by Brad Gooch
Yet the thrill of being literary coconspirators was an important bond. Appealing, too, for the extremely guarded Mary Flannery, was Betty Boyd’s quiet earnestness. She later portrayed herself as a “horribly serious” college student, her studiousness counterbalanced by O’Connor’s “same dry whimsical humor.” The Corinthian editor Jane Sparks Willingham concurs that “Betty Boyd was a deep-thinking person, not somebody who sat around and cracked jokes about what you did the night before on your date.” Boyd’s sensitivity was evident in an essay published in the fall 1942 Corinthian, tremulously recording her summer arrival at GSCW. She wrote of bidding good-bye to her parents, “the two people I love more than all others”; having “walked up the steps to the library to register”; and looking forward to “companionship with a fine group of smiling, quiet, friendly girls.”
If not handpicked, Betty Boyd was approved by Mrs. O’Connor, and often invited to the Cline Mansion, where she spent “a great many hours” enjoying the “large and high-ceilinged and cool” rooms: “I soon became a regular visitor there and enjoyed many a Sunday dinner at the wonderful long walnut table with its silver napkin rings and the little pot of demitasse coffee served to pour over the ice cream at dessert. They had trouble keeping a cook because of the demands of Miss Katie. . . . In retrospect, this seems to me a somewhat unusual household, but at the time it appeared perfectly unexceptional, and I’m sure they all looked on it as such.” Although Aunt Gertie died just four months after Edward O’Connor, Aunt Mary kept the mansion as a haven for single women by inviting two college teachers as occasional boarders, Miss Bancroft and Miss Kirby.
The most unusual aspect of the house might have escaped the notice of the young Betty Boyd: the group of women was self-sufficient. “Miss Mary was a businessman from the word ‘go,’” reported one Milledgeville resident. The GSCW History professor Dr. Helen Greene has remarked that “Miss Mary . . . inherited many rental properties and often a person in need of a place to live would come to the house to speak with her. The family employed a number of black people for the maintenance of their house and yard, and some of these employees were truly devoted.” The younger sisters contributed as well. Following Edward O’Connor’s death, Dr. Bernard Cline brought Regina to Atlanta to train as a bookkeeper for Sorrel Farm; in the spring of 1941, they received a sweet-milk contract from State Hospital. Aunt Katie worked her entire life at the postal job she secured in the 1920s when elder brother Hugh T. Cline was the Republican-appointee postmaster.
Not only did O’Connor discover, over the course of this summer, her capacity for close friendship, but even the introductory courses she later brushed aside provided intellectual awakening, and at least one challenge. Most important for her was Survey of Humanities, with Dr. Paul Boeson, of the Classical Language Department. Because Dr. Boeson was a Roman Catholic, and a Latin scholar, she trusted him as her first guide to the world of philosophical ideas. On the cover of the winter 1943 Corinthian was a photograph, reprinted from his personal collection, of a nun, in stark wimple and habit, reading a book illuminated by light streaming through a window. “She and Dr. Boeson would talk every day before the class would start,” recalls a fellow student, Lou Ann Hardigne. The following year O’Connor took the second half of his survey, buying the editions of Plato, Aristotle, and the Selected Essays of Montaigne that she would keep her entire life.
More trying was her first college writing class, English 101, General College Composition, with Miss Katherine Kirkwood Scott. Nearly twenty years later, in January 1960, Flannery O’Connor was invited back to the college, as a local literary celebrity, to speak at Chapel in Russell Auditorium. Her topic was “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” but she added personal comments that she left out when giving the same talk some months later at Macon College. These thoughts, tailored to her GSCW audience, suggested insecurities that had haunted her ever since college. She confided that morning: “When I sit down to write, a monstrous reader looms up who sits down beside me and continually mutters, ‘I don’t get it, I don’t see it, I don’t want it.’ Some writers can ignore this presence, but I have never learned how.”
An early reader, who may well have said, “I don’t get it, I don’t see it,” in not so many words, was Miss Katherine Scott. Although she gave O’Connor a grade of 92, Miss Scott was the steel magnolia version of Sister Mary Consolata at Sacred Heart. A writer herself, Scott later published a nostalgic memoir about Milledgeville titled The Land of Lost Content. While O’Connor was in college, Scott delivered a talk billed as “poetic and romantic” on “Greece: A Pioneer in Democracy,” to the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She liked to hold at least one class session at her 1838 Victorian family home that she claimed was haunted; she brought along to school her three prized Boston bulldogs.
“They would not have been a happy combination,” says Mary Barbara Tate, later an English teacher at GSCW, and a friend of Katherine Scott’s. “She thought Flannery had great talent, but she wanted her to write like Jane Austen. She was the kind of teacher who expected to be a mentor, and to be the one who gives out of this box of knowledge.” As Scott was a family friend, and had been in a small fourth-grade class with Regina Cline, both teacher and pupil were perfectly civil. Fran Richardson, a student in the class, has reported, “They would start talking and forget the rest of us were there. I told Mary Flannery once that I wished I could borrow some of her creativity, and she replied, ‘I’d exchange it for your ability to attract men.’” Yet when a journalist asked Scott, decades later, about her famous pupil, she revealed a lifelong ambivalence. “Even then, it was obvious she was a genius,” she replied, “warped, but a genius all the same.”
ON SEPTEMBER 28, the fall semester officially began with the arrival of the entire student body of 948 students, mostly from middle-income families in rural areas and small towns in Georgia, paying a yearly tuition of $67.50. The scale of O’Connor’s campus had suddenly expanded from the three “Choo-Choo” buildings, a few steps in from a side street, to include nearly twenty neoclassical brick buildings, trimmed in limestone, and striped with white Corinthian columns. Set in the middle of Milledgeville, this twenty-three-acre quadrangle of firs and plumed elms, courtyards laced with flowering shrubs, and wide promenades and stone fountains constituted a humble postcard version of a Southern women’s college. “I found my ideal,” wrote Betty Boyd of its “old stately buildings” in her Corinthian piece on “My First Impression of GSCW.”
Much of the charged atmosphere of the time made these years at GSCW indelible in the memories of alumnae from the early forties. Influencing all of their moods was the sensation of a nation now fully mobilized for war on two fronts. Students returning that fall remembered well the evening of December 7, 1941, when they had filed into Russell Auditorium for the annual choral singing of Handel’s Messiah, having just heard news of the bombing attack on Pearl Harbor, resulting the next day in a declaration of war against Japan. “Girls were crying, although we didn’t fully realize why we were crying,” says Louise Simmons Allen of the class of ’44. “The next day I listened carefully to President Roosevelt’s ‘day of infamy’ speech on the radio. Our boyfriends were in the service and writing back about new experiences. The war was always with us.”
From the start of the fall semester of 1942, the women at GSCW gathered regularly in a large room set aside in Porter Hall to roll surgical dressings for the Red Cross, and pack khaki gift kits for soldiers. Many consumer goods popular with students were rationed, including radios, phonograph records, even rolled cigarettes. Bicycles were in vogue, as few of their male dates, or even family members, could spare rationed gasoline for pleasure driving. “Sugar was scarce, but they had Ribbon Cane syrup, and fig preserves, on the table every meal,” recalls one dormitory resident, Virginia Wood Alexander, of “meatless” and “breadless” suppers in Atkinson Dining Hall. Reacting to the shock of a number of unexpected American defeats early in the conflict, one
student confessed in the college paper, the Colonnade: “This war is making us think.”
The young women were also beginning the academic year at a college that had its academic accreditation suddenly pulled the previous December by an irate Governor Eugene Talmadge, not to be restored, retroactively, until January 1943. GSCW was that most unusual of institutions for middle Georgia in 1942: a progressive college, with a faculty of about sixty men and women, including a number of bright lights with PhDs from the University of Chicago and Columbia, some even transplanted Northerners. Embodying its contradictions was its longtime president, Dr. Guy H. Wells. A gruff, cigar-chomping, stout, and jowly gentleman who mangled his grammar and lacked polish, he was also a liberal on race. As early as a talk in Chapel in 1932, he was “calling attention to the prejudice against the negro.” Governor Talmadge was punishing Wells with de-accreditation for his “foreign ideas” in forming a campus “Race Committee.”
With all these challenges, the women who blithely nicknamed themselves “Jessies,” eliding the GSC initials, operated on a cusp between the “Woman Power” called for in the homeland during the Second World War, and the more traditional giddiness of coeds away at college. Especially for women from farm communities, the four-block strip of downtown Milledgeville had its draws: Culver Kidd Drug Store, with its lunch counter specializing in hot dogs and ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a favorite spot to meet cadets from Georgia Military College; Benson’s Bakery; E. Bell’s Beauty Shop, which O’Connor turned into “Palace Beauty Salon” for a college composition exercise; the Darling and Peggie Hale dress shops; and two movie theaters, the Campus and the Co-ed, charging fifteen cents for students, with separate entrances for blacks to segregated balconies.
Known as “Georgia State College for Wallflowers,” because of the reduced number of available cadets and town boys, college house rules still chafed: signing out to go to the movies; ten o’clock curfew; a limit of two dates per week, one in a public parlor, with a chaperone. If Dr. Wells was liberal on race, he was a stickler on female propriety. “I grew up in Madison, Georgia, where we felt safe and as free as butterflies,” complains one alumna, Gladys Baldwin Wallace. “Upon entering GSCW I felt as though I had been clapped into irons. Shortly before, two girls had been suspended for smuggling two Cokes into the dorm. One girl stood outside the window with the Cokes, the other dropped a cord out the upstairs window and hoisted them upwards.” Wallace also remembers sightings of Regina O’Connor, “a hide-bound Southern lady, always wore hat and gloves in public.”
Some of the more serious young women became involved in the YWCA, a center among campus clubs for race politics and social feminism. “People find it odd when I tell them that I was radicalized at this women’s college in Georgia in the forties,” says the 1946 yearbook editor Helen Matthews Lewis. She credits support for such leanings from a cadre of “older spinster-suffragette teachers: strong, independent women who were among the first generation of women to vote.” The director of the YWCA, Emily Cottingham, once boldly drove a car full of GSCW students to Atlanta University to live in the dorm, and eat in the cafeteria, with black women students. When the Milledgeville paper printed an editorial critical of an AFL-CIO speaker, brought to campus by the YWCA, Betty Boyd and Helen Matthews composed a ringing “Letter to the Editor”: “Ours are girls with a vivid realization that the pattern set for the coming world will deeply affect their future well-being and happiness and those of their children.”
Living in an “imposing” terraced home, like the aunts in “The Partridge Festival,” about “five blocks from the business section,” O’Connor, as a freshman, was insulated, either by her design or her family’s, from many of these burning issues among her peers. As she was a “town girl,” she didn’t fully reside in “Jessieville.” “Most of the time Mary Flannery walked home alone when she had a break from classes, but sometimes she stayed in the Town Girls Room,” remembers Zell Barnes Grant, who lived on a farm a mile outside town. “She always had her nose stuck in a book.” Tellingly, the only club O’Connor joined her first year was the Newman Club, which met weekly in the Sacred Heart rectory and included about ten girls, the total number of Roman Catholic students at the college; they all woke up at dawn to attend monthly First Friday masses together.
She kept her friendship with Betty Boyd during all their years at school. “They were so close,” remembers their mutual friend Jane Sparks Willingham. “They had a kindred spirit. Yet Betty was not awkward like Flannery. She was a very polished person, and much more into things on campus.” Within the first few weeks of the fall semester, Boyd had already grown beyond the circumference of summertime at the Cline Mansion. She was living in Terrell, the freshman dormitory, with a roommate coincidentally named Mary Boyd, an English major from Calhoun, Georgia, who worked on the literary magazine. And she became active in student government. The tall, shy, reticent young woman showed such a knack for engaging in policy issues at meetings that she was elected freshman class secretary.
As Betty Boyd’s roommate, Mary Boyd was also invited many times to Sunday dinner at the Cline Mansion. “She was very fond of her mother in Flannery’s way of liking people,” Mary Boyd Gallop has recalled. “Being the only child, the mother seemed just as fond of her girl as were two maiden aunts living there.” Yet there was tension between Betty’s two friends. Mary Flannery once told Betty Boyd that she found her roommate “just a bit too pedantic.” More to the point, Mary Boyd made constant comments along the lines of her observation, years later, that “O’Connor never seemed interested in the opposite sex. She was happy just being herself.” Mary Flannery did avoid dating. Yet she was uncomfortable at having such a private topic openly discussed.
Her defense was to cast Mary Boyd as a husband hunter, or simply boy crazy. O’Connor’s letters to Betty Boyd in the years following graduation are peppered with jokes about Mary Boyd and marriage, obviously continuing a college routine. In 1949, O’Connor received a letter from Mary Boyd asking point-blank if she planned to get married. “Now let me see,” O’Connor pretended to muse. “Do I or do I not want to get married?” When Betty Boyd announced her own impending wedding later that year, O’Connor’s humorous response was: “This should reassure Mary Boyd.” Pushing the matter to its extreme, O’Connor wrote Betty Boyd Love, in 1951, that she expected a letter from Mary “shortly, probably asking me if I like men, or some such.”
If Mary Flannery stood on the sidelines of the mating rituals of many of her fellow Jessies, she was just as removed from their liberal campus politics. “We kept trying to get her to come to these things,” says Helen Matthews Lewis, of the YWCA events. “But she was apolitical or nonpolitical.” She saw leading campus characters as figures of fun, rather than as serious role models. The “country bumpkin” side of President Wells impressed her more than his being “ahead of his time” on race issues. Six years after graduation, she wrote to Betty Boyd, in her collegiate tone, “I read in the local paper where Guy H. Wells was going somewhere to give a talk entitled, ‘Humor of Many Lands.’ Now, I said, ain’t that a laugh?” Bringing up the “spinster-suffragette” professors to Betty Hester in 1955, she skipped over their social feminism for a funny remark that turned on a novel by the Atlanta author Frances Newman: “she did write a novel called The Hard Boiled Virgin I find, which now I must read. I am going to see if they have it in the GSCW Library — the title may keep it out of there, a natural inconsistency, since half the teachers at that place are surely such.”
The first official gathering of the entering freshman class, in September 1942, was a formal tea at the Old Executive Mansion, the residence of President Wells. Once home to Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown, as well as to General Sherman during his March to the Sea, the Palladian high Greek Revival governor’s mansion, with its soaring fifty-foot rotunda and gilded dome, was located on the same block as the Cline Mansion. Mary Flannery could spy its massive rose-colored masonry walls from her bedroom window, just beyond the backyard
where, according to Betty Boyd Love, she still “kept ducks.” Yet her family had to force her to walk around the block to the social event. “Flannery did not want to go but was pressured into it,” remembers their classmate Harriet Thorp Hendricks. “She donned the required long dress — but wore her tennis shoes.” When asked why she was sitting alone in a corner, she replied, “Well, I’m anti-social.”
A tradition that elicited nothing but scorn from her was Rat Day, which began as Freshman Initiation Day in the thirties. A mass hazing of the freshman class, Rat Day commenced at four thirty in the morning. By evening, freshmen who had not shown enough servility were put on trial before a screaming jury of juniors in a Rat Court in Peabody Auditorium. Among the punishments meted out, in a 1943 Rat Court reported in the Colonnade: “Connie Howell was sentenced to wash her mouth out with soap. Sarah Pittard was seen sitting on a Coke bottle and washing clothes.” Earlier that day, Mary Flannery had been tested by just such a group of hazing sophomore girls, ordering her to wear an onion around her neck. When she flatly refused, they commanded her to kneel and beg their pardon. “I will not,” she responded with disdain, and walked off.
Even more trying for her than Miss Scott’s creative writing class was English 102, the sequential General College Composition, taught that fall by Dr. William T. Wynn. Known to his students as “Willie T,” the Southern-lit buff did not give the young writer even the benefit of the doubt of a high grade; she earned an 83, keeping her off the first-quarter dean’s list. “Dr. Wynn was a gentleman of the old school who was soon to retire,” reported a class member, Kathryn Donan Kuck. “He did not enjoy her style of writing and he tried hard to change it. He wanted her to be ladylike and graceful.” When the time came to declare a major, she chose Social Science to avoid taking two requirements for the English major taught only by Dr. Wynn, a grammar course, using a little textbook he had written, and Shakespeare. “He was a laughingstock,” says Mary Barbara Tate. “She just did not want to have him again. That’s how she evaded him.”