Welcome to the weekend!
Here in Wisconsin, the household is recovering from Christmastime ague. If my pen strokes appear faint, it’s because sitting upright is a challenge at the moment, let alone writing. But Flannery O’Connor’s work is worth any discomfort, and her 1955 short story “Good Country People” has my heart today. If you’re unfamiliar with O’Connor, Faulkner’s counterpart in the Southern Gothic genre, she’s maybe best described by the Misfit’s words in her most lauded work, A Good Man Is Hard to Find: “She would have been a good woman . . . if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” O’Connor is a viper, and I love her for it; she’s mean as sin and unflinching in her analysis of the human condition. O’Connor knows her characters’ and region’s faults, and she delights in revealing blemishes to the reader. “Good Country People” is positively ferine.
‘Good Country People’ begins:
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs. Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of them figs you put up last summer.”
You can read the whole story in 10–20 minutes. Here be the link.
Like Melville’s protagonist Amasa in Benito Cereno (I wrote a bit about Melville earlier this week; I’m keeping Cereno for another weekend), O’Connor’s most acerbic observations are reserved for those who should know better. George W. Bush talked about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the idea that lowering the bar for others under the misguided assumption that they could never clear it is demeaning; this is a theme that O’Connor plays to tremendous effect.
“Good Country People” is especially germane to the modern conservative movement’s inability to excise grifters. For instance, we would do well to remember that not every young man who shows up asking for dollars with a Bible, some culture-war ammo, and a country twang actually has our best interests in mind.
For some cicada-laden Southern ambiance, here’s Lost Dog Street Band’s “Terrible & True”:
