by Brad Gooch
Ed O’Connor’s sense of being outvoted by the women in his wife’s family may well have increased in late 1929 — four years after their daughter’s birth — when Mrs. Semmes departed Monterey Square to move into her Greek Revival home at 211 East Charlton Street, adjacent to, and dwarfing, the O’Connors’ house. With her, she brought not only lots of construction work, but also her unmarried cousin Annie Treanor, an aunt of Regina O’Connor. A few years later, she was joined by Miss M. C. Hynes and the widow Mrs. Fitzpatrick Forston. An early photograph of “Aunt Annie” shows a severe woman in wire-rim spectacles, her white hair gathered in a bun, wearing a long, dark skirt and sweater, dark stockings, and lace-up oxfords, evidently one of those family members that O’Connor felt had never “left the 19th century.” A cousin recalled these Treanor aunts as having a penchant for the word “’umbled, omitting the ‘h.’ Humility was a great message in our family.”
O’Connor’s early childhood is captured in a collection of family photographs. In the earliest, a series of studio portraits taken for a family Christmas card, the little girl is smiling and charming, legs crossed on a stage prop of a bench, showing all the signs of being, as one family friend has recalled, “beautifully cared for” — in some she is hugging a doll; in others she is posed next to her mother, who reveals a sultry beauty as she stares quietly into the camera. In these staged portraits, mother and daughter look together into the camera. In pictures with her father, the girl turns her beaming face toward his, and he returns her smile. Both parents communicate fond doting in all the shots. A solo portrait of O’Connor, age two or three, sitting on an ottoman, brow furrowed, satin bow in hair, frowning with full concentration into the curled page of a book on her lap, reveals a remarkably self-possessed expression of adult intensity.
As a little girl, O’Connor’s appearance favored her father. She bore his direct gaze and his clean, handsome features. This resemblance is striking in her confirmation portrait, taken at seven years old. In a dress trimmed in white lace, with her short, straight brown hair combed slickly to the side, she is the mirror image of her clear-eyed father. The adult Flannery O’Connor would become fascinated by the cloning of features between generations, considering them as a sign of some spiritual bond. In “A View of the Woods,” the grandfather finds his granddaughter Mary Fortune’s face “a small replica of the old man’s,” and feels “she was like him on the inside too.” In “The Artificial Nigger,” Mr. Head’s ten-year-old nephew Nelson has a “face very much the same shape as the old man’s.” Calhoun is horrified in “The Partridge Festival” when his aunt Bessie reminds him, “You look very like Father.”
The affinity between Ed O’Connor and his daughter was certainly “on the inside too.” His pride in her could amount to infatuation. From 1927 until 1931, he included a separate listing for “Miss Mary Flannery O’Connor” in the Savannah City Directory, an unusual, whimsical gesture for a preschool child. Another fond touch shows up in a 1936 diocesan bulletin, “Roll of the Female Orphanage Society,” crediting Mary Flannery O’Connor as a contributor rather than her parents. A coconspirator in her world of childhood fantasy, wishing sometimes to be a writer himself, he slipped her notes signed “King of Siam.” In their games, she dubbed herself “Lord Flannery O’Connor.” She would hide little poems or drawings under his breakfast plate, or tuck them into his napkin for him to discover when he sat down at the kitchen table. He liked to fold up these tokens of affection, stick them in his wallet, and show them off to friends during the day.
Her relationship with her mother was just as intimate, though more fraught. Regina told a friend of having to spank her six-year-old daughter to make her wear hose and a dress for her first piano recital. A cartoon that O’Connor drew when she was nine years old shows a child walking with her father and mother. In a balloon coming from the mother’s mouth are the words: “Hold your head up, Mary Flannery, and you are just as bad, Ed.” To which the girl, dragging along, snidely replies, “I was readin where someone died of holding up their head.” As a family friend summed up the difference in attitude of the parents, “Ed would not have put the kind of pressure on her that Regina did. He liked her just as she was.” Regina’s devotion to her daughter often took the form of trying, unsuccessfully, to mold her into the perfect Southern-style little girl.
Yet there is no evidence that O’Connor’s childhood was troubled. As far as pressuring went, she was quite capable of digging in her heels. Her self-confidence was clear in her bold act of calling her parents by their first names — they were “Regina” and “Ed” to her from early on. They were also her first audience. When the O’Connors went out for the evening, their little daughter, in the care of the babysitter, would write letters, or make drawings, to surprise them. One of these was done on a piece of white cardboard bent in half, with a red silk cord threaded through two holes at the fold. On one side, she traced her mother’s initials “R.C.O’C.,” pasting a cutout drawing, childishly hand-colored, of a pretty little girl on a bridge, watching ducks swimming in the stream below. On the flip side, for her father, “E.F.O’C.,” she glued an illustration of an old clockmaker, peering intently through wire-rim glasses, tinkering at his worktable.
AN EVENTFUL YEAR in Mary Flannery’s life was 1931. Not only had she been filmed by Pathe News, but she took her first steps into an ever-so-slightly larger world by entering the first grade at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls. This parochial school was housed in the Gerard mansion, an early-nineteenth-century, three-story converted private home, with an iron lattice balcony across its second floor, and a low iron picket fence. Though St. Vincent’s was located a mere forty yards from the O’Connors’ door, each morning the child would make the brief walk to the front gate holding her mother’s hand, taking part in a ritual in which, as one student recalls, “All the mothers walked the little girls to school.”
Outside the stone walls of the elegant box-shaped school, with its eaves and pillared portico, Savannah, like much of America, was coping with the aftershocks of the stock market crash of 1929 and the deepening, worldwide Great Depression: real estate values were declining, businesses stagnating, property rapidly changing hands, grand town houses being cut into apartments renting for as little as eight dollars a month. The poorer population was moving downtown, where charity food lines were appearing for the first time since Sherman’s occupation. An economic downshift was felt in middle-class homes as well. O’Connor later claimed that at the height of the Depression her family had eaten ground round steak and turnip greens for supper “every day.”
O’Connor’s father had invested all of his business hopes in the vulnerable real estate market. The year his daughter entered the first grade, the downward graph of Edward O’Connor’s business career was already visible in the Savannah City Directory. In 1927, he had officially entered his new business for the first time, listing himself as manager of the Dixie Realty Company. In 1927 and 1928, the company’s most successful years, he took out display ads pitching his company as buying, selling, renting, and insuring properties. In 1930, he added the Dixie Construction Company to the business entry, but by the next year the affiliated venture had disappeared. At the height of the economy, in 1928, Dixie Realty Company was one of a hundred companies placing such ads; by 1930, one year into the Depression, that number had already decreased to eighty-five.
Whatever tensions the girls entering St. Vincent’s were sensing in their own homes, the school maintained a nearly medieval aura of Latinate order and spirituality. Run by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Mary Flannery was born, St. Vincent’s was an enclave of parochialism of the sort she would later label the “novena-rosary tradition.” Each morning the “big girls” of grades five through eight, with their classes on the top floor, lined the long interior staircase, while the “little girls,” including Mary Flannery during most of her years at the school, remained standing in their classrooms on the floor below, adding their high,
quivering voices to sing the opening daily hymn, “Veni Creator Spiritus,” or “Come, Holy Ghost.” Prayers were then dutifully recited before classes, before and after lunch, and at the dismissal.
In preparation for a special “Communion Sunday” during the school year, the girls gathered before intricately carved, dark wood confessionals, with velvet drapes and sliding panels — two at the back, two at the transept at the front of the cathedral — to count their sins and rehearse the formula of the sacrament of penance: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” They fasted from midnight on the day before the Communion, and, like their parents and other family members, abstained from eating meat on Fridays. For a florid May Day procession, all the girls — 324 of them, taught by nine sisters the year she began — lined up in matching white dresses, clutching bouquets of spring flowers, and marched into the cathedral to recite the rosary and sing sentimental Marian hymns: “O Mary we crown thee with flowers today / Queen of the angels, queen of the May.”
She caught glimpses, too, of the activities of boys — unfamiliar outsiders in her enclosed world. Mostly these were among the 340 pupils of Marist Brothers School, run, in 1931, by nine Brothers of Mary. Underlining the awkward divide between the two companion schools and genders, Dan O’Leary, enrolled at Marist while O’Connor was at St. Vincent’s, recalls being enlisted to deliver a note to one of the nuns: “I delivered my message, and the sister said, ‘Thank you, son.’ I said, ‘You’re welcome, brother.’ All the girls cracked up and I retreated with my ears burning.” On Sundays, chosen Marist boys served as acolytes or altar boys, dressed in white surplices, little hats, and Buster Brown collars, swinging censers and reciting brief Latin responses at the Italianate marble high altar of the cathedral, or singing, as boy sopranos, at midnight mass.
In such a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world, O’Connor found herself a misfit from the start. In an autobiographical sketch for a Magazine Writing course at Iowa, she remembered herself as “a pidgeo-ntoed, only-child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex” that did little to reassure her parents of their good fortune. Showing her irascibility at St. Vincent’s, she bragged of substituting “St. Cecilia” for “Rover” in third-grade composition exercises such as “Throw the ball to Rover.” A thinly disguised only child named “Mary Flemming” in a student story of O’Connor’s wears orthopedic “Tarso-Supernator-ProperBuilt shoes” and needs to “take toe exercises every night and remember to walk on the outsides of her feet.”
This bravado that O’Connor adopts on the page when telling tales of her childhood was not always the tone of the earliest memories of her classmates. Rather, Mary Flannery was usually pegged as quiet, painfully shy, self-reliant but remote, the introvert on the sidelines whose cousin remembers her wearing “some sort of corrective shoes, she had a distinctive kind of loping walk.” On rare occasions when she went with other little girls to Broughton Street, the main shopping strip downtown, she clutched her pocketbook tightly in her hand. “If I took off with some of the other children to go through Colonial Cemetery, she’d stand on the side and watch,” a girlfriend remembers of their shortcuts. “She would not go through the cemetery, no way.” She was never seen at the playground two blocks from her home, though she did walk the eight or nine blocks to the movie theater, with a friend, and roller-skated around the block.
The six-year-old girl was much more likely to be found upstairs, secluded, in her small, pine-floored corner bedroom, with one east window facing Katie Semmes’s home, and two rear windows looking down into the family’s walled backyard and the Charlton Lane service alley behind. In this hideaway, sparsely furnished with two single, matching, unpainted, pine beds — camp cots of a Sears, Roebuck catalog style — a little green doll’s bed, and a narrow closet full of clothes, many sewn for her by her mother, she kept the precious crayons and paper she preferred as gifts to candy and sweets. Removed from all the comings and goings downstairs, she spent most of her free time making drawings, usually of birds. As she later wrote of her sketches to her friend Betty Hester, “I suppose my father toted around some of my early productions. I drew — mostly chickens, beginning at the tail, the same chicken over and over, beginning at the tail.”
Sometime during 1931, she picked up a pencil and blue crayon and traced a jumble of capital letters from the alphabet she had been learning onto the thickly lined, pulpy page of a school tablet — an E, a backward D, other shaky letters at odd angles, while a steadier adult hand modeled letters on the same page. Next to the scattered alphabet, she attempted the unfinished form of a face with large, round eyes and dark, pronounced pupils. When she turned the page over, she completed, much more surely, an instantly recognizable turkey with featherless crown and wattle, its feet planted on the ground, and a smiling child in a tall, square hat gleefully flying overhead. Cut in the shape of a two-inch square, just the right size for her father’s wallet, this joyful depiction of whimsical role reversal — grounded bird, soaring child — survives as her earliest cartoon.
Taught that first year by Sister Mary Consuela, O’Connor earned decent grades. She did well in Reading, 93, but her overall average, 88, was brought down by her worst grade, 81, in Arithmetic, lowered even further to a 70 her second year, when she was taught by Sister Mary Franzita. Her strongest showing was in Catechism, where she scored 96 her first year, and 98 her second. A graded class in Roman Catholic theology, Catechism was taught at the time in American parochial schools and churches using a pale blue hardcover edition of the Baltimore Catechism. The book was organized in a simple Q-and-A format, leading students to memorize rote answers to fundamental questions in a singsong litany with the nuns:
Q: Who made us?
A: God made us.
Q: Why did God make us?
A: He made us to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.
Q: From whom do we learn to know, love, and serve God?
A: We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches us through the Catholic Church.
O’Connor later revisited this set piece of her childhood in her story “The Enduring Chill,” when a large, red-faced country priest, blind in one eye and introducing himself as “Fahther Finn — from Purrgatory,” examines Asbury, an arty intellectual who has been living too long in Manhattan. To the primary question, “Who made you?” Asbury replies, “Different people believe different things about that,” and to “Who is God?” he says, “God is an idea created by man.” Channeling some of the no-nonsense faith of the priests and teaching nuns of St. Vincent’s, Father Finn grumbles, “You are a very ignorant boy.”
A flash of the contrary girl O’Connor was on her way to becoming was revealed as early as the first grade. Each Sunday, a mandatory children’s mass was held in the basement of the cathedral, and the nuns devoted several minutes on Monday mornings to addressing their attendance records. With the support of her parents, she always attended the later adult mass. Indeed, when the children’s mass was once shifted from eight to ten a.m., the O’Connor family chose to switch to the earlier mass. Each Monday morning, Leonora Jones, another first-grader, whose family lived near a golf course outside town, and Mary Flannery, who lived near the church and had no such excuse, would be lined against the blackboard to explain their absences. As Jones recalled of her bold classmate, “She’d stand there and tell sister, ‘The Catholic Church does not dictate to my family what time I go to Mass.’ I was five and she was six, and I knew she was different.”
In the third and fifth grades, O’Connor was taught by Sister Mary Consolata, “just off the boat” from Ireland, and installed as a teacher while still very young. “When we were in the third grade, Sister Consolata used to give Mary Flannery a real hard time about her compositions,” recalled a classmate who lived a few doors down at 302 East Charlton Street. “She said that she always wrote about ducks and chickens and she sai
d she never wanted to hear about another duck or a chicken.” Though discouraged by the nun in her obsessive fixation on birds, the young girl was getting lots of outside support, not only from Katie Semmes, a bird lover herself, but also from her uncle Dr. Bernard Cline, a bird-watcher, who was later profiled in the Atlanta Constitution for keeping a “backyard quail farm.” Yet Sister Mary Consolata remained unimpressed. “Nothing remarkable at all about her as a student,” she later observed curtly. “She was a little forward with adults.”
O’Connor did more than write stories starring chickens to antagonize Sister Mary Consolata. Though braces were rare, during the Depression, because they were expensive, Mary Flannery, like Mary Flemming in her untitled early story, had a mouth “full of wire where her teeth were being straightened and there were small rubber bands that hooked onto the top and bottom and had to be changed twice a day.” Lillian Dowling, one of twenty-six third-graders crowded in a class picture with O’Connor, everyone outfitted with Mickey and Minnie Mouse ears and shoes — Disney having just formed the original Mickey Mouse Club in 1929 — remembers that she sometimes “pulled the rubber bands and let them sail across the room,” or caked them with peanut butter. One day, she brought snuff to school after observing black servants at home pull out their bottom lips to insert a pinch. To discourage others from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes bring castor oil sandwiches.