“The children have been to Florida before,” the old lady said. “You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.”
I have been to Andalusia – Flannery’s farm – four times now, twice to tour it, and twice, early on, before it was opened up, trying to get a glimpse of the house from the locked fence across the dirt road leading up to it.
But only one time have I prepared for the visit by sitting in a hotel room across the highway, listening with two teenage boys, Flannery reading to us.
It was, in fact, the first time I’d listened to this – the recording of her reading “A Good Man is Hard to Find” to an audience at Vanderbilt. I’m glad I waited. It was good preparation, to be enveloped, really – for that is what it felt like, as faint and scratchy as the recording was – in that rolling, sure drawl that seems to be pulling out wisdom from the earth and sky both, casting out and reeling in the preening fools and the unwilling, accidental prophets.
It wasn’t the same as the other times, but then what is? I wasn’t awestruck and almost trembling as I was the first time I stood in her bedroom and looked at those crutches and that typewriter. I was in the listening and teachable moment mode, listening to the capable and informed young docent and giving the side-eye to my companions, making sure they were listening too. Hoping.
What was I hoping?
Hoping that they’d absorb something, learn something. Not only about Flannery herself and her writing – which, of course, the recent Catholic high school graduate had not encountered once in his four years of (I repeat myself) Catholic high school education. So yes, this was remedial.
But more than that, hoping – as I’d told them repeatedly in the days before, when we read her stories together, and the minutes after, as we drove away – that they’d absorb the lesson of her life, something I wrote about at length here.
O’Connor’s work is important. Her life and spiritual witness is important as well.
For Flannery O’Connor, like all of us, had plans. Unlike many of us, perhaps, she also had a clear sense of her own gifts. As a very young woman, she set out to follow that path. She had fantastic opportunities at Iowa, made great connections and seemed to be on the road to success at a very young age. Wise Blood was accepted for publication when she was in her early 20s. She was in New York. She was starting to run in invigorating literary circles.
And then she got sick.
And she had to go back to her mother’s farm in Milledgeville, Georgia.
O’Connor’s story is a helpful and necessary corrective, it seems to me, of the current spiritual environment which privileges choice and health and seeks to baptize secular notions of success, achievement, and even beauty. What is missing from all of that is a cheerful acceptance of limitations and a faith that even within those limitations—only within those limitations—we are called to serve God.
Hoping that I’d listen, and remember as well.
In case you don’t know – the working dairy farm had been purchased by one of Flannery’s mother’s (Regina) brothers. When Flannery got sick and moved back, they decided to relocate from town out here. Of course now, the highway right beyond is built up and there’s Wal-Mart and traffic, but back then, of course, there was nothing but farmland.
Still, they didn’t lead an isolated existence, of course. Flannery and her mother went into town every day for daily Mass, and often for lunch. And of course, she had loads of visitors.
Her mother, Regina, managed the farm, and didn’t die herself until 1995. (She left the farm after Flannery died and moved back into the large house in town.)
Yes, there are a couple of peacocks. The last time I’d gone, years ago, the guide told me that they didn’t have peacocks because of coyotes. Well, now they have them, sensibly and safely housed in a pen.
Flannery’s space. The typewriter isn’t hers – it’s a replica. But everything else, including, amazingly, the draperies, are original. The guide told us (and I think this is in the letters) that Regina had bought some frilly curtains for the room, but Flannery, of course, hated them – they weren’t her. So Regina made these, and it’s a wonder they are still in such beautiful condition.
Everything on the mantle was Flannery’s. What happened was that when Regina moved out, she left everything. The house was vacant for years, then a few cousins moved in, but they were respectful of what was here. They didn’t treat it as a museum, but they did begin some repairs, and saved Flannery’s things.
My favorite details. The record player was a gift from the Hawthorne Sisters who gave it in appreciation for reworking A Memoir of Mary Ann. The refrigerator was purchased from selling the television rights to “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.” More on that here.
“…the kind that spits ice cubes at you, the trays shoot out and hit you in the stomach, and if you step on a certain button, the whole thing glides from the wall and knocks you down.”
After we finished at the farm, we headed to the cemetery
Her grave could use a cleaning….
And then to the Georgia State College Special Collections – here’s my advice – don’t bother. The first time I went, ages ago, they had a room with her library on display – in bookcases that have now been moved back to Andalusia – along with other drawings (she was the school newspaper cartoonist in college) and artifacts. It was quite wonderful. Well, none of that now. They don’t want to expose the books to the elements. They have a “museum” space set up to honor various people related to the college, including Flannery, but there’s nothing interesting about it, really. Of course, if you are a researcher, it’s all there for you, but for the random tourist – don’t bother.
And then…
This is the administration building of the massive former Central State Hospital. Founded in the 1820’s, used until the 90’s, it was at one time the largest mental hospital in the world. Read more about here and see more photos. We could have used more time there – and I never did find the cemetery – but we were ready to start heading back home by that point.
Mab Segrest, a visiting scholar at nearby Georgia College, is writing a book about Central State and teaching a course titled Milledgeville and the Mind. She has explored the hospital’s impact on the fiction of author Flannery O’Connor, who lived just seven miles from the asylum. “Her crazy preachers walk right out of case histories of ‘religious excitement’—their fears of ‘wise blood’ part of the belief in insanity as a hereditary illness that worsened over generations,” Segrest says.
Think about it all, thinking about Milledgeville, this small town in the middle of nowhere, the place she lived, far from where she’d thought she’d live in the big, busy, world. Thinking about what she saw: the farmers, the farmworkers, the white, the black, the few wealthy, the many poor, the ancient Confederate soldiers, the spiritually fervent, the know-it-all college girls, the unbalanced, the misfits, the proud, the lame, the displaced persons – all there, right there –
…you can be broad right where you are, it seems. You just have to know how to see.
For more on Andalusia, go here.
Charlotte was Both 