Good man is hard to find pdf

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Thomas P . Flint

REN 70.2 (Spring 2018)

ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CIVIL WAR REFERENCES IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S “A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND”

Detail has to be controlled by some overall purpose, and every detail has to be put to use for you.

Flannery O’Connor, “Writing Short Stories” (MM 93)

Much has been written about the ways in which the details found in Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” contribute to the overall themes of the story. The killings that take place toward the end of the story, it has often been noted, are prefigured by many of the details presented earlier in the work. As Frederick Asals puts it, “there is a darkly menacing undertone that runs throughout the first part of the story in the form of recurrent references to violence and death” (147). What has not been seen, though, are the ways in which this undertone is augmented via repeated allusions, not to violence and death in general, but to the specific locus of evil that still haunted the South even during O’Connor’s lifetime: the Civil War. While the story surely is intended to have broader ap- plications, O’Connor, in accord with her usual practice and consistent advice, moves to the universal via the specific and the concrete: it is this family and these convicts, engaged in this journey through a region still traumatized by this war, that offer us a window into wider truths.

While it would be specious to imply that the links drawn to the Civil War offer the key to understanding O’Connor’s story, recogniz- ing their presence should have an impact upon one’s appreciation of the work. As I will argue below, they strengthen the case for claiming that one of the central morals of the story is the difficulty of our dis- cerning what justice requires. There are at least four references to the Civil War that occur in the story. Let us consider them, one by one, in the order in which they appear, before turning to the cumulative effect they have on the story as a whole.

The first clear reference to the War occurs when the grandmother points out Stone Mountain as one of the “interesting details of the scenery” (CS 119). Located a bit northeast of downtown Atlanta, Stone Mountain shouldn’t be readily visible to a family travelling to the southeast from the heart of the city.1 But history seems to have

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become more prominent than geography in O’Connor’s mind. For Stone Mountain was, among other things, the location of a planned monumental carving of Robert E. Lee (flanked by Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson), begun in 1915. Though still woefully unfinished (due to lack of funds) at the time O’Connor was writing, enough of the work had been done for Lee (astride his famous gray horse Travel- ler) to be visible. The mountain would thus serve to those passing by as a concrete reminder of the South’s most accomplished general.

The carving on Stone Mountain had been planned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group of women committed to a romanticized picture of the Confederacy and of the society it endeavored to perpetuate.2 As we soon see in the story, it is a picture shared in many ways by the grandmother, whom one can easily imagine belong- ing to the U.D.C. O’Connor repeatedly rejected interpretations of her story that presented the grandmother as an evil, witchlike character, but she undoubtedly saw her as comically misguided. And, as Hallman Bryant has suggested, the reference to Stone Mountain contributes to O’Connor’s delineation of her:

Flannery O’Connor was amused by the quixotic qualities of the U.D.C., and Stone Mountain would evoke for Georgians of O’Connor’s generation the folly of a sentimental project — a project almost as futile as the grandmother’s in the story, whose fascination with past grandeur is congruent with that of the U.D.C.’s and has equally unfortunate results. (Hallman 302, fn. 3)

By calling our attention to the mountain, then, the grandmother indi- rectly reminds us of the lost cause which it attempted to memorialize, and begins to prepare us for the sorry events that her own attachment to a past that never was will engender.

The second Civil War reference is to “Gone with the Wind.” Soon after leaving Atlanta, the family encounters a small cemetery contain- ing only five or six graves.3 The grandmother reports that it must have been a family graveyard for a local plantation. When John Wesley asks where the plantation is now, the grandmother replies, “Gone With the Wind. . . . Ha. Ha” (CS 120).

Clearly struck with her own wit, the grandmother has managed to remind us of the best-known novelistic and cinematic depiction of the War and of its aftermath in the South. While not, perhaps, as dis- torted as the memories of the Confederacy harbored by members of the U.D.C., Mitchell’s work and the film which it inspired were seen by many as doing more to perpetuate than to correct such distortions.

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O’Connor was among the critics; she made no secret of her negative appraisals both of the novel and of the movie.4 Through the grand- mother’s reference, then, both the Civil War and the failure of so many Southerners to come to terms accurately with this seminal event in their past are subtly spotlighted.

Third comes a reference to General Sherman. After lunch at Red Sammy’s (to which we’ll return shortly), the grandmother recalls an- other remnant of the antebellum South, a plantation she had visited in her youth. Struck by the desire to see it again, but realizing that Bailey will not easily agree to the detour involved, she gets the children on her side by a bit of deception:

“There was a secret panel in this house,” she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, “and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found . . .” (CS 123)

The reference to Sherman reminds us of a fact which, though men- tioned neither in the story nor by its many commentators, is striking once noticed.5 The Misfit has escaped from the federal penitentiary (presumably in Atlanta, the only one in the area) and is heading south- east toward the sea and Florida. The family is travelling in precisely the same direction. And all are following the route of Sherman’s famous March to the Sea, from Atlanta to Savannah, O’Connor’s childhood home, via Milledgeville, the capital of Georgia during the War and, of course, O’Connor’s home for most of her adult life. Though Sher- man in 1864 saw his march — and the looting and destruction that accompanied it — as simply the fastest way to break further South- ern resistance and thus end the War, the reputation he and his troops earned for bringing “total war” to Georgia was and remains mythic; as John Marszalek has noted, “the march is remembered to this day as barbarism unleashed,” while Sherman himself “entered the Con- federate psyche and remains in some minds to the present day.”6 For those of us living in the twenty-first century, it’s easy to forget that O’Connor was writing at a time when survivors of Sherman’s March were still alive; she and most of her readers, at least most of her South- ern readers, had undoubtedly heard tales of the March from actual witnesses. O’Connor would surely have expected the mention of Sher- man’s name, then, to remind readers of “barbarism unleashed,” and to prepare us for the violence that eventually descends upon the family.7

Finally, we have the significance of The Misfit’s two companions. The grandmother’s sudden recognition that the house she remembers

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was actually in Tennessee, not in Georgia, leads to the accident which presages the arrival of The Misfit and his two companions. The descrip- tion of his partners in crime is worthy of attention:

One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his face. (CS 126)

The boy in the red sweat shirt, we soon learn, is named Bobby Lee, while the one in the blue coat is Hiram.

The names might strike us as throwaways, as typical good-old- boys monikers. Yet “Bobby Lee” is surely reminiscent of the Robert E. Lee whose depiction on Stone Mountain we have already encountered. And the silver stallion on Bobby Lee’s shirt seems to mirror Lee’s horse Traveller. So Bobby Lee brings to mind the South’s leading military leader from the War. But Lee is not alone. As was so often the case throughout the conflict of the 1860s, he’s accompanied by his nemesis from the North. For the name “Hiram” was not, it seems, chosen ran- domly; it was in fact the real first name of Lee’s counterpart on the Union side during the War, the general commonly known as Ulysses S. Grant.8 The Misfit, following Sherman’s trail of death and destruction, thus has his own Lee and Grant as companions.

The references to the Civil War are thus numerous throughout the story.9 But O’Connor, in keeping it would seem with the wider points she has in mind, expands the focus beyond one war. The family with whom we travel seems embroiled in a small-scale civil war from the mo- ment we meet them, and conflict remains the order of the day virtually until their end. Even the names of the constantly obnoxious children point, if only indirectly, toward larger conflicts in mid-twentieth-century America: “John Wesley” connotes the evangelical tradition still domi- nant in the South (if largely dormant in this family), while “June Star” perhaps suggests a growing American tension between the profane, glitzy world of Hollywood or Las Vegas and the Bible Belt. Red Sam- my Butts, proprietor of The Tower, is, as the signs along the highway proclaim, a veteran, and his very name recalls the two sides — the red Soviets vs. Uncle Sam — engaged in the Cold War still raging at the time of the story’s publication.10 Domestic contemporary conflicts, especially regarding the Civil Rights Movement, are also subtly intro- duced. The grandmother’s insensitive remarks concerning the “cute

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little pickaninny” they pass on the road, and the poverty that no doubt afflicts his family, remind us that the repercussions of the Civil War are being heard still in the Georgia of the day.11 O’Connor would no doubt agree with Faulkner that the past “is never dead. It’s not even past” (Faulkner 73). Indeed, even the early reference to Stone Mountain brings back more than merely memories of the War, since, as most (or at least many) readers of the time would recall, Stone Mountain was the site where the reformulated Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915.12

So conflict, injustice, war, and violence are introduced repeatedly well before The Misfit and his crew commit the shocking acts of murder in which the story culminates. The Civil War is the central, recurrent image that leads us toward that ending, but the story is redolent with so many memories of evil that the conclusion seems all but foreor- dained. We march with Sherman, with Lee and with Grant, with Cold Warriors of both sides, with both sides of a culture war, with victims and with perpetrators of racial hatred, as we pass through Toomsboro toward death.

Given the Christian conviction that animates so much of O’Connor’s work, it’s natural to suspect that these many reminders of conflict, and especially the many echoes of the Civil War, are related to a theological message. O’Connor stated that her early tales were “stories about original sin,” and she saw Southerners as particularly well-situated to appreciate such stories (HB 74). In “The Regional Writer,” O’Connor interprets Walker Percy’s explanation for the abun- dance of prominent twentieth-century Southern writers (“Because we lost the War”) in a theological way:

What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery. . . . Not every lost war would have this effect on every society, but we were doubly blessed, not only in our Fall, but in having a means to interpret it. Behind our own history, deepening at every point, has been another history. Mencken called the South the Bible Belt, in scorn and thus in incredible innocence. (MM 59)

How does “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” with its numerous allusions to the lost War, relate to the Christian story of the Fall? This is too broad an issue to discuss fully here. It does seem, though, that one ele- ment of O’Connor’s story both connects to the Christian concept of original sin and is illuminated by the ties in the story to the Civil War. The notion of original sin suggests that all of us enter life with an inherited stain that predisposes us to dreadful acts, acts that cry out for

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retribution. But how much culpability do we bear for what we do? And how much punishment do we deserve for such acts? These are questions that have bedeviled Christians for centuries. And in O’Connor’s story, it is precisely such questions, applied to his own life, that most trouble The Misfit.

The Misfit never proclaims himself to be innocent, but he does see his punishment as out of proportion to his crimes, whatever exactly they were. (He says that he doesn’t know for what he is supposed to be doing penance in prison — which, tellingly, is always referred to in the story as a penitentiary, never as a prison or a jail.) The sense of being unjustly “buried alive” (CS 130) in prison is one he carries with him still; the gray, cloudless, sunless sky, noted first by The Misfit (CS 127), resembles the drab, tomblike prison cell he inhabited.13 That featureless sky, of course, imprisons the family as well, and (as Asals has noted) the death sentences given them by The Misfit seem as exces- sive a punishment as was his own, despite the faults the grandmother and her progeny have so patently displayed (Asals 151). And this sense of paying too high a price for one’s sins once again connects us to the War. From the perspective of many in the South, the retribution imposed upon them, by Sherman and by so many others in the wake of their defeat, seemed wildly out of balance; their sins, genuine and serious as they were, deserved treatment less vindictive than what the North dispensed.

Or so it seemed to them. Prisons, the saying goes, are full of innocent people – innocent in their own minds, at least. Even those of us willing to acknowledge our guilt are usually poor judges of what punishment we deserve for our misdeeds. As we have noted, The Misfit is not unaware of his own failings — “Nome, I ain’t a good man” he at last replies to the grandmother’s repeated ascriptions of goodness to him (CS 128) — yet he feels confident that his punishment has been extreme. His very name, given to him by himself, testifies to this con- viction: “‘I call myself The Misfit,’ he said, ‘because I can’t make what all I done wrong fit what all I gone through in punishment’” (CS 131). The grandmother no doubt can, to some extent, sympathize with this feeling; surely she feels that the disrespect repeatedly shown her by her own family is out of all proportion to whatever peccadillos she might have committed.

It is, perhaps, relevant to remind ourselves that the accident, and the subsequent deaths, are due to the presence in the car of yet another captive who surely feels mistreated — the family cat, Pitty Sing. The cat’s name is a slightly disguised reference to Pitti-Sing, one of the “three little maids” in Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta The

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Mikado. Like the characters in O’Connor’s story, Pitti-Sing faces a punishment that seems excessive; unlike them, one might think, she is fortunate enough to live in a fictional world governed by a ruler who sees to it that “the punishment fits the crime” — no more, and no less. The Misfit is convinced he lives in no such world, and while it would be wrong to see him as compassionate only toward himself, the pity that he expresses and the sense of injustice he feels are primarily self-directed. In this respect too, his attitude largely parallels that of the grandmother, whose words (until the very end of the story) seem constantly designed primarily to secure her own survival.

Her failure at achieving this goal is overshadowed, though, by the sudden insight that she receives immediately before her death. Despairing, one might think, of moving The Misfit by the appeals to breeding, to morality, and to religion that have dominated her remarks, the grand- mother, “not knowing what she was saying” (CS 132), suggests to The Misfit that perhaps Jesus didn’t in fact raise the dead. The Misfit concedes that he has no way of knowing, since he wasn’t there, but insists that his position of uncertainty is another example of unjust punishment — punishment because it leaves him with no way of tell- ing how he should lead his life (follow Jesus or pursue pleasure via meanness to others), and unjust (“It ain’t right”) because he did nothing to deserve his condition of incurable ignorance. As he beats the ground with his fist and bewails his situation “in a high voice,” the grandmother, who had dizzily sunk to the ground just moments before, undergoes a stunning transformation:

the grandmother’s head cleared for an instant. She saw the man’s face twisted close to her own as if he were going to cry and she murmured, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” She reached out and touched him on the shoulder. (CS 132)

Sympathy for self has, at least momentarily, been replaced by sympathy for another, for one whom she recognizes as being more like her — so much like her as to be her own child — than she had ever before seen. Self-pity and the concern that she is being treated unjustly evaporate in her compassion for the suffering of another.

And so she dies, shot three times by The Misfit. After the shooting, “he put his gun down on the ground and took off his glasses and began to clean them” (CS 132). The cleaning of the glasses suggests that The Misfit feels he’s not seeing things as he ought — and perhaps suggests that clean lenses will allow him to see more clearly. And what he sees

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about the grandmother is nicely encapsulated in his claim to Bobby Lee, “She would of been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life” (CS 133).

Much has been written on the The Misfit’s concluding appraisal of the grandmother, and surely no one reading of the line is sufficient to capture its full meaning. But given the emphasis in his own story, and in the latter half of O’Connor’s story, on the notions of sin and punishment, it is plausible to connect his words with those notions. It does seem that only the extraordinarily painful circumstances in which she was placed allowed the grandmother to escape the narrow focus on self that animated her prior behavior. Was her suffering an instance of just punishment? From one perspective, perhaps not. But “extreme” or “excessive” punishment may sometimes be the only way to awaken a person to the shallow nature of his or her life. Is a lesser, more “just” or “fitting,” punishment preferable — is it really more fitting — if it leaves one blind to one’s actual condition? Maybe some people do need to be shot every minute (so to speak) to see what they really are.

From a Christian perspective, attempts to form judgments as to what degree of suffering one requires, or as to whether one’s punishments are excessive or unjust, may best be seen as further manifestations of the pride and arrogance that precipitated our original Fall. These are judgments we are in no position to make; they are best left to God. One can hope this is a message The Misfit is beginning to take to heart at the end of the story, though honesty compels us to confess that we have evidence for nothing more than hope. And it is a message, one might think, that Southerners in general, tempted to shake their fists in God’s face in the wake of their wartime sufferings, were especially well primed to appreciate. Perhaps nothing less than suffering on such a scale would have led at least the more discerning Southerners to face the reality of slavery and of its continuing ramifications.

Seen in this light, then, the references to the Civil War serve to reinforce one of the central themes of the story. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Connor famously claimed that “evil is not simply a problem to be solved but a mystery to be endured” (MM 209). And part of the mystery, for O’Connor at least, is the question of what constitutes just punishment. To endure the mystery of evil means, among other things, to acknowledge that the fittingness of the evils we encounter is for God to judge, not for us.14

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NOTES 1 See Bryant 302, fn. 3. It probably is a bit presumptuous to suggest, as Bryant

does, that O’Connor was unaware of the precise location of the mountain, especially given our ignorance of the exact starting point of the family; had they started from the northeast suburbs, they could easily have passed close to Stone Mountain. In any event, O’Connor might readily have assumed that questions concerning the probable proximity of the mountain to the family’s path would not occur to (or at least not trouble) many readers.

2 For one description of the group and of the project, see Neal 23-33.

3 As Alex Link notes, the gravestones at the plantation mirror the virtual gravestone for the Confederacy that Stone Mountain has become. See Link 132.

4 See Gooch 68.

5 Even readers of the story who are quite perceptive to its intricacies have failed to remark on the specific relevance of the Sherman reference. For example, Asals claims that the grandmother, through her actions and words, “reveals the fam- ily’s trip as mere empty movement through space” (145). As we will see, the specific space through which the family moves is related to the thrust of the story.

6 Marszalek. For detailed descriptions of the effects of the March, see also Bryan 166-73. It’s interesting to note that O’Connor owned a copy of Bryan’s book, inscribed to her by the author; see Getz 89. Bryan’s book was published early in the same year that “A Good Man is Hard to Find” was written, but whether or not O’Connor consulted it prior to finishing the story is impossible to know. See, though, Bryan’s description of a Confederate hiding his gold from the approaching Union forces (a story parallel in some ways to the “secret panel” tale concocted by the grand- mother) on 168.

7 That we have three parallel journeys — of Sherman and his army, of The Misfit and his gang, and of the grandmother and her family — is not surprising in a story in which triads so frequently appear. The Misfit escaped the penitentiary with two confederates; the grandmother’s family includes three adults and three children. The family is planning on a three-day trip to Florida, as we know because of Pitty Sing’s presence; the grandmother secretly brought the cat along because she felt he shouldn’t be “left alone in the house for three days” (CS 118). The children insist three times that they want to see “the house with the secret panel”; Bailey finally gives in – on the condition, stated three times, that they all “shut up” (CS 123). After their mishap, the children scream three times, “We’ve had an ACCIDENT” (CS 125-26). The grandmother tells The Misfit three times “you’re a good man” (CS 127-28), calls for “Bailey Boy” on three occasions (CS 128, 129, and 132), and insists three times (CS 127 and 132) that The Misfit (who three times scratches in the ground (CS 127-29)) wouldn’t shoot a lady. And the shootings occur in three groupings (first the males, then the three younger females, then the grandmother), with the grandmother shot “three times through the chest” (CS 132) as the story reaches its climax.

8 The confusion regarding Grant’s name began with his career at West Point: the congressman who appointed Grant incorrectly wrote the name as “Ulysses S. Grant,” and Hiram Ulysses decided not to rectify matters. See McFeely 12.

9 Whether such references would have been included had the story been written

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later in her career could be debated. Already in January of 1961 — when Civil War centennial events were but beginning — O’Connor told a correspondent, “I sure am sick of the Civil War” (HB 426).

10 O’Connor may well have fashioned his name with more than serious motives in mind. After all, we enter and leave Red Butts’s establishment to the chattering of Sammy’s pet monkey. And monkeys are known for colorful, often red, posteriors.

11 O’Connor seems to have been well aware of just how offensive the grand- mother’s “pickaninny” comments were. In her letter to “A” on January 31, 1959, she reported that she intended to leave out this paragraph in a public reading of the story in Chicago. “I can write with ease,” she confesses, “what I forebear to read” (HB 377).

12 The link between Stone Mountain and the Klan has been noted previously by commentators, but few of them have ascribed much significance to it. See, for example, Link 127-28.

13 “‘Turn to the right, it was a wall,’ The Misfit said, looking up again at the cloudless sky. ‘Turn to the left, it was a wall. Look up it was a ceiling, look down it was a floor’” (CS 130).

14 I would like to thank JoAnn DellaNeva for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

WORKS CITED

Asals, Frederick. Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity. Athens, GA: University of Georgia P, 1982.

Bryan, T. Conn. Confederate Georgia. Athens, GA: University of Georgia P, 1953. Bryant, Hallman. “Reading the Map in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’.” Studies in

Short Fiction 18 (1981): 301-07. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage Books, 2011 [1950]. Getz, Lorine. Flannery O’Connor: Her Life, Library and Book Reviews. New York:

Edwin Mellen P, 1980. Gooch, Brad. Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor. New York: Little, Brown and

Company, 2009. Link, Alex. “Means, Meaning, and Mediated Space in ‘A Good Man Is Hard to

Find’.” Southern Quarterly 44 (2007): 125-38. Marszalek, John. “Scorched Earth: Sherman’s March to the Sea.” Hallowed Ground 15

(2014). Accessed at http://www.civilwar.org/hallowed-ground-magazine/fall-2014/ scorched-earth.html.

McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography . New York: Norton, 1981. Neal, Willard. The Story of Stone Mountain. Atlanta: Neal and Rogers, 1963. O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” The Complete Stories [CS]. New

York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1971. 117-33. —. The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor [HB]. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New

York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. —. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose [MM]. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

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