Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [5]
With their ambiguous status, subdivided further into middle-class “lace curtain” and lower-class “shanty,” the Irish could at least take comfort that legal segregation didn’t apply to them as it did to the city’s blacks. Jim Crow laws kept Savannah strictly divided by race. St. Joseph’s Hospital was listed in the “White Department” rather than the “Colored” section of the Savannah City Directory. The Catholic diocese ran seven churches — four for whites, three for blacks. Growing up, O’Connor saw blacks mainly in menial roles, usually maids slipping through the back doors of distressed antebellum homes. Her cousin Patricia Persse, who remembers her own family’s electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills during the Depression, recalls, as well, “We had a black cook and nursemaid who came every day for fifty years, though she didn’t live with us.”
Edward and Regina O’Connor brought their newborn daughter home from the hospital to Lafayette Square, the epicenter of Roman Catholic life in Savannah, socially situated in the better half of the Irish ghetto, and one of twenty-one original squares put in place on a two-and-a-half-square-mile grid in an enlightened display of city planning. Settling the town in 1733, the English governor James Edward Oglethorpe had used as his model the design of a Roman military camp. A checkerboard of squares with allusive names such as Monterey, Chippewa, and Troup, Savannah was built from an inventory of architectural styles — Federal, Edwardian, Regency, Colonial, and Victorian — its tabby and cobblestone streets lined by live oaks hung with Spanish moss; chinaberry, Japanese maple, and Southern magnolia trees; and azalea and camellia bushes.
Each of the town’s squares, many a bit worn by 1925, filled with dirt, or cut by streetcar tracks, had a distinctive neighborhood feel. Lafayette Square reflected the self-sufficiency of the Irish Catholics. Opposite the O’Connors’ home, on the other side of the square, was the massive white-stucco French Gothic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, occupying a full city block. Between the cathedral and their house was St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls and, diagonally opposite St. Vincent’s, its companion, Marist Brothers School for Boys. “I remember the square as a barren, sandy pile crawling with boys playing sports,” says an ex-Marist pupil, Dan O’Leary. A Presbyterian girl who lived across the street from the O’Connors has remarked, “It was so Catholic that I felt a bit like a fish out of water.” During the school year, hundreds of Catholic children (together the schools enrolled about seven hundred students) marched back and forth across the square.
Built in 1856 of Savannah gray bricks, covered in light tan stucco, the O’Connors’ three-story Georgian row house, its front door topped with a ruby etched-glass transom, was still joined, in 1925, with 209 East Charlton Street. Its twin, also a twenty-footer, was not torn down until three years later when Katie Semmes moved into 211 East Charlton and wanted an elevator attached to her sidewall. Mrs. O’Connor took pride in the modest elegance of her well-kept parlor floor with its small entrance foyer; attractive, dark green double living room with two black marble fireplaces, two chandeliers, and four eight-foot bay windows; large dining room with a heavy dark oak table, where the family would gather for formal meals; small kitchen; and back sunporch, where she kept her green plants. Upstairs, the parents’ front bedroom was connected by a doorway to their daughter’s back bedroom, both heated in winter by coal fireplaces.
The often-repeated Savannah comment that Flannery O’Connor “was conceived in the shadow of the cathedral” is not entirely rhetorical. Looming through her parents’ bedroom windows were always its pale green twin spires, topped by gold crosses