Flannery_ A Life of Flannery O'Connor - Brad Gooch [60]
In the fall of 1946, the Workshop moved into a sheet-metal Quonset hut on the banks of the Iowa River north of the Iowa Memorial Union; its next move, soon afterward, was to four corrugated-iron barracks. Quickly assembled to accommodate the influx of GI Bill students, in a style dubbed “World War II Ghastly” by knowing vets, these rows of official metal buildings constituted a fitting stage set for much of the fiction being written. “When more than half the class are returned servicemen, and when a good proportion of the fiction being written concerns war experiences, one would naturally expect veterans to disagree on the psychological reactions of story heroes,” the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported of the Workshop, now numbering thirty-five students. “Men who have served in the navy question the motives of the air corps story heroes; infantry men do the same about the navy.”
While not writing about the war, Flannery did try her hand at a topical subject for a next story, “The Barber.” In November, a married couple had opened University Barber Shop on East Market Street to accommodate black students unable to get haircuts at “Jim Crow barbers” in town or on the campus. The State University of Iowa president, Virgil M. Hancher, refused to take a position on this divisive issue. For weeks, the Workshop had been abuzz with the topic as its only black member, Herb Nipson, who later became an editor of Ebony magazine, needed to travel twenty-one miles to Cedar Rapids to get a haircut. At about this time, Nipson was present at Flannery’s reading of a story of hers involving relations between blacks and whites. Afterward a student complimented her dignified, respectful portrayal of a black servant. Nipson has recalled that “Flannery’s answer went something like this, ‘No. That’s just the way he was.’”
In “The Barber,” she reset the racial tension to Joe’s Barber Shop in Dilton, a fictional college town in the rural South. The story turns on three visits made by Rayber, a liberal college professor, when he argues with its patrons, all supporters of Hawkson, a populist and racist conservative candidate. With little personal knowledge of men’s barbershops, she pulled off a convincing evocation of hot lather, tinted windows, and good old boys spitting tobacco. But from its opening line, “It is trying on liberals in Dilton,” Rayber was more a brunt of jokes than heroic, lending credence to a suspicion among some in the Workshop that she displayed too much of the “Southern attitude.” James B. Hall reports, “She once said to my wife, also a Southerner, ‘Momma and me got a nigger that drives us around.’ My wife was privately critical of that order of talk.”
Yet Flannery’s personal attitudes about race were actually quite progressive during her years in Iowa. “I see I should ride the bus more often,” she wrote to Betty Hester, in 1957. “I used to when I went to school in Iowa, as I rode the train from Atl. and the bus from M’ville, but no more. Once I heard the driver say to the rear occupants, ‘All right, all you stove pipe blonds, git on back there.’ At which moment I became an integrationist.” Having become friendly for a while with a black woman graduate student, she bucked warnings from her mother that interracial friendships were dangerous, refusing to be swayed by such issues. She joked of “Verge” Hancher, complicit in Southern-style segregation on campus, as being president of the “Iowa Barber School.”
Another story she wrote that year was equally a departure. While she had created a morning discipline of daily mass, followed by hours of writing, she had yet to put the two activities together. She had not treated the religious faith that was sustaining her in a story, even a darkly comic one. Her first attempt was “The Turkey,” which used as its