Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [37]
A poet and mathematician from Rome, Georgia, with wavy hair, round eyeglasses, and a bright smile, Boyd was the first friend Mary Flannery truly chose on her own, without her mother’s oversight. The two young women discovered that they shared unfocused literary ambitions and, in the first flush of their friendship, both were writing poems. Two of Boyd’s were published in the fall 1942 issue of the college literary magazine, the Corinthian — “Fairies” and “Reflection,” a sensitive meditation on roses “twining over the wall . . . built around my soul.” O’Connor tended to stilted odes, like “Pffft,” published two years later. Its first line was “Some new, unheard-of thought I would put down!” Both later cringed at these “pretty terrible poems,” said Love. Hearing a rumor, in 1949, of a sighting of a published poem, O’Connor wrote her in a panic: “have not written anything but prose since I got out of stir. But several awful ghosts come to mind. Do you remember the poems we sent to an anthology and had accepted — called America Sings, printed by offset somewhere in California?”
Yet the thrill of being literary coconspirators was an important bond. Appealing, too, for the extremely guarded Mary Flannery, was Betty Boyd’s quiet earnestness. She later portrayed herself as a “horribly serious” college student, her studiousness counterbalanced by O’Connor’s “same dry whimsical humor.” The Corinthian editor Jane Sparks Willingham concurs that “Betty Boyd was a deep-thinking person, not somebody who sat around and cracked jokes about what you did the night before on your date.” Boyd’s sensitivity was evident in an essay published in the fall 1942 Corinthian, tremulously recording her summer arrival at GSCW. She wrote of bidding good-bye to her parents, “the two people I love more than all others”; having “walked up the steps to the library to register”; and looking forward to “companionship with a fine group of smiling, quiet, friendly girls.”
If not handpicked, Betty Boyd was approved by Mrs. O’Connor, and often invited to the Cline Mansion, where she spent “a great many hours” enjoying the “large and high-ceilinged and cool” rooms: “I soon became a regular visitor there and enjoyed many a Sunday dinner at the wonderful long walnut table with its silver napkin rings and the little pot of demitasse coffee served to pour over the ice cream at dessert. They had trouble keeping a cook because of the demands of Miss Katie. . . . In retrospect, this seems to me a somewhat unusual household, but at the time it appeared perfectly unexceptional, and I’m sure they all looked on it as such.” Although Aunt Gertie died just four months after Edward O’Connor, Aunt Mary kept the mansion as a haven for single women by inviting two college teachers as occasional boarders, Miss Bancroft and Miss Kirby.
The most unusual aspect of the house might have escaped the notice of the young Betty Boyd: the group of women was self-sufficient. “Miss Mary was a businessman from the word ‘go,’” reported one Milledgeville resident. The GSCW History professor Dr. Helen Greene has remarked that “Miss Mary . . . inherited many rental properties and often a person in need of a place to live would come to the house to speak with her. The family employed a number of black people for the maintenance of their house and yard, and some of these employees were truly devoted.” The younger sisters contributed as well. Following Edward O’Connor’s death, Dr. Bernard Cline brought Regina to Atlanta to train as a bookkeeper for Sorrel Farm; in the spring of 1941, they received a sweet-milk contract from State Hospital. Aunt Katie worked her entire life at the postal job