Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [41]
If Mary Flannery stood on the sidelines of the mating rituals of many of her fellow Jessies, she was just as removed from their liberal campus politics. “We kept trying to get her to come to these things,” says Helen Matthews Lewis, of the YWCA events. “But she was apolitical or nonpolitical.” She saw leading campus characters as figures of fun, rather than as serious role models. The “country bumpkin” side of President Wells impressed her more than his being “ahead of his time” on race issues. Six years after graduation, she wrote to Betty Boyd, in her collegiate tone, “I read in the local paper where Guy H. Wells was going somewhere to give a talk entitled, ‘Humor of Many Lands.’ Now, I said, ain’t that a laugh?” Bringing up the “spinster-suffragette” professors to Betty Hester in 1955, she skipped over their social feminism for a funny remark that turned on a novel by the Atlanta author Frances Newman: “she did write a novel called The Hard Boiled Virgin I find, which now I must read. I am going to see if they have it in the GSCW Library — the title may keep it out of there, a natural inconsistency, since half the teachers at that place are surely such.”
The first official gathering of the entering freshman class, in September 1942, was a formal tea at the Old Executive Mansion, the residence of President Wells. Once home to Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown, as well as to General Sherman during his March to the Sea, the Palladian high Greek Revival governor’s mansion, with its soaring fifty-foot rotunda and gilded dome, was located on the same block as the Cline Mansion. Mary Flannery could spy its massive rose-colored masonry walls from her bedroom window, just beyond the backyard where, according to Betty Boyd Love, she still “kept ducks.” Yet her family had to force her to walk around the block to the social event. “Flannery did not want to go but was pressured into it,” remembers their classmate Harriet Thorp Hendricks. “She donned the required long dress — but wore her tennis shoes.” When asked why she was sitting alone in a corner, she replied, “Well, I’m anti-social.”
A tradition that elicited nothing but scorn from her was Rat Day, which began as Freshman Initiation Day in the thirties. A mass hazing of the freshman class, Rat Day commenced at four thirty in the morning. By evening, freshmen who had not shown enough servility were put on trial before a screaming jury of juniors in a Rat Court in Peabody Auditorium. Among the punishments meted out, in a 1943 Rat Court reported in the Colonnade: “Connie Howell was sentenced to wash her mouth out with soap. Sarah Pittard was seen sitting on a Coke bottle and washing clothes.” Earlier that day, Mary Flannery had been tested by just such a group of hazing sophomore girls, ordering her to wear an onion around her neck. When she flatly refused, they commanded her to kneel and beg their pardon. “I will not,” she responded with disdain, and walked off.
Even more trying for her than Miss Scott’s creative writing class was English 102, the sequential General College Composition, taught that fall by Dr. William T. Wynn. Known to his students as “Willie T,” the Southern-lit buff did not give the young writer even the benefit of the doubt of a high grade; she earned an 83, keeping her off the first-quarter dean’s list. “Dr. Wynn was a gentleman of the old school who was soon to retire,” reported a class member, Kathryn Donan Kuck. “He did not enjoy her style