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By Root 1418 0

Shreve Ryan recalls, “We were always told, ‘Leave the world a better place than you found it.’” There were no “classes,” only “activities.” In Home Economics, students planned and executed a formal dinner at one of their homes. A semester of Chemistry began with the instructor asking her pupils what they wished to study, and then helping them fulfill a desire to learn about photography or cosmetics. “The teacher did run in a little bit about the elements and the periodic table,” one student remembered. Literature appreciation was favored over diagramming sentences. History began with reading and reporting on the front page of a daily newspaper. The choir, of which Mary Virginia Harrison was a member, was a cappella, involving mostly reciting poetry in unison.

Yet the newspaper’s contrary art editor had nothing but scorn for such experimental teaching. She got her wish to be liberated from the nuns only to be equally disdainful of their polar opposites, the freethinkers. “I went to a progressive highschool where one did not read if one did not wish to,” she complained to Betty Hester in 1955. “I did not wish to (except the Humerous Tales etc.).” In an early draft of Wise Blood, the Peabody principal Mildred English becomes “Mr. English the principal who had graduated from Teacher’s College, Columbia,” and the school becomes Tilford High School.

While putting down the principles of original thought and free expression, and teachers playing to their audience at the next meeting of the PTA, she was actually a beneficiary of the system. Cutting a highly original profile, Mary Flannery was generally accepted as the “creative” girl dressed in a plaid skirt, rolled sleeves, and a pair of brown Girl Scout shoes, her school notebook painted in oils and covered with cellophane. She often waved “hello” with a salute as she strode the halls with her head thrust forward. “I can see her plodding along,” says Charlotte Conn Ferris. “That’s how she walked, with her hands behind her back, just clumping along, thinking about something, who knows what.” For life drawing in Art, she brought her goose of a gander, Herman, as a portrait model. She played clarinet, and bull fiddle, because, she said, “I am the only one who can hold it up.” As an adult, she told an interviewer that all she remembered of high school was “the way the halls smelled and bringing my accordion sometimes to play for the ‘devotional.’”

Her greatest bit of meticulously planned showmanship took place in Margaret Abercrombie’s Home Economics section. The “activity” for the semester was sewing, and all the other girls busily sewed aprons, or underwear, for weeks on end, while O’Connor sat idly off to the side, not participating. “Now next Wednesday is the examination day for this course,” Miss Abercrombie finally announced, a bit exasperated. “All members who expect to receive a grade are to bring and display the various garments made during the quarter. I hardly see how you are going to get a whole outfit finished and ready, Mary Flannery, by that time.” As a fellow student has reported, “On the appointed day Flannery arrived with her pet duckling, and a whole outfit of underwear and clothes, beautifully sewn to fit the duck! The class in great glee all gathered round and helped dress the duck. Flannery successfully passed the course.”

By now she had a full menagerie of birds to choose from for her models. On the eve of America’s entrance into World War II, Mary Flannery was particularly drawn to names for her pets lifted from the daily newspapers she was required to read for History class. With an instinct for shock value, the author who would later warn, “The topical is poison,” went straight for the headlines. She named her black crow, rescued when the bird was shot by a neighbor for stealing pecans, Winston, after Winston Churchill. Her pet rooster, another of her models in Art class, was Haile Selassie, for the emperor of Ethiopia, reinstated in 1941 after being routed by the armies of Benito Mussolini. Most controversial was her second rooster, Adolph, the pen mate