Flannery

by Brad Gooch

  The Irish families using St. Joseph’s Hospital had a double loyalty — to Confederate Memorial Day, and to St. Patrick’s Day, with St. Patrick winning by a nose. The Irish pride parade in March just managed to overshadow the annual Confederate Day parade held each April 26. As O’Connor later wrote to a friend, “I was brought up in Savannah where there was a colony of the Over-Irish. They have the biggest St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere around and generally go nutty on the subject.” She went on to exclaim incredulously that she had even heard her hometown compared to Dublin. Making up most Catholics in Savannah, the Irish were certainly a presence. In the year of her birth, two of the six city aldermen were Irish Catholics and so was the city attorney.

  Yet the Irish Catholics of Savannah were given to a bunker mentality, with some justification. Catholics were expressly banned, along with rum, lawyers, and blacks, under the original Georgia Trust in 1733. While that law had long ago been overwritten, and waves of Irish immigrants arrived during the potato famines of the 1840s, an anti-Catholic law was still on the books at the time of O’Connor’s birth: the Convent Inspection Bill became Georgia law in 1916. Under this weird legislation, grand juries were charged with inspecting Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages, to search for evidence of sexual immorality and to question all the “inmates,” ensuring that they were not held involuntarily. Tom Watson, elected U.S. senator from Georgia in 1920, went so far as to accuse the bishop of Savannah of keeping “white slave pens” of missing girls.

  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 — visible, indeed, for miles around. Clearly audible was the tremulous booming of the big bells every morning, noon, and evening, signaling the praying of the Angelus, in honor of Mary. Like St. Joseph’s Hospital, the cathedral — named St. John the Baptist, some said, to mollify a paranoid Protestant majority — was the handiwork of Captain John Flannery. A generous benefactor of the first cathedral, destroyed by fire in 1898, Captain Flannery then became chairman of the building committee for the present cathedral, dedicated in 1900. One of its three stained-glass windows, depicting a scene from the life of John the Baptist, was donated by him, “In Memory of Mary Ellen Flannery.”

  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 Saf
ety — 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 circles of relatives, especially unmarried female cousins and aunts, she was hardly overlooked. Thanks largely to her mother, she was kept as sealed during her early years as she was as a baby in her Kiddie-Koop — the brand name almost too neatly predicting her identification with fowl as her friends. Yet along with excessive control was entitlement and encouragement; the embossed initials on the perambulator predicted the heightened attention that would be paid, at least by the adults in the family, to each creative and sometimes downright peculiar gesture of this only child.

  O’CONNOR WAS BORN into a clan of strong women, beginning with the family of her mother, the regally named Regina Lucille Cline. She was undoubtedly thinking of her mother’s side of the family when writing to a friend of her relatives, “I don’t think mine have ever been in a world they couldn’t cope with because none of them that I know of have left the 19th century.” Known around the region as “Old Catholic,” both the Cline and Flannery families could be traced back to the Irish Treanors and Hartys, who settled, in the late eighteenth century, in old Locust Grove, in Taliaferro County, Georgia.

  Flannery’s great-grandfather Hugh Donnelly Treanor, who emigrated from county Tipperary in 1824, had a reputation for being well read. He developed a prosperous water-powered grist mill on the Oconee River in Milledgeville, in central Georgia, which became the family seat; as O’Connor later reported in a letter from Milledgeville, “Mass was first said here in my great-grandfather’s hotel room, later in his home on the piano.” After Hugh Treanor died, his widow, O’Connor’s great-grandmother Johannah Harty Treanor, also Irish-born, settled with her family in the Locust Grove community. She donated the land on which Sacred Heart, the Catholic church at the corner of Hancock and Jefferson streets in Milledgeville, was built in 1874.

  One of Hugh Treanor’s daughters, Kate, married Peter J. Cline, a successful dry-goods store owner in Milledgeville, and when she died, her sister, Margaret Ida, married him, in turn. The two bore a total of sixteen children, with Regina, born in 1896, being the second-youngest daughter of the second family. Like Haze’s father in a draft of Wise Blood, Peter Cline’s father was a humble Latin scholar, a schoolteacher in Augusta. Peter’s wealth sufficiently trumped his oddity as a small-town Irish Catholic to allow him to buy an antebellum mansion in Milledgeville soon after the Civil War, to be unanimously elected its mayor in 1889, and to have his every movement covered in the local paper: he set off “a grand pyrotechnic display” in front of his home on Christmas Eve 1890, and left town “for the northern markets” in March 1903.

  As a young daughter of a first family in town, Regina was often sassy. One afternoon when she was walking with some girlfriends, a laborer rolling a wagon along the street called out to her, “Little girl, what you got in your bag?” She snapped her blond head about and startled her playmates by shouting back, “I’ve got the biscuits. Have you got the honey?” After elementary school, she went away to Mount St. Joseph Boarding and Day School for Girls, in Augusta, a convent school supported with funding from its alumna Katie Semmes, who paid for the school’s own Flannery Hall, and whose aunt, Mother Gabriel, served as its Mother Superior. At her high school graduation, in May 1916, Regina recited a Latin poem, “Fortiter et Recte,” while her younger sister, Agnes, graduating as well, played a piano selection from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger.

  Of a visit at age four to the school, O’Connor later wrote to her friend Father James McCown: “I don’t know anybody in Augusta. I visited there once when I was four — at the convent where my cousin was Mother Superior and celebrating her something-or-other jubilee. They had ice cream for dessert in the shape of calla lilies. That was the only time I was ever tempted to join an order — I thought they ate that way every day.”

  This childhood visit impressed her enough for Mount St. Joseph to be echoed in the name Mount St. Scholastica in her story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The rest of the description of its fictional double resembled Sacred Heart Academy, located in downtown Augusta on Ellis Street. It was a redbrick house set back in a garden in the center of town, surrounded by a high black grillwork fence.

  A protracted six years after graduation, Regina Cline met her future husband, Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr., at the wedding of her youngest brother, Herbert Aloysius Cline, to O’Connor’s younger sister Anne Golden O’Connor. The simple ceremony at the Sacred Heart Chapel of the cathedral in Savannah, on July 18, 1922, was characterized in a newspaper announcement as an “interesting, quiet wedding . . . neither bride nor bridegroom having an attendant.” As Regina Cline was twenty-six years old at the time, some of the older women in her family might have felt — like Lucynell Crater for her daughter in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — “ravenous” for a suitor. Apparently the pretty young woman with the heart-shaped face had once been disappointed in love when a Protestant family living in Pennsylvania convinced their son, who was working in Milledgeville, not to marry her on religious grounds.

  Ed O’Connor, also twenty-six, and also on the rebound from an unhappy love affair, made a likely candidate. With a stage actor’s good looks, direct pale blue eyes, and the flair of a mustache, he cut quite a figure in Irish circles about town. As his sister recalled, he loved to “put on his white linen suit, tilt his straw boater over his eye, and go out to Tybee Island dancing of a summer evening.” The oldest of eight children, he was educated at Benedictine College, a military prep school in Savannah, and attended Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmetsburg, Maryland, after failing to secure a spot at Annapolis because of a low math score — a lack of aptitude for numbers inherited by his daughter. Her friend Robert Fitzgerald recalled a photograph of him as “a robust, amused young man. . . . sitting like the hub of a wheel with his five gay younger brothers beside and behind him.”

  After college, Ed O’Connor served between May 1916 and August 1917 in the Georgia National Guard taking part in the “Mexican Expedition” led by General John J. Pershing to patrol the border of New Mexico against incursions by the rebel general of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa, often vilified in the press as a bandit and horse thief. The “Expedition” included punitive invasions into Mexican territory. During World War I, O’Connor was deployed overseas, between April 1918 and May 1919, in the 325th Infantry of the 82nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force, the “All Americans” out of Camp Gordon, Georgia, with their famed “AA” shoulder patches. For helping rout the German Imperial Army from France, he was awarded, at the rank of second lieutenant, a World War I Victory Medal and Victory Button.

  A nagging downside for Regina Cline, in choosing a husband, was Ed O’Connor’s background — his family never achieved the social stature of the Clines of Milledgeville, or the Flannerys of Savannah, though they led comfortable middle-class lives. His grandfather Patrick O’Connor, a wheelwright, emigrated from Ireland with his brother Daniel in 1851, and established a livery stable on Broughton Street. His father, Edward Francis O’Connor, Sr., was a wholesale distributor of candies and tobacco; he was a prominent enough businessman, though, to have been president of the People’
s Bank, and a director of the Hibernia Bank. When Regina Cline met him, her future husband was living with his parents at 115 East Gwinnett Street, working as a salesman in his father’s company, and hoping to make a start in the real estate business.

  Their courtship was quick. Less than three months after they met, one of Regina Cline’s older brothers, Dr. Bernard Cline, placed an engagement announcement in the Savannah Morning News, promising, “The wedding will take place at an early date.” Just a week later, on Saturday, October 14, 1922, the couple was married at Sacred Heart Church, in Milledgeville, by the Reverend T. J. Morrow. The newlyweds then moved into a small set of rooms that the young husband could afford in the recently built Graham Apartments, downtown, on Oglethorpe Square. In March 1923, Katie Semmes generously intervened with a favorable deal so that they could move into the pretty Charlton Street town house that she owned on Lafayette Square. Ed O’Connor agreed to pay a minimal monthly rental fee against a modest purchase price loan, basically a private mortgage, of forty-five hundred dollars, to be repaid when his real estate business took off.

  During their first years on Charlton Street, Regina O’Connor’s cool attitude toward her husband’s family grew more pronounced. From conversations with family members, O’Connor’s close friend, as well as editor and biographer, Sally Fitzgerald, later concluded, “There seems little doubt that there were little failures of kindness and tact on the young wife’s part.” One of the faux pas was the announcement of their child’s impending birth, at an evening party. Small cards accompanying the refreshments declared the happy occasion, so the paternal grandmother-to-be learned the news along with the other casual guests. She was “wounded,” and relations with her daughter-in-law grew more strained. Ed O’Connor insisted that his daughter be named after his mother, but since the name Mary could fit either Mary Elizabeth O’Connor or Mary Ellen Flannery, Regina did not find compliance terribly difficult.