ABSTRACT
In Flannery O’Connor’s short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the grandmother clearly symbolizes the Old South, and her endless nostalgia for the past is intertwined with issues of race and her contempt for blacks. Although race was only the indirect subject of the story, it underlies the entire text, including the grandmother’s lost world of plantations, Southern ladies and gentlemen, family graveyards and Old Time Religion. She is literally the product of a horse-and-buggy era, but imagines this as a time when people were nicer to each other or at least pretended to have better manners. She fails to recognize that for blacks this was a world of slavery, lynching, poverty and segregation, in which whites were most certainly not ‘nice’ to them. Nor is the grandmother, with her casual and automatic racism that the others also accept, even if they do not seem to like her personally. Her desire to visit on nonexistent plantation house and the legend of the hidden family silver literally puts her and the family on the same dirt road as The Misfit, and only at the very end does she finally recognize that he is one of her own ‘children’. In the symbolic sense, that is exactly what he is, at least from perspective that the Old South she represents has produced many monsters.
Until the very end of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”, the grandmother consistently represents the Old South, and symbolizes not only is racism but a sick and decrepit desire to keep the past alive in every way possible. This story was published in 1955, just one year after the Supreme Court outlawed public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, but if the grandmother noticed this decision at all it had no effect on her. Just the opposite, she would have no doubt agreed with the policy of ‘massive resistance’ against civil rights and voting rights for blacks that continued into the next decade. Although O’Connor openly refers to race only occasionally, these scenes stand out quite noticeable in the story, such as when she sees a naked black child in a shack and calls him a “pickaninny” and “little nigger”, and comments that “if I could paint, I’d paint that picture” (O’Connor, 1992, p. 9). Bailey, his wife and the children either do not notice her casual racism or tacitly endorse it since it was expressed so commonly at that time. Even though racism was not O’Connor’s “central fictional subject”, this one scene revealed the “automatic racism of the postwar South in those years preceding the civil rights movement” (Asals, 1993, p. 8). Her backward-looking worldview is “far from harmlessand is not divorced from a perception of poor black children as picturesque”, as if they were characters in an old-fashioned musical or minstrel show (Asals, p. 9).
She blatantly exposes her ideas on race in another brief scene, in which she waxes nostalgic about the days of gentlemen riding in coaches and courting ladies in a very formal way. Many years before, a “gentleman” named Edgar Atkins Teagarden brought came courting every Saturday with a watermelon that had his initials carved in it, but one time “a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials, E.A.T.” (O’Connor, p. 5). She regretted not marrying him since he later became very wealthy from buying Coca Cola stock early on, which actually was more of an example of the New South version of capitalism, but at the same time, none of the others in the car seem to notice or react to her use of racial epithets or her description of blacks as comical and buffoonish characters. As they pass an old family graveyard, the grandmother also expresses regret that the plantation house is “Gone with the Wind”, not yet aware that she soon will be as well (O’Connor, p. 5). Although the children June Star and John Wesley are not nearly as nostalgic about the past as her, and refer of Tennessee as a “hillbilly dumping ground” and Georgia as a “lousy state”, they are not completely immune to her influence (O’Connor, p. 3). She admonishes them that in her day “children were more respectful of their native state and their parents and everything else. People did right then”, although in her mind ‘people’ refereed only to whites, while blacks were excluded from full humanity (O’Connor, p. 4).
When they stop for lunch at The Tower, the grandmother continues to reminisce about how the past was so much better than the present. She listens to “The Tennessee Waltz” on the jukebox and tries to persuade Bailey to dance, but he is not interested, while the children prefer to listen to louder and faster music. She tells the owner, Red Sammy Butts, that “people are certainly not nice like they used to be” and her agrees that “a good man is hard to find” (O’Connor, p. 7). In the old days, people used to leave their doors unlocked, but it was no longer safe to do so in the modern world. In this respect, the grandmother and Red Sammy both symbolize an older world before highways, suburbs and television, when the U.S. was more rural and isolationist, and not so concerned with events in Europe and the rest of the world. It goes without saying that the inferior and oppressed position of blacks was simply taken as a given in that older society, but this was no longer nearly so certain by 1955. Blacks were beginning to rebel and protest at home just as the colonized peoples of the world were attempting to overthrow the imperial powers. For the grandmother, this was a dangerous and unpredictable world, and this is reflected in her fear of encountering a violent criminal like The Misfit.
Only moments before her death does the grandmother finally recognize The Misfit as one of her own children, at least on the symbolic level, and that he is the product of her own world. He naturally recoils from that recognition, the only time he shows any hint of emotion when dealing with his victims, realizing that he too was created in the “moral metaphysical vacuum that result in part from self-serving nostalgia” (Asals, p. 9). To be sure, the grandmother’s traditional world was not nearly so full of good, nice and polite ladies and gentlemen as she imagined, particularly for its many victims. Slaves on the plantations or workers in the mines and factories would not have had such a high regard for the white gentry as they did for themselves. People like The Misfit, no matter what their color, had no place in that world or any reason to feel nostalgia for it, nor had they desire to preserve it. Everything that the grandmother represented, including her ideas of white supremacy, religion and class superiority was simply part of the culture and institutions that oppressed and controlled people like The Misfit. Had O’Connor chosen to portray him as a black man rather than a poor white, this message would have been even clearer, but in any case The Misfit had no place in the grandmother’s world and no need to keep her or her memories alive even for one minute.
REFERENCES
Asals, F. (1993). “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: Flannery O’Connor. Rutgers University Press.
O’Connor, Flannery (1992). A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Short Stories. Harvest Books.
