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By Root 1362 0

Vinson’s intention to help. He responded to Sibley, “Can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness.” But the good news was accompanied by a shake-up. By March, with the politicking completed, her father needed to move to Atlanta to take a position as senior zone real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration, or FHA. As he went ahead to arrange a living situation for himself and his family, Mary Flannery was quickly removed from Sacred Heart School, and enrolled, for April and May, the last two months of her seventh grade, in the Peabody Elementary School in Milledgeville. This arrangement began an unsettled two-year period for mother and daughter of shuttling between Atlanta and the Cline familial home in Milledgeville.

At first, her father kept alive the hope of returning to their pleasant town house in Savannah. In the 1939 Savannah City Directory he was listed as “on govt. service in Atlanta.” In 1940, his name was still listed at 207 East Charlton, but the notice changed to a more final “moved to Atlanta.” The family never did return, and Ed O’Connor never paid off his loan to Katie Semmes, who remained its owner. When Mrs. Semmes died in 1959, she left the property to Flannery O’Connor, who reported the news, simply, to the Fitzgeralds: “Cousin Katie left me the house in Savannah I was raised in.” As its new landlady, she rented out the premises, even though she once complained to a friend of two properties her mother owned, “My papa was a real-estate man and my mamma has two apartment houses and we have gone nuts with renters for years.”

Flannery O’Connor rarely returned to Savannah. Her adult letters contain only a few references, when someone from there sends her mother an azalea, or mother and daughter give three-dollar donations to St. Mary’s Home for girls, or she expresses relief at being unable to accept an invitation to speak to a Savannah Catholic women’s group. Yet for the writer who claimed, “I think you probably collect most of your experience as a child — when you really had nothing else to do — and then transfer it to other situations when you write,” her time in Savannah registered as a strong afterimage in her work. Especially in the guise of the unnamed twelve-year-old girl in “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” pacing back and forth in her upstairs bedroom “with her hands locked together behind her back and her head thrust forward and an expression fierce and dreamy both, on her face.”

Chapter Two

Milledgeville: “A Bird Sanctuary”

In 1934, the city council of Milledgeville voted to designate the town a “Bird Sanctuary.” Writing up “the glad news” of the town’s nickname, the local historian and poet Nelle Womack Hines, in her Treasure Album of Milledgeville, gave credit to a “bird conscious” population, especially a circle of avid bird-watching professors at Georgia State College for Women. She whimsically recorded that, after the vote, “The rumor spread that several Robin Red Breasts were building nests in various parts of town — something almost unheard of.” To advertise the special event, the council and the local Audubon Society ordered road signs posted at all the main entrances to the city:

MILLEDGEVILLE, GA.

A BIRD SANCTUARY

These sturdy metal signs mounted on poles captured the attention of Mary Flannery O’Connor, as she moved to Milledgeville to complete the final two months of seventh grade. A wry version of this fascination still shows up in her adult letters. She occasionally liked to put as her return address, “Milledgeville / A Bird Sanctuary.” When one of her stories, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” was televised in 1957, she reported to a former high school teacher, “It was well received here in the Bird Sanctuary and everybody thinks that I have now arrived.” Extending a backhanded invitation, in 1960, to her friend Maryat Lee, who was living in Manhattan, she asked, “Why don’t you take yourself a real vacation in that land of happy retreat, Milledgeville, a bird sanctuary?”

For the thirteen-year-old O’Connor, her family’s spring 1938 move to