June 30, 2024

Re: Flannery O’Connor, the South, and the Humiliation of Racism

“The devil cannot endure to be mocked.”

— St. Thomas More, A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1553)

Several years ago, in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd (1973-2020) and the civil unrest that followed, it appeared that the great Southern writer Flannery O’Connor was on the verge of being “canceled.” Doubtless this was a sign of the times, but the matter went deeper than a few anonymous trolls on Twitter. Paul Elie, a Senior Fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkeley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, triggered the controversy with his June 2020 article in The New Yorker “How Racist was Flannery O’Connor?” In less than two months, O’Connor ‘s reputation was damaged to such an extent that Loyola University Maryland—a private Catholic institution in Baltimore, founded by the Jesuit priest and educator John Early (1814-73) in the mid-nineteenth century—removed her name from a dormitory hall on campus. Just like that, one of America’s greatest fiction writers, and undoubtedly one of the major cultural figures of modern Catholicism, was rendered a persona non grata among the nation’s intelligentsia.

For a number of reasons, however, O’Connor’s legacy has proven sturdier than expected. In August 2020, Fordham-based scholar Angela Alaimo O’Donnell sharply criticized Elie’s article. As she wrote, “It is confusing, it is irresponsible, and it is an attempt to make the erroneous claim that he is the only critic ever to deal frankly with O’Connor’s complex attitude toward race.” According to O’Donnell, who at the time had already published three books about O’Connor, including Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (2020), Elie’s piece eschews careful scholarship for hot-button grandstanding. Other commentators agreed, including Chicago-based author Amy Alznauer and Pepperdine professor Jessica Hooten Wilson. For his part, Elie countered with a response in the liberal Catholic magazine Commenweal, insisting that his analysis of O’Connor’s racism was largely based on O’Donnell’s own research. It was O’Donnell, after all, who first called attention to private remarks that, in May 1964, O’Connor made to the avant-garde playwright Maryat Lee (1923-89). While O’Connor’s comments, read in context, seem to betray an attempt to needle her leftwing friend, they are nevertheless offensive. Elie is certainly right on this point, though his subsequent claim is equally damning. In contrast to O’Donnell and others, he does not view O’Connor’s stories as “anti-racist parables” but, rather, as “barbed and paradoxical” tales that stereotype Black characters and pardon white ones. That scholars such as O’Donnell refuse to acknowledge this point indicates what Elie calls a “stumbling block” that serves “to diminish the reality of racism in our society.”

While I have written about and podcasted on O’Connor before, I do not consider myself an O’Connor specialist. Thus I have not followed this debate closely as it has unfolded since the summer of 2020. Nevertheless, even a cursory glance at pop culture would suggest that the anticipated cancellation of O’Connor did not come to fruition. To cite an obvious case in point: in May 2024, well-known actor (and lesser-known writer) Ethan Hawke released Wildcat—a biographical drama about O’Connor, which used a number of the Georgia author’s short stories to illustrate her struggles to pursue a literary career amid a life-altering diagnosis of SLE (systemic lupus erythematosus). While Wildcat does not promise to be a blockbuster, Hawke was nevertheless able to recruit a number of prominent actors to join the project: Liam Neeson, Laura Linney, Steve Zahn, and Hawke’s daughter Maya, who plays O’Connor with aplomb. Moreover, in the wake of Wildcat, a rash of articles, interviews, and reviews appeared, many of them positive. If nothing else, this level of attention suggests that the issues raised by Elie have not come to define O’Connor’s legacy. She is an author and a thinker to be reckoned with, not forgotten.

Still, it would be a mistake to assume that Elie’s criticism is irrelevant. Questions about race still permeate American culture, and doubtless the prominence of race in O’Connor’s works will continue to divide opinion. In what follows, then, I have no pretensions of “solving” the wider debate. Indeed, I even have a degree of sympathy with O’Connor’s critics: reading her in the wake of recent political turmoil is truly jarring. Characters in her stories frequently and variously use the “N-word.” Sometimes this term is used derisively, but at many points (and perhaps with even greater shock value) the “N-word” is employed with casual indifference. Those who say it are unafraid of negative repercussions; some even invoke it as a term of endearment—a paradox that is both emotionally harrowing and historically accurate. To be offended by such characters is appropriate.

Of course, one aspect of O’Connor’s reception, particularly since the summer of 2020, is trying to tease out the extent to which her own views are reflected in her fiction. I don’t intend to dig into that topic here. However, I do want to offer a critique of Elie’s claim that O’Connor’s stories fail to censure the Jim Crow South. While it is true that O’Connor tackles the issue of racism obliquely—none of her works could be compared to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s landmark novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852)—I believe that they are revelatory (no pun intended!) in a different way. For O’Connor, the stain of slavery and the residue of white oppression can be rendered in ways other than a villainous figure such as Beecher Stowe’s slave owner Simon Legree. As she portrays it, the upshot of racism is also a form of humiliation—a shameful outcome of human stupidity, self-deception, and ultimately alienation from God. In this way, racism is tied to human sinfulness writ large.

In a number of stories, O’Connor makes these points precisely in and through Black characters. As will be seen, these characters lack the three-dimensionality of proper protagonists. This fact may be of biographical significance—perhaps O’Connor did not want to presume familiarity with Black culture—but on a literary-critical level the main point is what they reveal about white Southerners and, indeed, about human nature itself. I will make this case by way of a few short stories by O’Connor, starting with her 1955 classic “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

“A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Doubtless O’Connor’s most famous tale, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” does not address racism in direct fashion. Instead, it startlingly juxtaposes the hypocrisy of the Jim Crow South with the mysterious grace of God. O’Connor personifies this tension in the form of an Atlanta grandmother, who is preparing for a vacation with her curmudgeonly son Bailey and his wife and two children. The family intends to travel to Florida, while the grandmother lobbies for a trip to Tennessee, citing the escape of a murderous criminal known as The Misfit, who is reported to be fleeing southward.

From the outset, it is clear that O’Connor treats the grandmother as a mindless product of a broken social code. She is blind both to her own sins as well as to those of the larger society. This point is exemplified in a key early scene. While en route to Florida, the grandmother espies a Black child from their passing car:

“Oh look at the little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.

“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star [the grandmother’s granddaughter] said.

“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little n******¹ in the country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said.

Here the grandmother actually uses two slurs: the word “pickaninny” is originally derived from the Portuguese pequenino (“boy” or “young child”), but in the nineteenth century it came to be associated with crude, cartoonish depictions of Black children, especially in minstrelsy. To be sure, the link to minstrel shows is evident in the grandmother’s comments, as she imagines the Black child as a “picture.” But a picture of what? June Star notices that the boy is poor—a snapshot of an inequitable societal hierarchy. The grandmother agrees but is unmoved. In point of fact, her use of racial pejoratives indicates a tacit endorsement of this social stratification.

O’Connor’s genius here is to not say too much: she allows the “picture” to speak for itself, giving the reader sufficient freedom to ponder its meaning. Just as the Black boy is a kind of picture, so is the grandmother—an image of what Hannah Arendt (1906-75) famously called “the banality of evil.” The grandmother is oblivious to the falseness of her decorum; she does not perceive her complicity with injustice. In a sense, then, she too has been doomed, albeit to a life of twisted ignorance, resistant even to the search for truth.

And yet, as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” comes to a close, the scales fall from the old woman’s eyes. The grandmother and her family are in a single-car accident on an abandoned country road. There they have a chance encounter with The Misfit and his gang, who, one-by-one, murder the family members. The grandmother pleads for her life, encouraging The Misfit to pray for God’s help and to turn towards a better life: “Jesus!” the old lady cried. “You’ve got good blood! I know you wouldn’t shoot a lady! I know you come from nice people! Pray!” Yet, much as the grandmother is indifferent to the Black boy’s plight, so is The Misfit unmoved. He lacks faith in a higher purpose:

If [Jesus] did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.

This is a moment of tragic identity between the two characters. The grandmother reaches out and touches The Misfit, calling him “one of her babies.” He recoils “as if a snake had bitten him” and shoots her three times in the chest. Whether or not the grandmother is redeemed is an open question, but, from The Misfit’s perspective, her final act of graciousness cannot undo a lifetime of hypocrisy: “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” he concludes.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge”

O’Connor died on August 3, 1964. She was just 39 years old. Roughly six months later, her final collection of short stories was published. Entitled Everything That Rises Must Converge, the book begins with an eponymous short story that O’Connor first issued in 1961. It represents her most direct critique of the norms and attitudes of the Old South.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge” focuses on the Chestny family—mother and son. The former, identified only as Mrs. Chestny, is an aging Southern belle, who pines for the etiquette of yesterday. Her son Julian is a progressive intellectual, who champions the blooming Civil Rights Movement. As Julian sees it, his views on race are enlightened, though his own treatment of Blacks contains overt traces of condescension. Indeed, Julian’s liberality is more a refutation of his mother than an embrace of African Americans—a trait that ultimately secures the family’s ruin.

The story’s plot unfolds on a recently integrated public bus. Black passengers now share the same privileges as white ones, and Julian intends to demonstrate his approval of this new arrangement. First, he sits next to a Black passenger—a dignified man, who is quietly reading the newspaper—after his mother comments, “Now you see why I won’t ride on these buses by myself.” However, the Black man ignores Julian, deflating the impact of his grand gesture. A few minutes later, two more Black passengers embark—a mother and her young son, Doppelgänger of Mrs. Chestny and Julian.

This time, however, Julian fears that his mother will be nice: “He had the terrible intuition that when they got off the bus together, his mother would open her purse and give the little boy a penny. The gesture would be as natural to her as breathing.” So it happens. Upon disembarking, Mrs. Chestny offers the child a penny, but the boy’s mother, already annoyed by the older woman’s playful haughtiness, reacts violently. She slaps Mrs. Chestny, exclaiming, “He don’t take nobody’s pennies!” Much like the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Mrs. Chestny is humbled by this encounter. In the anger of her maternal counterpart, she is made aware of her own sins. Julian, however, is not. Sensing that the Black woman has justified his liberal views, he censures his pained and woozy mother: “What all this means is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn.” Soon afterwards, Mrs. Chestny collapses on the sidewalk and dies.

Notably, the expression “everything that rises must converge” is taken from the work of the Jesuit priest and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955):

Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.

In Teilhard’s work, the notion of universal convergence involves the so-called “Omega Point,” that is, the eschatological point of unification whereby all things become one in Christ, who is the divine Logos of creation. Whether or not O’Connor is using this concept aspirationally or ironically is hard to say. Perhaps it is a little bit of both. Certainly O’Connor does not envision a political unification effectuated by activists such as Julian. For her, the burning away of personal sin is a necessary precondition of any higher unity. Hence, as “Everything That Rises Must Converge” reaches its dénouement, Mrs. Chestny’s humiliation has created a channel, as it were, for God’s truth. On this reading, the Black mother’s violence is not righteous per se, but it does occasion a kind of examen—an earnest reflection on one’s life and on where it fits in God’s plan for the world. Social justice, O’Connor suggests, must start here.

“The Enduring Chill”

“The Enduring Chill” is the fourth short story in Everything That Rises Must Converge, but it was first written in 1958—a year of ongoing racial tension, both in the United States and abroad. That O’Connor would tap into such real-life events may seem surprising—scholars tend to stress her religious sensibilities at the expense of her socio-political commentary—but O’Connor herself saw no such contradiction. As she put it in her 1963 talk at Georgetown University, later published as “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”: “The eye sees what it has been given to see by concrete circumstances, and…the imagination reproduces what by some related gift it is able to make live.”

“The Enduring Chill” begins with a student named Asbury, who is returning to his Southern home after a stint in New York City. For Asbury, this homecoming is hardly a welcome one. Not only is he in poor health, but, to make matters worse, his convalescence must take place amid the religious and social repression of his family life. In New York City, Asbury has styled himself as a cosmopolitan artist, who champions the common man and the oppressed. He has even begun to convert his political sympathies into literature, and a silver lining of his Southern upbringing is that it gives him an opportunity to do fieldwork: “[Asbury] had been writing a play about the Negro and he had wanted to be around them for a while to see how they really felt about their condition.”

Indeed, a year or so before he began feeling ill, Asbury had volunteered to work in his mother’s dairy, primarily to associate with a pair of Black field hands, Morgan and Randall. A peculiar tension, however, characterizes their interactions. As O’Connor writes:

When [Asbury] and Randall were in the milk house pouring the fresh milk into the cans, [Asbury] had picked up the jelly glass the Negroes drank out of and, inspired, had poured himself a glassful of the warm milk and drained it down. Randall had stopped pouring and had remained, half-bent, over the can, watching him. “She don’t ‘low that,” he said. “That the thing she don’t ‘low.” Asbury poured out another glassful and handed it to him. “She don’t ‘low it,” he repeated. “Listen,” Asbury said hoarsely, “the world is changing. There’s no reason I shouldn’t drink after you or you after me!” “She don’t ‘low noner us to drink this here milk,” Randall said.

In time, Asbury was convinced that Morgan and Randall were not ready to join him in the fight for social change, and he soon returned to the Northeast. And yet, as O’Connor goes on to show, this was a misunderstanding. Asbury was trying to use the Black field hands in order to find existential meaning and purpose. Morgan and Randall have a sense of communion that he lacks. As O’Connor puts it, “When they said anything to him, it was as if they were speaking to an invisible body located to the right or left of where he actually was.”

Indeed, in an ironic twist, Asbury’s subsequent sickness stems from his own racial isolation. It turns out that he is suffering from brucellosis (or “undulant fever”), which one can contract from drinking unpasteurized milk. Morgan and Randall, then, knew well the dangers of drinking unpasteurized milk from the dairy. And yet, they refrained from telling Asbury, perhaps because they were afraid of correcting their boss’s son, or perhaps because they were humored by a condescending white man doing damage to himself. Either way, the socio-economic stratification of Southern society has led to Asbury’s illness—an infection that is prone to relapses, despite not being fatal. Indeed, as Asbury lies sick in bed, the two Black workers pay him a visit:

“You certly does look well,” [said Morgan].

“I’m about to die,” Asbury said irritably.

“You looks fine,” Randall said.

“You be up and around in a few days,” Morgan predicted.

They know Asbury will be “fine,” because they know why he is sick. Just as Asbury’s fever is “undulant”—coming and going, like waves along the seashore—so does racism ripple through society in unexpected ways. Pompous, privileged, and self-centered, Asbury views Morgan and Randall as pawns in his personal quest for artistic and political importance. Thus he confuses their hesitance with ignorance; he assumes that their skin color precludes knowledge. Racism, as a form of sin, represents a very real and life-altering “enduring chill.”

Conclusion

Flannery O’Connor’s depictions of African Americans suggest that she does not deeply understand Black culture. Her panoply of Black characters—including, but hardly limited to, the “pickaninny,” the mother who slaps Mrs. Chestny, and the field hands Morgan and Randall—are far from well-rounded portraits. Yet, while one might wonder what this fact says about O’Connor’s own attitude towards African Americans, it is nevertheless clear that her Black characters expose the ironic absurdities of racism. She undermines the hypocrisy of the Jim Crow South, not by issuing grand political statements, but by mocking it. Such an approach is not meant to obscure tragedy—look no further than the demise of the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—but it does cast racism against the larger backdrop of human sin itself. For if racism is evil—and it certainly is—then it cannot merely be legislated away. As O’Connor famously wrote, “Evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured.”

1. I will use this symbol as a proxy for O’Connor’s use of the “N-word.” This is not a form of censorship—I think O’Connor’s stories would lose their transformational power if they were shorn of offensiveness—but there’s no need to explicitly repeat the “N-word” in order to understand O’Connor stories.