4.Flannery O’Connor’s Peacocks
Milledgeville is about 430 miles to the east of Oxford, across Alabama entirely and into the center of Georgia. Like Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor made sure to mark out a distance from William Faulkner’s work, though she admired his writing greatly. “I keep clear of Faulkner so my own little boat won’t get swamped,” she wrote to a friend. Confined to her family farm, Andalusia, by illness, O’Connor worked on her own fictional landscape, one where the burden was religious rather than historical, and the clotted imagery of small-town Southern life gave way to menacing preachers, surly shut-ins, and possessed petty criminals.
FLANNERY O’CONNOR LIVED her short life surrounded by birds. Her fascination with the creatures began as a child, when she was growing up under the shadow of the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in a narrow house on Lafayette Square in the Irish section of Savannah, Georgia. Her mother allowed O’Connor chickens as a substitute for a dog or cat, and the little girl kept them on the back porch of her home. At five years old, O’Connor attracted the attention of Pathé, a British newsreel company, after teaching her pet Cochin bantam hen to walk backwards. The short, scratchy video, titled “Do You Reverse?” shows a young O’Connor, then still going by her given name, Mary, struggling to hold on to the little chicken as it flutters, alarmed, at her shoulder.
“From that day with the Pathé man I began to collect chickens,” O’Connor wrote in “Living with a Peacock,” an essay for Holiday magazine later retitled “The King of the Birds.” “What had been only a mild interest became a passion, a quest. I had to have more and more chickens.” As a child, O’Connor sought out birds with odd characteristics, like different-colored eyes or crooked combs. She sewed tiny, proper outfits for her pets. “A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white pique coat with a lace collar and two buttons in the back,” O’Connor wrote. She named her pets after historical figures, family members, and friends. She named a rooster Haile Selassie, kept a quail dubbed Amelia Earhart, and insisted on bringing a chicken named Aloysius, resplendent in a jacket and bow tie, to her Girl Scout meetings. In order to pass her home economics course at Peabody High School, O’Connor sewed an entire wardrobe of clothes to fit a duckling.
O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah is now a visitor site. She lived there with her mother, Regina, and father, Edward, in Savannah for her first thirteen years as, she wrote while at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, “a pidgeon-toed [sic], only-child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.” You can climb down a perilously steep set of steps to the backyard to see where she kept her chickens, trace the spot where O’Connor appeared on camera in 1932, fighting to make her “frizzly chicken” behave for the stranger’s camera. Upstairs on display is the old claw-foot bathtub, unconnected to any plumbing, where O’Connor would entertain her playmates. O’Connor’s frilly baby carriage, a gift from well-to-do relatives, is tucked into the living room, along with the “Kiddie Koop” baby crib where O’Connor slept—a mesh container that looks like an oversized hamster enclosure. You can see a small collection of O’Connor’s early literary criticism scrawled on the flaps of her childhood books. (On Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book.” On Little Men: “First rate, splendid.”)
But aside from these early examples of O’Connor’s candor, the house in Savannah has little indication of the stuff that would consume her fiction, the obsessions and religious conviction and dark, moving portraits of the rural, Depression-era South. O’Connor did not return to Savannah often after her parents relocated to Milledgeville, a sleepy mid-sized town in the center of the state where Regina O’Connor had family, the kind of relatives who were heavy hitters in the societal and political workings of the town. Milledgeville had served as the Georgia capital during the Civil War, and the first house O’Connor and her mother lived in there was the Cline Mansion, the former governor’s mansion. It was also the site of a state hospital formerly known as the Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum. In local parlance, “going to Milledgeville” translated to “going crazy.” It was also the site of the Georgia State College for Women, now Georgia College & State University, where O’Connor later studied social sciences and drew cartoons for the student newspaper. But perhaps the most welcoming characteristic of Milledgeville for O’Connor was its designation, in 1934, as a bird sanctuary. The city fathers elected to formalize this distinguishing mark in the matter-of-fact town motto, erecting signs downtown that boasted, “Milledgeville: A Bird Sanctuary.”
In later letters to her friends, O’Connor would sometimes add the distinction as a flourish on her return address, or as part of an invitation. It became an epithet. She sometimes ran the words together to formulate the e. e. cummings–esque term “birdsanctuary.” It was an affectionate rib at her town, a place that often amused O’Connor with its citizens’ high estimation of their home. After all, very few parts of Georgia were exactly hostile to birds. To one friend, O’Connor wrote, “We expect you to visit again in Milledgeville, a Bird Sanctuary, where all is culture, graciousness, refinement and bidnis-like common sense.” (To another, she wrote, “Greetings from historic Milledgeville where the ladies and gents wash in separate tubs.”) But there was also something sincere in O’Connor’s embrace of the term, the religious tinge of the word “sanctuary.” Because Milledgeville became, for O’Connor, exactly that: a safe haven, a sacred place, a shelter, and a shrine.
It’s fair to say that O’Connor’s eventual confinement to Milledgeville was not part of her original plans. “I was roped and tied and resigned the way it is necessary to be resigned to death,” she explained in a letter to her friend Maryat Lee. “I thought it would be the end of any creation, any writing.” When she was forced to return to her mother’s care in Georgia at age twenty-five, O’Connor had been on track to have a flourishing academic and literary career up North. She had graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she first arrived with a fifteen-pound muskrat fur coat slung over her arm, with connections to the likes of Southern literature champion and author Andrew Lytle and Robert Penn Warren. It was at Iowa that O’Connor asked her mother’s permission to go by “Flannery” instead of “Mary Flannery,” in anticipation of having her work published because, she joked to an interviewer, “Who was likely to buy the stories of an Irish washerwoman?” She spent two months at the famed Saratoga Springs artist retreat, Yaddo, where she worked on her first novel, Wise Blood. When the first symptoms of systemic lupus erythematosus, the hereditary autoimmune disorder that would ultimately end her life, began to manifest, O’Connor was living in Redding, Connecticut, with friends Robert and Sally Fitzgerald. “I stayed away from the time I was 20 until I was 25 with the notion that the life of my writing depended on my staying away,” O’Connor wrote. “I would certainly have persisted in that delusion had I not got very ill and had to come home. The best of my writing has been done here.”
The restraints of O’Connor’s illness, which she initially believed to be arthritis, also led to Flannery and Regina O’Connor’s relocation from the Cline Mansion to the place that would become home for the final thirteen years of O’Connor’s life. The move was supposed to be a temporary, practical measure. With O’Connor too weak to handle the staircases at the Cline Mansion, she and her mother took up residence in the 550-acre farm four miles outside of downtown Milledgeville that O’Connor’s uncle Bernard Cline had left to Regina and her brother. They set up in the bottom floor of the two-story house on the estate to allow O’Connor to convalesce without bothering with the stairs. When O’Connor and her cousins had visited the place during her summers growing up, it had been called Sorrel Farm, after the reddish coats of the horses her uncle kept there. But on a bus ride to Atlanta, O’Connor met a descendant of the farm’s original owner, who told her an earlier name for the farm, which stuck: Andalusia.
THE ONLY BIRDS visible on my approach to Milledgeville were clutches of vultures picking at roadkill on the sides of the highway. The usual roadside exit attractions of the state were in full effect: pecan palaces, peach stands hawking homemade chow-chow (a kind of Southern relish made from green tomatoes) and moonshine jelly (preserves made with white wine, sugar, and gelatin, meant for spreading on toast), pokey billboards offering religious guidance, satellite dishes that dwarfed the neighboring houses. Endless clots of pine trees sprang from the reddened clay. On my stop for late lunch, in a pub in Dublin, Georgia, the bartender professed not to know much about O’Connor. But, he said, he had run into a more recent celebrity resident of the Milledgeville area at an annual event called the Redneck Games: reality star Honey Boo Boo Thompson, a hyperactive child beauty-pageant contestant best known for her preferred meals of ketchup-drenched spaghetti and Red Bull mixed with Mountain Dew. She is, in fact, a character who might feel at home in an O’Connor short story.
To O’Connor, Andalusia Farm had seemed far from the neatly arranged checkerboard of downtown Milledgeville, in the rural hinterlands. The novelist Alice Walker grew up in Eatonton, not far from O’Connor’s farm, the daughter of sharecroppers who struggled to support Walker’s education and escape from the oppressive rule of Jim Crow. Walker’s brother, Jimmy, remembered delivering milk to O’Connor. These days, Andalusia Farm is in the thick of the suburbs and subdivisions surrounding the city. The turn for the farm is closest to several car dealerships, a Comfort Suites, and a Walmart, with a familiar tangle of vinyl siding and gas stations, fast food joints, and pawnshops surrounding the site. The sign pointing up a sloped drive to Andalusia was so unassuming that I drove past it twice, unable to quite fathom plunging into the bank of pines where the farmhouse stood. As the car crept up the drive to the white house, the noise of the highway evaporated, blocked by the dense forest surrounding the grounds, the trunks of trees wound with kudzu. In its place grew a lush, leafy silence, punctuated by the twittering of birds overhead and the occasional mysterious cawing floating in through the car’s open window.
During O’Connor’s time at Andalusia, the property’s hundreds of acres were bustling with activity. Regina O’Connor plunged into managing the place first as a dairy farm and then as a beef-cattle business. She spent her time split between caring for her daughter and tending to the many needs of the dozens of cows and the farmhands who worked with them: mending fences, keeping books, gauging the health of the cattle. Flannery O’Connor, weakened by multiple blood transfusions and stiffness in her arms and legs from her lupus, was mostly an observer of the business of the farm. The house, at the top of the hill, afforded O’Connor a view of the goings-on from the porch, a vantage point where she could drink in the exchanges between the people who labored with the cattle. “I watch what goes on . . . largely through the crack in the door,” O’Connor wrote in a letter. “My contribution amounts to picking up a few eggs . . . anyway there is always something going on on a farm to watch.”
She busied herself with writing and rewriting from her room downstairs, content to exclude herself from the nitty-gritty of farming. In her story “The Enduring Chill,” a semiautobiographical account of a young man named Asbury, fallen ill and forced to take up residence at his mother’s farm, O’Connor describes him surveying a farm almost identical to Andalusia from a rocking chair on the screen porch:
The lawn extended for a quarter of an acre down to a barbed-wire fence that divided it from the front pasture. In the middle of the day the dry cows rested there under a line of sweetgum trees. On the other side of the road were two hills with a pond between and his mother could sit on the porch and watch the herd walk across the dam to the hill on the other side. The whole scene was rimmed by a wall of trees which, at the time of the day he was forced to sit there, was a washed-out blue that reminded him sadly of the Negroes’ faded overalls.
The view is now crowded over with thicket, the pasture unsullied by cows. The bustle of farm activity is long gone from Andalusia. But the wall of trees O’Connor described obscures the Walmart and gas stations beyond, making Andalusia feel as it must have to the young writer: an island, where the waves of modernity lap gently at the boundaries but never quite touch.
AFTER HALF A MILE or so of the forest tunnel that leads up from the highway, the drive opens up into the central farm complex, where the plantation house that O’Connor lived in stands proudly, topped by a red metal roof sunbaked by the relentless Georgia rays. A white water tower looms behind. Magnolia trees are lined obediently near the drive, their blooms already faded to the color of old newspapers. The grounds of Andalusia are now a nature preserve, much as those surrounding Faulkner’s house at Rowan Oak. There are trails for hiking. Bird watching, naturally, is encouraged. A pamphlet at the house lists the kinds of birds that you might encounter at Andalusia, from wild turkey to the blue-gray gnatcatcher to the loggerhead shrike. Classes from Georgia College & State University occasionally visit the grounds to study local wildlife or the Tobler Creek, which intersects the grounds and was used in the eighteenth century as an avenue for bootleggers.
Though the house has survived more or less intact, not all of the structures on the grounds are as well preserved. The satellite buildings behind the house lie in various states of disarray. The milk-processing shed, the old pump house, and a tenant-farmer residence have been restored, but several other small structures have been reduced to little more than piles of splintered timber. The cow barn, in the midst of restoration, teeters uncertainly, planks of wood missing from its face. There was something slightly menacing and fantastical about it, the hayloft yawning widely at the top of the structure, a rickety, narrow ladder reaching into the darkness. A sign reading DANGER PLEASE DO NOT ENTER was propped up in a dusty white chair near the entrance. O’Connor’s crooked Bible salesman from “Good Country People” could have come sprinting out at any minute, carrying a pilfered wooden leg.
Unlike Welty’s or Faulkner’s houses, O’Connor’s last residence was not converted into an official museum until almost forty years after her death. It had remained, for many years, a working farm and an object of curiosity. There are several accounts, including one by Alice Walker, of O’Connor admirers skipping past the No Trespassing signs to marvel at the grounds, but Andalusia only opened to visitors in 2003, after O’Connor’s cousins Margaret Florencourt Mann and Louise Florencourt established the Andalusia Foundation in her honor. There was a pleasingly ragged feeling to the endeavor. Rather than being meticulously monitored and scrubbed, things had been allowed to decay and warp with age. It was not hard to imagine O’Connor and her mother still living there, like some middle-Georgia version of Grey Gardens, as things quietly fell into disrepair around them. My reveries on the matter were interrupted, suddenly, by a flat, insistent, almost nasal squawk. I walked to the other side of the house, hidden from view from my vantage in the driveway, to find a sizable coop rustling with activities. I had found the peacocks.
THE CHICKENS IN Savannah were just O’Connor’s beginner birds. On Andalusia there were already chickens, ducks, geese, and quail; O’Connor tended to them all. But the arrival of the peacocks followed two events that shaped the last decade of O’Connor’s life. The first was the publication of her first novel, Wise Blood, originally titled The Great Spotted Bird. The book was the one that she started while at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and had worked on in the years living in Yaddo, in Connecticut, and upon her return to Milledgeville. In it, O’Connor announced clearly the themes that she would examine throughout her work: sin and salvation, tolerance and zealotry, the connection between spiritual and physical ailments.
In her satirical tale, the veteran Hazel Motes, fresh off a four-year stint in the Army, grapples with religion in the fictional town of Taulkinham. “He saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind,” O’Connor wrote, “a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.” Motes turns into a street preacher for the gospel of atheism, encounters a nymphomaniac, a con man, and a mummified dwarf, and eventually blinds himself with quicklime to live as an ascetic. Critical reception of the novel was tepid. Reviewers dismissed O’Connor as one in a line of regional writers penning paeans to oddballs, or else they found the tale impenetrable. But the assessments in newspapers were not as contentious as the reception from O’Connor’s relatives. One of her Savannah cousins, the matriarch Katie Semmes, had ordered advance copies for a handful of Catholic priests with whom she was friendly. After Wise Blood came out, rumor has it that Semmes shut herself in for a week writing notes of apologies to the clergymen. In person, O’Connor maintained the codes of Southern manners that Milledgeville society required. But her fiction, Wise Blood clearly communicated, would not be polite.
The second event was O’Connor’s friend Sally Fitzgerald revealing the true diagnosis of her condition. It was not, as she had been told, rheumatoid arthritis, but systemic lupus erythematosus, the same disease that had killed O’Connor’s father when she was just fifteen. O’Connor had witnessed her father’s deterioration as a young teenager. She knew that the ravages of the autoimmune disease meant that she likely did not have many years left to live. It also meant that O’Connor’s stay at Andalusia would be not a temporary measure but a permanent one. O’Connor was forced into several weeks’ bed rest after a flare-up of the disease. It was a devastating blow, but one that O’Connor accepted with grace. “I have enough energy to write with and as that is all I have any business doing anyhow, I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing,” she wrote Fitzgerald.
During the time she was laid up, O’Connor perused an advertisement in the Florida Market Bulletin for peafowl at $65 a pair, one that had long intrigued her. She finally seized on the opportunity in October 1952, ordering a peacock and a peahen with four small “peabiddies,” to be delivered via railway express.
Once they arrived in Andalusia, the peafowl population quickly proliferated, much to the distress of O’Connor’s mother. In “The King of the Birds,” written almost a decade after she acquired her first peafowl, O’Connor assessed the situation thus:
It is hard to tell the truth about this bird. The habits of any peachicken left to himself would hardly be noticeable, but multiplied by forty, they become a situation. I was correct that my peachickens would all eat Startena; they also eat everything else. Particularly they eat flowers. My mother’s fears were all borne out. Peacocks not only eat flowers, they eat them systematically, beginning at the head of a row and going down it. If they are not hungry, they will pick the flower anyway, if it is attractive, and let it drop. . . . In short, I am the only person on the place who is willing to underwrite, with something more than tolerance, the presence of peafowl.
At their peak, nearly fifty peafowl strutted around the grounds of Andalusia, their long elegant tails trailing through the Georgia dirt. The birds roosted in the trees near the house and brought down the fencing around the cattle pens with their weight. The clatter and clamor of peacocks crying and the sight of their shimmering tail feathers drooped over trash-can lids, fences, and shrubberies, became one of the hallmarks of Andalusia. Once O’Connor made a name for herself, authors would travel to meet her at Andalusia, picking through the peacocks and their droppings to pay a call to the author. “Visitors to our place,” O’Connor wrote, “instead of being barked at by dogs rushing from under the porch, are squalled at by peacocks whose blue necks and crested heads pop up from behind tufts of grass, peer out of bushes and crane downward from the roof of the house, where the bird has flown, perhaps for the view.” Katherine Anne Porter, who stopped by after reading in nearby Macon, “plowed all over the yard behind me in spike-heeled shoes to see my various kind of chickens,” O’Connor wrote.
O’Connor collected the feathers from the birds when they molted in the late summer and sent them in care packages to her friends, sometimes alongside freshly collected pecans. She donated some of the plumes to the ladies of Milledgeville, who wore them in their hats, and doled out the pinions to children visiting the farm. On her gravestone, in the Memory Hill Cemetery, fans sometimes leave peacock feathers in tribute. The most famous photographs of O’Connor, taken by photojournalist Joe McTyre for the Atlanta Constitution, show her leaning on the crutches that doctors recommended starting in 1955, a pair of peacocks turned in attention. Her daily routine involved working daily from nine a.m. to noon, the space that her illness would allow, and spending the afternoon painting, rocking on the front porch, observing her ostentation of peacocks. The feathers became her personal symbol, shorthand for her work.
Peacocks, as O’Connor well knew, have transformative powers. For O’Connor, the peacock’s display was not just a natural wonder but also a reminder of the existence of a higher power. “You can’t have a peacock anywhere without having a map of the universe,” O’Connor explained in a letter. “It also stands in the medieval symbology of the Church—the eyes are the eyes of the Church.” For the devoutly Catholic O’Connor, the peacock was a symbol for the wonders that lie just beyond the realm of vision, the possibility of the divine. They were a link between the physical and the ethereal worlds, the same connection that she explored in her fiction, of the freakish qualities of humanity as a spiritual journey made manifest. And they were a promise, too, that creatures of all kinds are more than what they appear to be.
Captured in these birds is also something of the public perception of O’Connor as an outsider. She seemed an exotic creature living in a humble environment, someone whose stark, sharp, odd voice punctured the pleasant myths that Southern writers swathed themselves in. In one of the self-portraits O’Connor painted, of herself in a straw hat posed next to a pheasant, her representation is strikingly birdlike: the shirt the same rust color as the bird’s breast, their eyes both set ahead. The birds of Hera squawking alongside the tree frogs in middle Georgia captured something essential about the contrasts in O’Connor’s persona: a Southern woman fluent in the graces of society, whose fiction portrayed a singular, searing vision.
THE PEACOCKS IN Andalusia today are more contained than the ones that ran around the premises in O’Connor’s final years. When I approached the truck-sized pen, the peahens, scratching at the ground, looked up in alarm. The humidity felt like being swathed in thick, damp cotton, and the whine of mosquitoes Dopplered in and out of earshot. The peacock, its feathers gold and green under a coating of dust, fluttered up to perch on a small bench and emitted a trilling caw, the one that O’Connor had compared to “a cheer for an invisible parade.” The birds, all three of them contained in a spacious aviary, looked suspiciously at me before returning to the business of pecking at the dirt. A black-and-white sign posted to the cage instructed visitors: PLEASE DON’T FEED OR FRIGHTEN THE BIRDS.
I turned from the enclosure and trudged back toward the house, anticipating the sweet, metallic chill of air conditioning. I trudged up the steep steps and through the door of the screen porch, and was greeted by a man with blond hair and a wide grin. “I see y’all have been getting acquainted,” he said, nodding to the peacocks.
He introduced himself as Craig Amason, a former librarian who had been appointed the first executive director of the Flannery O’Connor–Andalusia Foundation. He has been at the house since before it was opened, though he was in his final months in the position there. (Elizabeth Wylie succeeded Amason later that year; she has plans to restore the Andalusia backyard in a similar fashion to Welty’s garden, by using the descriptions from O’Connor in her essays and letters.) Amason and visitor-services manager Mark Jurgensen were in charge of the operations at the farm, Amason tells me, including minding the peacocks. The birds dined on game feed, cracked corn, grapes, and baby spinach. Jurgensen documented their antics on the Andalusia blog, referring fondly to the “scraggly squawkers” and tracking their molting season, spent “raking up feathers by the wheelbarrowful.”
The birds are not descendants of O’Connor’s pride. Those, Regina O’Connor dispersed after Flannery’s death: One pair to a hospice, one to Stone Mountain Park outside of Atlanta, another to a monastery. A peacock’s life-span is only about twenty years, so any of O’Connor’s original companions would have likely died off in the 1980s. The last of the farm animals that had descended from Regina’s stock, a hinny named Flossie, had died in 2010. Andalusia’s current muster of peacocks arrived in 2009, thanks to a donor. Their names were culled from O’Connor’s works. I had just met Manley Pointer, Joy/Hulga, and Mary Grace.
The tour of the Andalusia house was a self-guided affair, though Amason encouraged questions. The viewing area was limited to the bottom floor, the portion of the house that O’Connor mostly occupied. The rooms are modestly furnished, faded rugs covering the floors. The paint was peeling in parts of the rooms. Amason pointed out the drapes in one room, hemmed with particularly long stitches, explaining that Regina O’Connor had likely made the alteration in haste in order to return to her many other duties on the farm. The Hotpoint refrigerator in the back kitchen was the one that O’Connor had bought her mother with the television rights for “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”
O’Connor’s room was a small, almost monastic affair. It housed a single bed with a thin patterned coverlet. “We want it to be like she just left out the back door,” Amason said. “The only major things missing are her books and papers.” O’Connor’s crutches were leaned against the wardrobe. Her desk, simple and wooden, was pushed up against a window. A replica of O’Connor’s typewriter—a squat gray-green number—perched at attention on the desk’s surface. On the original—now housed along with her christening gown, walnut bookshelves, and a couple of other personal effects at the Georgia State College for Women—O’Connor would devotedly type out her daily allotment of words. She described her setup to a friend thus: “I have a large ugly brown desk, one of those that the typewriter sits in a depression in the middle of and on either side are drawers.” Missing from the scene were the “rat’s nest of old papers, clippings, torn manuscripts, ancient quarterlies” that O’Connor built around herself. But the most crucial aspect of the arrangement was the proximity to the window, allowing O’Connor to eavesdrop on the farm workers.
After the publication of Wise Blood, O’Connor’s fiction began to take on a different tone. Life at Andalusia quickly became fuel for a series of short stories, some inspired by chatter overheard from the tenant families and various visitors. The window in front of O’Connor’s desk looked out on the farm complex, allowing her to casually spy on their comings and goings. In one letter to Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor described a dairyman who, she wrote, “calls all the cows he: he ain’t give but two gallons, he ain’t come in yet. . . . I reckon he doesn’t like to feel surrounded by females or something.” The habits and mannerisms of middle-Georgia folk were rhythms that O’Connor adapted into her own writing. Like Eudora Welty, O’Connor kept note of local parlance that tickled her, particularly names. A Lucynell who attended O’Connor’s book signing for Wise Blood appeared in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” as Lucynell Crater, a deaf-mute with “eyes as blue as a peacock’s neck.” The fugitive bank robber in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” got his name, “The Misfit,” from a clipping O’Connor found in the Journal-Constitution with a similar alias. One visitor, Father James McCown, later recalled that when he was asking directions to Andalusia, a Milledgeville lady reported, “Mary Flannery is a sweet girl. But I’m afraid to go near her. She might put me in one of her stories.”
It was in the short stories that O’Connor wrote at Andalusia where her gift for intercepting and shaping language flourished. The smaller scope concentrated her style, increased her potency. It was in them that she created her most indelible characters—the family in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” with a mother “whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage,” and the overeducated innocent Joy/Hulga in “Good Country People.” She caught the middle-Georgia dialect exactly: point A to point B nonstop is going “terreckly,” and the British royal family included the “Duchesser Windsor.” Even the titles of her stories had a pleasing lilt to them, the kinds of religious-tinged wisdom dropped as conversation starters and stoppers between people: “You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” In a recording of O’Connor reading “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” at Vanderbilt University in 1959, she pauses to savor certain words and is forced to stop for a moment thanks to waves of laughter at the joking passages. Once I heard the recording, every story I read by O’Connor included her Georgia drawl, the distinct voice that she had faithfully re-created.
If most people know O’Connor through her stories and not her essays and longer work, it is partially because the stories are, by nature of their form, more easily digestible than novels or discourses about the Catholic writer. But partly it is because many of them are extraordinarily effective at fulfilling the O’Connor doctrine that acolytes like Harry Crews would later take to heart: that the best way of capturing people’s attention was through unsettling and enduring characters. She did not hope to placate or comfort, but to gut her readers by laying out the assumptions and faulty logical systems and petty cruelties that humanity operates on. And O’Connor resented the implication that this tactic was a cheap one. She complained in one lecture that the label of “Southern Gothic” had reduced her and other writers to “unhappy combinations of Poe and Erskine Caldwell.”
Her distortion was a kind of realism: She sought to make the moral blemishes and weaknesses every person carries visible to the naked eye. “We have become so flooded with sorry fiction based on unearned liberties . . . that in the public mind the deeper kinds of realism are less and less understandable,” O’Connor noted in a speech later published as “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” The kind of writing she aimed for was closer to the aims of cubists, attempting to see every facet of an individual on one plane. “It is not necessary to point out that the look of this fiction is going to be wild, that it is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine,” she continued.
O’Connor, like Harper Lee and Eudora Welty, was often portrayed as a hermit in the press, thanks to the remoteness of Milledgeville from New York City or Los Angeles. But O’Connor, when illness would allow her, traveled to give lectures and readings as her work began to gain popularity. Though Andalusia was on the outskirts, Regina and Flannery O’Connor frequented the social set of Milledgeville. She and her mother went to Mass at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. O’Connor met on Wednesdays with a book group, and dined regularly at the Sanford House, a high dining establishment with a copy of the Ordinance of Secession, the Civil War–era document formally announcing that Georgia had seceded from the Union, printed on a silk banner and hung in the entrance hall. O’Connor’s favorite menu selection was the peppermint chiffon pie. Though O’Connor’s writing caused a minor scandal among the ladies who lunch, she was accepted into the inner circle as a member of her mother’s family, the Clines. It’s this acceptance that gave an extra acidity to O’Connor’s writing, an insider perspective on the enforcement of manners and the idea of Southern nobility. O’Connor’s fiction is a reproach to the idea that manners are protection, a shredding of the self-perpetuating mythos of the South. O’Connor was not interested in the image of the South as a simpler, more virtuous place.
“I am always vastly irritated by these people . . . who know as much about the South as I do about lower Hobokin [sic] and on the strength of it advise Southern writers to leave it and forget the myth,” she wrote in a letter. “Which myth? If you’re a writer and the South is what you know, then it’s what you’ll write about and how you judge it will depend on how you judge yourself. . . . So much depends on what you have an ear for. . . . The advantages and disadvantages of being a Southern writer can be endlessly debated but the fact remains that if you are, you are.”
O’Connor’s Catholic beliefs provided her work with a blistering equality: Northerners, Southerners, men, and women are all equally corrupt, equally struggling toward grace. She was haunted not by the racial past of the region but by the unrelenting judgment of an omnipotent God. The women have fat ankles and nasal voices, not delicate feet and sweeping petticoats. The men are ugly and petty. She does not do her characters the flattery and disservice of gussying them up; they are all caught equally. In her essay about her visit to O’Connor’s house, Alice Walker wrote that she considered O’Connor the first great Southern modernist, “Because when she set her pen to [her characters] not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air.” Walker continued, “Yes, I could say, these white folks without the magnolia . . . and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience, these are like the Southerners I know.”
MILLEDGEVILLE SOCIETY’S MIXED reception of O’Connor’s work—acknowledging her as one of their own but wishing she could have written something more ladylike—remains today. O’Connor’s cousins, the Florencourts and their descendants, remain fixtures of Milledgeville, and are involved in preserving her legacy. But there is the sense, while asking around in town, that O’Connor’s work is strange and alienating. “That’s some pretty weird stuff,” one store clerk told me when I asked about her.
There are, of course, many who celebrate O’Connor’s work, who travel to Milledgeville to study her archives. Since her death in August 1963, O’Connor’s literary star has risen. The house averages some 5,000 visitors a year, many of whom react emotionally to the experience. Amason recalled one woman weeping as she stared into the little bedroom where O’Connor slept and worked. One couple even elected to get married at the farm. The bride wore peacock feathers woven through her hair.
I crept toward the back of the house to the gift shop, located near the tiny kitchen. Alongside the usual selection of books and postcards, there was an array of peacock-related items: ornaments, journals, earrings. Another section held pieces of reliquary available to commemorate the visit. A vase held plumes from Manley Pointer’s tail, collected last molting season and available for $5 each. Vials of dirt from the farm were also for sale, along with rosary beads and bumper stickers. One read A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND—MILLEDGEVILLE, GA. Another, SEE ‘FOWL PLAY’ AT ANDALUSIA FARM IN MILLEDGEVILLE, GA.
In “The Fiction Writer & His Country,” O’Connor tackles the idea of Southern writers as provincial creatures, bound up in their obsessive cataloguing of local color.
When we talk about the writer’s country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside of him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the inner and outer worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.
Andalusia became the place of O’Connor’s exile in Milledgeville, but it also became her place of greatest imaginative strength. She turned a little dairy farm in Georgia into a preserve for herself and her birds, odd creatures in an odd land. She absorbed the country around her, and inscribed her own vision of the world upon it.
I headed by the aviary to bid farewell to the flock. The peahens emitted a cacophony of coos and cries that echoed out into the nearby woods, their feet scratching out patterns into the dust. “It is a great blessing, perhaps the greatest blessing a writer can have, to find at home what others have to go elsewhere seeking,” O’Connor writes. It was this small patch of land, in the peripheral vision of these birds, that O’Connor had found what she was seeking, spinning the place into her prose. The peacock, Manley, strutted over to the side of the pen to inspect my hand for food. Finding nothing, he squawked once in indignation and then paused, as if considering his next move. His tail feathers glimmered in the dying light, reminders of the glory he could unfurl with a fanning out of his coat. And then he turned, clucking, away, his claws scratching strange hieroglyphics in the soil of the writer’s country.