Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [4]
O’Connor was born into a special corner of the life of Savannah simply by being born at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The homey redbrick building, with big porches on its first and second floors, took up an entire city block at the corner of Habersham and East Taylor, just a few blocks south of the O’Connors’ home. Known in the community as “old St. Joseph’s,” this intimate hospital, much trusted by Irish Catholics, was founded by Irish nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, who became local heroes in the summer of 1876 while caring for yellow fever victims crowded into the corridors of what was then Old Medical College. As their legacy, the founding sisters left behind, in the main entrance, a tall, stately statue of St. Joseph on a low pedestal that O’Connor’s parents walked by often.
St. Joseph’s was not only the hospital for the Irish Catholic community, but it was the O’Connors’ family hospital, the one Cousin Katie Semmes presided over as prime benefactress. Her father, Captain John Flannery, a Confederate officer in the Jasper Greens, Savannah’s Irish military corps, had parlayed his war record into success as a rich banker and a broker in the Savannah Cotton Exchange. When he died in 1910 he left all of his money, nearly a million dollars, to his only daughter, Katie, who used her inheritance to fund construction of a new adjoining east building, Flannery Memorial, in honor of Captain John and his wife, Mary Ellen Flannery. If O’Connor’s parents wished to give thanks in prayer for the birth of their daughter — her name itself a memorial to Cousin Katie’s mother — they stepped into the Flannery Memorial Chapel.
Named after the wife of a Civil War hero, the infant O’Connor was initiated at once into a social set haunted by the war still referred to in Savannah in the twenties and thirties as the “War Between the States” — a living memory for some, a single generation removed for others. The Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Savannah, Benjamin J. Keiley, retiring only two years before O’Connor’s birth, served in the war as a Confederate drummer boy. Katie Semmes’s deceased husband, Raphael Semmes, was the nephew of a famous Confederate admiral of the same name. Though O’Connor later swore, “I never was one to go over the Civil War in a big way,” she grew up among a set of older women who were forever slipping on white gloves, and putting on big hats, to go off to chapter meetings of the Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Irish families using St. Joseph’s Hospital had a double loyalty — to Confederate Memorial Day, and to St. Patrick’s Day, with St. Patrick winning by a nose. The Irish pride parade in March just managed to overshadow the annual Confederate Day parade held each April 26. As O’Connor later wrote to a friend, “I was brought up in Savannah where there was a colony of the Over-Irish. They have the biggest St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere around and generally go nutty on the subject.” She went on to exclaim incredulously that she had even heard her hometown compared to Dublin. Making up most Catholics in Savannah, the Irish were certainly a presence. In the year of her birth, two of the six city aldermen were Irish Catholics and so was the city attorney.
Yet the Irish Catholics of Savannah were given to a bunker mentality, with some justification. Catholics were expressly banned, along with rum, lawyers, and blacks, under the original Georgia Trust in 1733. While that law had long ago been overwritten, and waves of Irish immigrants arrived during the potato famines of the 1840s, an anti-Catholic law was still on the books at the time of O’Connor’s birth: the Convent Inspection Bill became Georgia law in 1916. Under this weird legislation, grand juries were charged with inspecting Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages, to search for evidence of sexual immorality