White Girls

by Hilton Als

  THIS LONESOME PLACE

  THE TWO NIGGERS, a man and a woman, cutting across the field are looking for a little moonshine when they spot the white boy, Francis Marion Tarwater—the teenage antihero of Flannery O’Connor’s startling second novel, The Violent Bear It Away—who is digging a grave for his great-uncle Mason. Mason, a self-titled prophet who spent his life denouncing the world for having forsaken its Savior, believed that Tarwater might have the calling, too, but the boy is not feeling his religion right now, standing in the dirt, just this side of death. O’Connor writes:

  The woman, tall and Indianlike, had on a green sun hat. She stooped under the fence without pausing and came on across the yard toward the grave; the man held the wire down and swung his leg over and followed at her elbow. They kept their eyes on the hole and stopped at the edge of it, looking down into the raw ground with shocked satisfied expressions. The man, Buford, had a crinkled face, darker than his hat. “Old man passed,” he said.

  The woman lifted her head and let out a slow sustained wail, piercing and formal. She...crossed her arms and then lifted them in the air and wailed again.

  “Tell her to shut up that,” Tarwater said. “I’m in charge here now and I don’t want no nigger-mourning.”

  “I seen his spirit for two nights,” she said. “Seen him two nights and he was unrested.”

  “He ain’t been dead but since this morning,” Tarwater said...

  “He’d been predicting his passing for many years,” Buford said. “She seen him in her dream several nights and he wasn’t rested...”

  “Poor sweet sugar boy,” the woman said to Tarwater, “what you going to do here now by yourself in this lonesome place?”

  Published in 1960, The Violent Bear It Away appeared just as Martin Luther King Jr. was cutting a large revolutionary swath through the Old South, and only six years after Brown v. Board of Education, when that little black girl in sunglasses had her face dotted with the spittle of her white countrymen in Little Rock. The South may indeed have seemed like a “lonesome place” to whites then. Integration was not going slow, as William Faulkner had said it should (to which Thurgood Marshall responded, “They don’t mean go slow, they mean don’t go”). And, in order to move into a modern South, whites would need to be less encumbered by the old ways: by manners, by the Christian charity and moral rectitude of colored life—the “nigger-mourning” that cut to the soul.

  Race and faith and their attendant hierarchies and delusions are O’Connor’s great themes. She was hailed for her artistic and social independence, but readings of this American master often overlook the originality and honesty of her portrayal of Southern whiteness. Or, rather, Southern whiteness as it chafed under its biggest cultural influence—Southern blackness. It’s remarkable to consider that O’Connor started writing less than a hundred years after Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and just a decade after Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, two books whose imagined black worlds had more to do with their authors’ patronizing sentimentality than with the complicated intertwining of black and white, rich and poor, mundane and sublime that characterized real Southern life—and O’Connor’s portrait of it. Her black characters are not symbols defined in opposition to whiteness; they are the living people who were, physically at least, on the periphery of O’Connor’s own world. She was not romantic enough to take Faulkner’s Dilsey view of blacks—as the fulcrum of integrity and compassion. She didn’t use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply—and complexly—drew from life.

  Flannery O’Connor’s electric vision is still surprising enough, nearly ninety years after her birth, to have inspired five critical studies in the year 2000 alone—the most compelling of which are Richard Giannone’s Flannery O’Connor, Hermit Novelist and Lorine M. Getz’s Flannery O’Connor, Literary Theologian. But one hesitates to read her fiction autobiographically; it was not an approach O’Connor had much patience for. “I know some folks that don’t mind their own bisnis,” she wrote when she was twelve. Eighteen years later, she elaborated, in a letter to a friend, explaining why she had no interest in representing herself in writing:

  To say that any complete denudation of the writer occurs in the successful work is, according to me, a romantic exaggeration. A great part of the art of it is precisely in seeing that this does not happen...Everything has to be subordinated to a whole which is not you. Any story I reveal myself completely in will be a bad story.

  From the beginning, O’Connor worked to alchemize her background into something beyond mere anecdote and eccentricity. Born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, she was baptized Mary Flannery O’Connor at the Catholic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. The Church’s sanctioning of mysticism would later have a profound influence on O’Connor’s writing, but Catholicism was a faith that had little sway in the “Christ-haunted” South O’Connor grew up in—a place where Jesus was God. Savannah had been settled first by Episcopalians and Lutherans, then by Baptists and Methodists; Catholics were excluded from the state’s charter until 1794, and were thereafter rarely regarded as anything but an itinerant non-Reformed sect, as alien a presence as the Jews. (“That must be Jew singing,” someone scoffs when two Catholic girls sing psalms in the 1954 O’Connor short story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.”)

  O’Connor was the only child of Regina Cline and Edward O’Connor, a real estate agent who aspired to be a writer. Both parents were descended from Irish Catholic immigrants, and Mary Flannery began her studies at the St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls. Even as a child, she had a merciless view of things, and her plain speech won her unwelcome attention from the Sisters of Mercy who provided her instruction. She grew up loving birds and she favored chickens with mismatched eyes or crooked combs. When she was five, she raised a “frizzled” chicken (its feathers grew backward), which she taught to walk backward. A New York-based newsreel company that specialized in natural phenomena heard about the bird and sent a crew to O’Connor’s home to film it—“an experience that marked me for life,” she said later. The crew’s visit provided her with the first approval of her obsession with the grotesque as it lives beside the normal: a frizzled chicken striding backward in the yard while Mother airs out a tablecloth and Father closes the shed door, ax in one hand, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck with the other.

  American genius often feeds on its own environs, and O’Connor was no exception. “I’m pleased to live in Baldwin County in the sovereign state of Georgia, and to see what I can from here,” she told one interviewer. She knew where her material was, and had known it since she was twelve. By then she had discovered the tone of her voice, too, its lyrical flatness and its wildly leaping humor. (“If I...tried to write a story about the Japanese, the characters would all talk like Herman Talmadge,” she once said.) O’Connor was already slipping verse under her father’s napkin at the table and rejecting books that didn’t satisfy her interest in the heretical. “Awful. I wouldn’t read this book,” she wrote in her copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In a copy of Georgina Finds Herself, by Shirley Watkins: “This is the worst book I ever read next to Pinocchio.” About her early reading, O’Connor wrote to a friend in 1955:

  The only good things I read when I was a child were the Greek and Roman myths which I got out of a set of a child’s encyclopedia...The rest of what I read was Slop with a capital S. The Slop period was followed by the Edgar Allan Poe period which lasted for years and consisted chiefly in a volume called The Humerous Tales of E.A. Poe. These were mighty humerous—one about a young man who was too vain to wear his glasses and consequently married his grandmother by accident; another about a fine figure of a man who in his room removed wooden arms, wooden legs, hair piece, artificial teeth, voice box, etc. etc.

  From the beginning of her reading life, O’Connor preferred stories that were direct in their telling and mysterious only in their subtexts. She clearly despised the lack of clarity which she believed came with Northern liberali
sm, and which she lampoons with her intellectual characters, who always function in a kind of godless oligarchy. In many of her stories, intellectuals are depicted as grumpy poseurs, mean and homely failures who can’t get on with life and are often driven into the ground by its brutality. O’Connor was like her chicken, walking backward, staring at others as she removed herself from them.

  In 1938, after Edward O’Connor was appointed a zone real estate appraiser for the Federal Housing Administration in Atlanta, Regina and Flannery moved into the Cline family house in the nearby town of Milledgeville, where Edward could visit on the weekends. There was no parochial education for Flannery in Milledgeville, the home of the state insane asylum. (She eventually graduated from the experimental Peabody High School.) And, soon after the move, Edward’s health began to deteriorate. He was suffering from lupus, a disease in which the body attacks its own tissues, destroying itself. Fifteen years after her father’s death, in 1941, O’Connor wrote to her friend Elizabeth Hester, a clerk at a credit bureau in Atlanta and a frequent correspondent during the last nine years of O’Connor’s life, whose identity was only recently revealed:

  My father wanted to write but had not the time or money or training or any of the opportunities I have had...Anyway, whatever I do in the way of writing makes me extra happy in the thought that it is a fulfillment of what he wanted to do himself.

  That fulfillment came relatively quickly. In 1945, shortly before completing her A.B. at the Georgia State College for Women, O’Connor was admitted to the State University of Iowa with a scholarship in journalism. O’Connor had clear, pale skin, a heart-shaped face, lively eyes, and a thick Georgia accent. In a letter to the editor Robert Giroux, Paul Engle, then the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, recalls meeting her that fall and being unable to understand her speech: “Embarrassed, I asked her to write down what she had just said on a pad. She wrote: ‘My name is Flannery O’Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers’ Workshop?’” Engle continued:

  Like Keats, who spoke Cockney but wrote the purest sounds in English, Flannery spoke a dialect beyond instant comprehension but on the page her prose was imaginative, tough, alive...Sitting at the back of the room silent, Flannery was more of a presence than the exuberant talkers who serenade every writing class with their loudness.

  O’Connor rarely if ever discussed her “bisnis”—her religion, her writing, her Southernness—with her peers in Iowa. One classmate claims not to have realized that O’Connor “really did believe in evil and damnation and redemption” until she produced a story that showed insight into a character’s fall. O’Connor’s parochialism might have been a defense, the armor she used to shield herself from other people, but she also seemed to view it as someone else’s problem; she knew who she was and where she was going. Iowa, at least, provided her with a new perspective on the cryptic idea of home.

  At the end of her first year at Iowa, O’Connor published her first story, “The Geranium,” in Accent. The story focuses on an enfeebled man named Old Dudley who is living up North with his daughter and her family but wants to go back home to the South to die, near the “niggers” who are kinder to the old man than his own children. O’Connor reworked the story several times after its first publication, but already, at twenty-one, she had found many of her mature themes: the skewering of tradition, the erosion of one world that, disastrously, comically, is the weak foundation of the next, and the spectacle of blacks and whites regarding each other across a divide of mutual outsiderness. O’Connor was not a polemicist, but her work is implicitly political given the environment she drew from—the South during its second failed attempt at Reconstruction, otherwise known as Integration. As she wrote in an essay titled “The Regional Writer,” “Southern identity is not really connected with mocking birds and beaten biscuits and white columns any more than it is with hookworm and bare feet and muddy clay roads.” Indeed, she was at times violently critical of Tennessee Williams’s and Carson McCullers’s work, because she felt that they played on clichéd images of the region. “An identity is not to be found on the surface,” she wrote.

  O’Connor’s vision of the postindustrial South—with its Winn-Dixie stores, its automobiles piled up in the junkyard of the Lord—as a modern version of the fall was all her own. But what fall? What loss of innocence? That of the slaves who became indentured servants and then “niggers,” and who dot her pages like flies? No: in O’Connor’s fictional universe, the whites in power are the only ones who can afford to be innocent of their surroundings. O’Connor’s most profound gift was her ability to describe impartially the bourgeoisie she was born into, to depict with humor and without judgment her rapidly crumbling social order. In “Revelation,” a 1964 story, she described Mrs. Turpin, a woman who occupies herself “with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn’t have been herself”:

  If Jesus had said to her before he made her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,” what would she have said?...She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right, make me a nigger then—but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.”

  When Mrs. Turpin gets into a fight with a young white woman from Wellesley while sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, her sense of propriety is upset; meaninglessness yawns before her like a great black hole. O’Connor allows us to see what Mrs. Turpin’s pride hides from her: how the blacks who work for her condescend to her, how they hide their intelligence so that she won’t be tempted to interfere in their lives. One of them asks Mrs. Turpin about the bruise she incurred during the fight and, before she can explain, continues,

  “Ain’t nothing bad happen to you!” the old woman said. She said it as if they all knew that Mrs. Turpin was protected in some special way by Divine Providence. “You just had you a little fall.”

  Mrs. Turpin describes the scene in the doctor’s office:

  “She said...something real ugly,” she muttered.

  “She sho shouldn’t said nothin ugly to you,” the old woman said. “You so sweet. You the sweetest lady I know.”

  “She pretty too,” the one with the hat on said.

  “And stout,” the other one said. “I never knowed no sweeter white lady.”

  “That’s the truth befo’ Jesus,” the old woman said. “Amen! You des as sweet and pretty as you can be.”

  Mrs. Turpin knew exactly how much Negro flattery was worth and it added to her rage. “She said,” she began again and finished this time with a fierce rush of breath, “that I was an old wart hog from hell.”

  There was an astounded silence.

  “Where she at?” the youngest woman cried in a piercing voice. “Lemme see her. I’ll kill her!”

  “I’ll kill her with you!” the other one cried.

  “She b’long in the sylum,” the old woman said emphatically. “You the sweetest white lady I know.”

  “She pretty too,” the other two said. “Stout as she can be and sweet. Jesus satisfied with her!”

  Jesus is, perhaps, not as satisfied as Mrs. Turpin. No reader can help but be amused and disturbed by this passage, which is representative of O’Connor’s subtle observation of a world that was not her own but that informed every inch of the one she inhabited. Blacks may have spent much of their lives on the margins, but she understood the ways in which they entered the circle. The theatrical modesty and duplicity exhibited by these blacks who are an audience for Mrs. Turpin’s troubles—despite the fact that she will never be one for theirs—are all just a part of the Southern code of manners.

  O’Connor delighted in portraying the forms of domestic terrorism. It is a Catholic tenet that God judges by actions, but virtually all her white woman characters judge by appearances. O’Connor greatly admired Faulkner. “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track th
e Dixie Limited is roaring down,” she remarked of Southern writers’ relationship to the Master. But there is no Faulknerian Snopes in O’Connor’s fiction. What she describes is far more evil: the nice lady on the bus who calls you “nigger” by offering your child a penny; or the old woman who loves to regale her grandchildren with stories about the “pickaninnies” of her antebellum youth. These are women who wouldn’t know grace if it slapped them in the face—which it often does. And why would any black person want to belong to the world that these women and their men have created?

  For O’Connor, writing about integration was a way of exposing the dangers of clinging to the fiction of power. But like Faulkner, O’Connor herself had difficulty assimilating the push toward integration that took the region so suddenly and violently in the fifties and sixties. She clung to the provincialism she satirized, and she was sometimes clumsy at conveying real life among blacks beyond her own circles—their class distinctions, their communication with one another apart from whites. The one false note in “The Displaced Person” (1955), for instance, comes when two black workers discussing the woman they work for fall into a kind of rural Amos ’n’ Andy routine: ‘“Big Belly act like she know everything.’ ‘Never mind...your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.’” A curtain falls over O’Connor’s insight—and her ear for speech. Luckily, she rarely tried to cover this ground, probably a prudent decision, given the murky and not altogether constructive works of some of the white liberals who did.