In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens (6 page)

Now we are facing a large green rise. To our left calves are grazing; beyond them there are woods. To our right there is the barn we used, looking exactly as it did twenty-two years ago. It is high and weathered silver and from it comes the sweet scent of peanut hay. In front of it, a grove of pecans. Directly in front of us over the rise is what is left of the house.

“Well,” says my mother, “it's still standing. And,” she adds with wonder, “just look at my daffodils!”

In twenty-two years they have multiplied and are now blooming from one side of the yard to the other. It is a typical abandoned sharefarmer shack. Of the four-room house only two rooms are left, the others have rotted away. These two are filled with hay.

Considering the sad state of the house it is amazing how beautiful its setting is. There is not another house in sight. There are hills, green pastures, a ring of bright trees, and a family of rabbits hopping out of our way. My mother and I stand in the yard remembering. I remember only misery: going to a shabby segregated school that was once the state prison and that had, on the second floor, the large circular print of the electric chair that had stood there; almost stepping on a water moccasin on my way home from carrying water to my family in the fields; losing Phoebe, my cat, because we left this place hurriedly and she could not be found in time.

“Well, old house,” my mother says, smiling in such a way that I almost see her rising, physically, above it, “one good thing you gave us. It was right here that I got my first washing machine!”

In fact, the only pleasant thing I recall from that year was a field we used to pass on our way into the town of Milledgeville. It was like a painting by someone who loved tranquility. In the foreground near the road the green field was used as pasture for black-and-white cows that never seemed to move. Then, farther away, there was a steep hill partly covered with kudzu—dark and lush and creeping up to cover and change fantastically the shapes of the trees… . When we drive past it now, it looks the same. Even the cows could be the same cows—though now I see that they
do
move, though not very fast and never very far.

What I liked about this field as a child was that in my life of nightmares about electrocutions, lost cats, and the surprise appearance of snakes, it represented beauty and unchanging peace.

“Of course,” I say to myself, as we turn off the main road two miles from my old house, “that's Flannery's field.” The instructions I've been given place her house on the hill just beyond it.

There is a garish new Holiday Inn directly across Highway 441 from Flannery O'Connor's house, and, before going up to the house, my mother and I decide to have something to eat there. Twelve years ago I could not have bought lunch for us at such a place in Georgia, and I feel a weary delight as I help my mother off with her sweater and hold out a chair by the window for her. The white people eating lunch all around us—staring though trying hard not to—form a blurred backdrop against which my mother's face is especially sharp.
This
is the proper perspective, I think, biting into a corn muffin, no doubt about it.

As we sip iced tea we discuss O'Connor, integration, the inferiority of the corn muffins we are nibbling, and the care and raising of peacocks.

“Those things will sure eat up your flowers,” my mother says, explaining why she never raised any.

“Yes,” I say, “but they're a lot prettier than they'd be if somebody human had made them, which is why this lady liked them.” This idea has only just occurred to me, but having said it, I believe it is true. I sit wondering why I called Flannery O'Connor a lady. It is a word I rarely use and usually by mistake, since the whole notion of ladyhood is repugnant to me. I can imagine O'Connor at a Southern social affair, looking very polite and being very bored, making mental notes of the absurdities of the evening. Being white she would automatically have been eligible for ladyhood, but I cannot believe she would ever really have joined.

“She must have been a Christian person then,” says my mother. “She believed He made everything.” She pauses, looks at me with tolerance but also as if daring me to object: “And she was
right,
too.”

“She was a Catholic,” I say, “which must not have been comfortable in the Primitive Baptist South, and more than any other writer she believed in everything, including things she couldn't see.”

“Is that why you like her?” she asks.

“I like her because she could
write,
” I say.

“ ‘Flannery' sounds like something to eat,” someone said to me once. The word always reminds me of flannel, the material used to make nightgowns and winter shirts. It is very Irish, as were her ancestors. Her first name was Mary, but she seems never to have used it. Certainly “Mary O'Connor” is short on mystery. She was an Aries, born March 25, 1925. When she was sixteen, her father died of lupus, the disease that, years later, caused her own death. After her father died, O'Connor and her mother, Regina O'Connor, moved from Savannah, Georgia, to Milledgeville, where they lived in a townhouse built for Flannery O'Connor's grandfather, Peter Cline. This house, called “the Cline house,” was built by slaves who made the bricks by hand. O'Connor's biographers are always impressed by this fact, as if it adds the blessed sign of aristocracy, but whenever I read it I think that those slaves were some of my own relatives, toiling in the stifling middle-Georgia heat, to erect her grandfather's house, sweating and suffering the swarming mosquitoes as the house rose slowly, brick by brick.

Whenever I visit antebellum homes in the South, with their spacious rooms, their grand staircases, their shaded back windows that, without the thickly planted trees, would look out onto the now vanished slave quarters in the back, this is invariably my thought. I stand in the backyard gazing up at the windows, then stand at the windows inside looking down into the backyard, and between the me that is on the ground and the me that is at the windows, History is caught.

O'Connor attended local Catholic schools and then Georgia Women's College. In 1945 she received a fellowship to the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa. She received her M.A. in 1947. While still a student she wrote stories that caused her to be recognized as a writer of formidable talent and integrity of craft. After a stay at Yaddo, the artists' colony in upstate New York, she moved to a furnished room in New York City. Later she lived and wrote over a garage at the Connecticut home of Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, who became, after her death, her literary executors.

Although, as Robert Fitzgerald states in the preface to O'Connor's
Everything That Rises Must Converge,
“Flannery was out to be a writer on her own and had no plans to go back to live in Georgia,” staying out of Georgia for good was not possible. In December of 1950 she experienced a peculiar heaviness in her “typing arms.” On the train home for the Christmas holidays she became so ill she was hospitalized immediately. It was disseminated lupus. In the fall of 1951, after nine wretched months in the hospital, she returned to Milledgeville. Because she could not climb the stairs at the Cline house her mother brought her to their country house, Andalusia, about five miles from town. Flannery O'Connor lived there with her mother for the next thirteen years. The rest of her life.

The word
lupus
is Latin for “wolf,” and is described as “that which eats into the substance.” It is a painful, wasting disease, and O'Connor suffered not only from the disease—which caused her muscles to weaken and her body to swell, among other things—but from the medicine she was given to fight the disease, which caused her hair to fall out and her hipbones to melt. Still, she managed—with the aid of crutches from 1955 on—to get about and to write, and left behind more than three dozen superb short stories, most of them prizewinners, two novels, and a dozen or so brilliant essays and speeches. Her book of essays,
Mystery and Manners,
which is primarily concerned with the moral imperatives of the serious writer of fiction, is the best of its kind I have ever read.

“When you make these trips back south,” says my mother, as I give the smiling waitress my credit card, “just what is it exactly that you're looking for?”

“A wholeness,” I reply.

“You look whole enough to me,” she says.

“No,” I answer, “because everything around me is split up, deliberately split up. History split up, literature split up, and people are split up too. It makes people do ignorant things. For example, one day I was invited to speak at a gathering of Mississippi librarians and before I could get started, one of the authorities on Mississippi history and literature got up and said she really
did
think Southerners wrote so well because ‘we' lost the war. She was white, of course, but half the librarians in the room were black.”

“I bet she was real old,” says my mother. “They're the only ones still worrying over that war.”

“So I got up and said no, ‘we' didn't lose the war. ‘
You
all' lost the war. And you all's loss was our gain.”

“Those old ones will just have to die out,” says my mother.

“Well,” I say, “I believe that the truth about any subject only comes when all the sides of the story are put together, and all their different meanings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts to the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after.”

“Well, I doubt if you can ever get the
true
missing parts of anything away from the white folks,” my mother says softly, so as not to offend the waitress who is mopping up a nearby table; “they've sat on the truth so long by now they've mashed the life out of it.”

“O'Connor wrote a story once called ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge.'”

“What?”

“Everything that goes up comes together, meets, becomes one thing. Briefly, the story is this: an old white woman in her fifties—”

“That's not old! I'm older than that, and I'm not old!”

“Sorry. This middle-aged woman gets on a bus with her son, who likes to think he is a Southern liberal… he looks for a black person to sit next to. This horrifies his mother, who, though not old, has old ways. She is wearing a very hideous, very expensive hat, which is purple and green.”

“Purple and
green?
”

“Very expensive.
Smart.
Bought at the best store in town. She says, ‘With a hat like this, I won't meet myself coming and going.' But in fact, soon a large black woman, whom O'Connor describes as looking something like a gorilla, gets on the bus with a little boy, and she is wearing this same green-and-purple hat. Well, our not-so-young white lady is horrified, outdone.”

“I
bet
she was. Black folks have money to buy foolish things with too, now.”

“O'Connor's point exactly! Everything that rises, must converge.”

“Well, the green-and-purple-hats people will have to converge without me.”

“O'Connor thought that the South, as it became more ‘progressive,' would become just like the North. Culturally bland, physically ravished, and, where the people are concerned, well, you wouldn't be able to tell one racial group from another. Everybody would want the same things, like the same things, and everybody would be reduced to wearing, symbolically, the same green-and-purple hats.”

“And do you think this is happening?”

“I do. But that is not the whole point of the story. The white woman, in an attempt to save her pride, chooses to treat the incident of the identical hats as a case of monkey-see, monkey-do. She assumes she is not the monkey, of course. She ignores the idiotic-looking black woman and begins instead to flirt with the woman's son, who is small and black and
cute.
She fails to notice that the black woman is glowering at her. When they all get off the bus she offers the little boy a ‘bright new penny.' And the child's mother knocks the hell out of her with her pocketbook.”

“I bet she carried a large one.”

“Large, and full of hard objects.”

“Then what happened? Didn't you say the white woman's son was with her?”

“He had tried to warn his mother. ‘These new Negroes are not like the old,' he told her. But she never listened. He thought he hated his mother until he saw her on the ground, then he felt sorry for her. But when he tried to help her, she didn't know him. She'd retreated in her mind to a historical time more congenial to her desires. ‘Tell Grandpapa to come get me,' she says. Then she totters off, alone, into the night.”

“Poor
thing,
” my mother says sympathetically of this horrid woman, in a total identification that is
so
Southern and
so
black.

“That's what her son felt, too, and
that
is how you know it is a Flannery O'Connor story. The son has been changed by his mother's experience. He understands that, though she is a silly woman who has tried to live in the past, she is also a pathetic creature and so is he. But it is too late to tell her about this because she is stone crazy.”

“What did the black woman do after she knocked the white woman down and walked away?”

“O'Connor chose not to say, and that is why, although this is a good story, it is, to me, only half a story.
You
might know the other half….”

“Well, I'm not a writer, but there
was
an old white woman I once wanted to strike …” she begins.

“Exactly,” I say.

I discovered O'Connor when I was in college in the North and took a course in Southern writers and the South. The perfection of her writing was so dazzling I never noticed that no black Southern writers were taught. The other writers we studied—Faulkner, McCullers, Welty—seemed obsessed with a racial past that would not let them go. They seemed to beg the question of their characters' humanity on every page. O'Connor's characters—whose humanity if not their sanity is taken for granted, and who are miserable, ugly, narrow-minded, atheistic, and of intense racial smugness and arrogance, with not a graceful, pretty one anywhere who is not, at the same time, a joke—shocked and delighted me.