Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [36]
The culmination of her time at what she dismissed ever after as “the progressive high school” was a graduation ceremony at eight thirty on the evening of May 28, 1942, at Russell Auditorium. Her graduation day cartoon in the Palladium the year before was titled “At Long Last . . .” and pictured a girl in cap and gown rushing with arms outstretched and head bent toward a door marked “EXIT” in big, block letters. Actually, all the girls wore evening dresses rather than caps and gowns. The program opened with the singing of the class song, to the tune of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”: “When our schooldays are gone, / As they’re bound to go, / We’ll be broken hearted but true.” Class President Mary Virginia Harrison addressed “our mothers, our fathers,” and spoke of the occasion as “the most significant one we have ever known.”
Afterward, Mrs. O’Connor and Mrs. Harrison threw a party at the Cline Mansion for their daughters, the graduating class of forty-six seniors, and Peabody faculty. Frances Binion helped ladle punch at a dining room table decorated with garden flowers and lighted tapers. Lila Blitch volunteered as one of the hostesses. “I recollect Mrs. O’Connor serving us little pink cakes, and little sandwiches, and punch at our graduation party,” says Elizabeth Shreve Ryan. “She was a genteel Southern lady, full of graciousness. But her daughter was on the couch looking as if she’d been crammed into her evening dress. She made it plain to everyone that she was not about to be a gracious hostess.” In contrast to her “very pretty” mother, Mary Flannery sat out the entire affair alone, her face fixed in a look of utter boredom.
Chapter Three
“MFOC”
Georgia State College for Women in Milledgeville proved to be a good fit for seventeen-year-old Mary Flannery O’Connor. The “girls’ college” did remain a lifelong target for her satire, sent up as Lucy Gains College, the “local college,” in a draft of “The Partridge Festival,” and as Willowpool Seminary, “the most progressive Female Seminary in the state,” in a draft of a graduate thesis story, “The Crop.” In her Iowa “Biography,” she leveled her alma mater for its emphasis on high school teaching, her early career path, by default, describing the training as qualifying her only for a job in Podunk, Georgia, earning $87.50 a month. Yet to her friend Janet McKane, in 1963, she admitted the bottom line of her feelings about high school and college: “I enjoyed college and despised the progressive high school but only remember people and things from both.”
With classes starting almost immediately in the summer of 1942, the laboratory school and the college were at first nearly indistinguishable. Like all of her Peabody classmates — except one, who went away to college in Alabama — O’Connor simply “moved over” to Georgia State College for Women, or GSCW, but continued to live at home. Registering for a special wartime three-year program that required summer sessions as well as the fall, winter, and spring semesters, she was already enrolled by June 9, a mere ten days after her Peabody graduation. In classrooms exactly like those in high school, she took four courses in Biology, Composition, Math, and Humanities that she later remembered as survey courses she had merely endured.
Of a lifelong friendship that began almost at once during that ten-week summer session, while most of the college buildings were shut against the Georgia heat, and most of the faculty away on vacation, Betty Boyd Love has written, “I first met Flannery O’Connor in the summer of 1942. We were both freshmen entering a new accelerated college