spotted walking up the road is Death coming to get her. In an eerie passage, the frightened little girl confronts the fears raised by this shadow of death. “‘Will he cut my tongue?’” she asks. “‘That and more,’ her mother said. ‘That for yer lyin.’” Trapped in bed, Caulda feels as if she’s running: “She had the feeling like a stone was creeping all over her and she was facing a wall of it and another was behind her and one was pushing in on one side and he was coming up the other.”

She may well have sensed the same convergence of threatening forces in her home life at the time. In January 1938, Ed O’Connor received positive news from Erwin Sibley of Congressman