Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [6]
So when Mary Flannery O’Connor’s parents carried her across the square for baptism at a four o’clock afternoon service on Easter Sunday, April 12, she wasn’t just any little girl, though she was one of many babies and their gathered parents and godparents. Far from the promise “You count now,” given by the Reverend Bevel Summers after he baptizes the young Harry in O’Connor’s story “The River,” was the Latin blessing pronounced that morning by the rector, Father T. A. Foley, as he marked the sign of the cross in water on her forehead: “Mary Flannery, ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” Listed on her baptismal certificate, as “first sponsor,” was her father’s brother, John Joseph O’Connor, a dentist in town. Her “second sponsor” was Mary Cline, her mother’s oldest sister, who presided over the family’s mansion in Milledgeville.
Early on, her parents brought the infant girl by the home of Katie Semmes, who was still living in an imposing 1852 redbrick Greek Revival at Bull and Taylor streets on Monterey Square. As Katherine Doyle Groves has recalled: “My first memories of her, we are third cousins, our great-grandmothers were sisters, was when she was an infant and they didn’t have all this kind of equipment they have now for hauling babies. I remember a basket of some sort. We were visiting with my cousin, Mrs. Semmes. . . . We would go down, my mother and father, my sister and myself, in the evening to call on my cousin, and Ed and Regina, Flannery’s parents, would be there with this baby in the basket on the floor.” Groves has stressed that Flannery O’Connor actually bore no Flannery blood, as Captain Flannery was merely a cousin by marriage.
At home, the baby was rolled between the two second-floor bedrooms — all the windows kept wide open for ventilation in spring and summer — and into the backyard, as well, in an elaborate crib. The contraption was common enough nursery furniture in the 1920s, especially in the South — a waist-high, flat, rectangular box, painted white, five feet in length, screened on the top and sides, and pushed on large metal wheels. Marketed as a “Kiddie-Koop Crib,” with the insinuation of being a chicken coop for kids, the box doubled as a playpen, allowing a child to stand, or to be laid flat on a board through the middle, protected by its closed lid from the pesky flies and mosquitoes of coastal Georgia. As its successful 1923 ad slogan asked, “Danger or Safety — Which?”
When Mrs. O’Connor took her infant daughter for strolls around the perimeter of Lafayette Square, the child’s conveyance was a bit more deluxe: a perambulator with oversized metal wheels and a padded interior lined with dark brown corduroy, given as a baby gift by Katie Semmes. Fashioned of wood, with a long swan’s-neck metal handle and an adjustable protective hood of slatted wicker with portholes on either side, all painted in the same cream color, the elegant focal point was a monogram of the new baby’s initials — “MFOC” — embossed in gold on the side. At rest in the hallway, the pushchair complemented the gilt picture-rail molding in the parlor, as well as Mrs. O’Connor’s upholstered green brocade love seat, with gilded cabriole legs, and tea cart.
The word used over and over by friends to describe O’Connor’s childhood is “protected,” or, just as often, “overprotected.” As a daughter in a Southern family with extended