Some of the more serious young women became involved in the YWCA, a center among campus clubs for race politics and social feminism. “People find it odd when I tell them that I was radicalized at this women’s college in Georgia in the forties,” says the 1946 yearbook editor Helen Matthews Lewis. She credits support for such leanings from a cadre of “older spinster-suffragette teachers: strong, independent women who were among the first generation of women to vote.” The director of the YWCA, Emily Cottingham, once boldly drove a car full of GSCW students to Atlanta University to live in the dorm, and eat in the cafeteria, with black women students. When the Milledgeville paper printed an editorial critical of an AFL-CIO speaker, brought to campus by the YWCA, Betty Boyd and Helen Matthews composed a ringing “Letter to the Editor”: “Ours are girls with a vivid realization that the pattern set for the coming world will deeply affect their future well-being and happiness and those of their children.”
Living in an “imposing” terraced home, like the aunts in “The Partridge Festival,” about “five blocks from the business section,” O’Connor, as a freshman, was insulated, either by her design or her family’s, from many of these burning issues among her peers. As she was a “town girl,” she didn’t fully reside in “Jessieville.” “Most of the time Mary Flannery walked home alone when she had a break from classes, but sometimes she stayed in the Town Girls Room,” remembers Zell Barnes Grant, who lived on a farm a mile outside town. “She always had her nose stuck in a book.” Tellingly, the only club O’Connor joined her first year was the Newman Club, which met weekly in the Sacred Heart rectory and included about ten girls, the total number of Roman Catholic students at the college; they all woke up at dawn to attend monthly First Friday masses together.
She kept her friendship with Betty Boyd during all their years at school. “They were so close,” remembers their mutual friend Jane Sparks Willingham. “They had a kindred spirit. Yet Betty was not awkward like Flannery. She was a very polished person, and much more into things on campus.” Within the first few weeks of the fall semester, Boyd had already grown beyond the circumference of summertime at the Cline Mansion. She was living in Terrell, the freshman dormitory, with a roommate coincidentally named Mary Boyd, an English major from Calhoun, Georgia, who worked on the literary magazine. And she became active in student government. The tall, shy, reticent young woman showed such a knack for engaging in policy issues at meetings that she was elected freshman class secretary.
As Betty Boyd’s roommate, Mary Boyd was also invited many times to Sunday dinner at the Cline Mansion. “She was very fond of her mother in Flannery’s way of liking people,” Mary Boyd Gallop has recalled. “Being the only child, the mother seemed just as fond of her girl as were two maiden aunts living there.” Yet there was tension between Betty’s two friends. Mary Flannery once told Betty Boyd that she found her roommate “just a bit too pedantic.” More to the point, Mary Boyd made constant comments along the lines of her observation, years later, that “O’Connor never seemed interested in the opposite sex. She was happy just being herself.” Mary Flannery did avoid dating. Yet she was uncomfortable at having such a private topic openly discussed.
Her defense was to cast Mary Boyd as a husband hunter, or simply boy crazy. O’Connor’s letters to Betty Boyd in the years following graduation are peppered with jokes about Mary Boyd and marriage, obviously continuing a college routine. In 1949, O’Connor received a letter from Mary Boyd asking point-blank if she planned to get married. “Now let me see,” O’Connor pretended to muse. “Do I or do I not want to get married?” When Betty Boyd announced her own impending wedding later that year, O’Connor’s humorous response was: “This should reassure Mary Boyd.” Pushing the matter to its extreme, O’Connor wrote Betty Boyd Love, in 1951, that she expected a letter from Mary “shortly, probably asking me if I like men, or some such.”
If Mary Flannery stood on the sidelines of the mating rituals of many of her fellow Jessies, she was just as removed from their liberal campus politics. “We kept trying to get her to come to these things,” says Helen Matthews Lewis, of the YWCA events. “But she was apolitical or nonpolitical.” She saw leading campus characters as figures of fun, rather than as serious role models. The “country bumpkin” side of President Wells impressed her more than his being “ahead of his time” on race issues. Six years after graduation, she wrote to Betty Boyd, in her collegiate tone, “I read in the local paper where Guy H. Wells was going somewhere to give a talk entitled, ‘Humor of Many Lands.’ Now, I said, ain’t that a laugh?” Bringing up the “spinster-suffragette” professors to Betty Hester in 1955, she skipped over their social feminism for a funny remark that turned on a novel by the Atlanta author Frances Newman: “she did write a novel called The Hard Boiled Virgin I find, which now I must read. I am going to see if they have it in the GSCW Library — the title may keep it out of there, a natural inconsistency, since half the teachers at that place are surely such.”
The first official gathering of the entering freshman class, in September 1942, was a formal tea at the Old Executive Mansion, the residence of President Wells. Once home to Confederate Governor Joseph E. Brown, as well as to General Sherman during his March to the Sea, the Palladian high Greek Revival governor’s mansion, with its soaring fifty-foot rotunda and gilded dome, was located on the same block as the Cline Mansion. Mary Flannery could spy its massive rose-colored masonry walls from her bedroom window, just beyond the backyard where, according to Betty Boyd Love, she still “kept ducks.” Yet her family had to force her to walk around the block to the social event. “Flannery did not want to go but was pressured into it,” remembers their classmate Harriet Thorp Hendricks. “She donned the required long dress — but wore her tennis shoes.” When asked why she was sitting alone in a corner, she replied, “Well, I’m anti-social.”
A tradition that elicited nothing but scorn from her was Rat Day, which began as Freshman Initiation Day in the thirties. A mass hazing of the freshman class, Rat Day commenced at four thirty in the morning. By evening, freshmen who had not shown enough servility were put on trial before a screaming jury of juniors in a Rat Court in Peabody Auditorium. Among the punishments meted out, in a 1943 Rat Court reported in the
Colonnade:
“Connie Howell was sentenced to wash her mouth out with soap. Sarah Pittard was seen sitting on a Coke bottle and washing clothes.” Earlier that day, Mary Flannery had been tested by just such a group of hazing sophomore girls, ordering her to wear an onion around her neck. When she flatly refused, they commanded her to kneel and beg their pardon. “I will not,” she responded with disdain, and walked off.
Even more trying for her than Miss Scott’s creative writing class was English 102, the sequential General College Composition, taught that fall by Dr. William T. Wynn. Known to his students as “Willie T,” the Southern-lit buff did not give the young writer even the benefit of the doubt of a high grade; she earned an 83, keeping her off the first-quarter dean’s list. “Dr. Wynn was a gentleman of the old school who was soon to retire,” reported a class member, Kathryn Donan Kuck. “He did not enjoy her style of writing and he tried hard to change it. He wanted her to be ladylike and graceful.” When the time came to declare a major, she chose Social Science to avoid taking two requirements for the English major taught only by Dr. Wynn, a grammar course, using a little textbook he had written, and Shakespeare. “He was a laughingstock,” says Mary Barbara Tate. “She just did not want to have him again. That’s how she evaded him.”
A sample of her writing style that would have stoked Dr. Wynn’s ire was “Going to the Dogs,” the first of a number of satires she published in the
Corinthian.
The parody appeared in the fall 1942 issue, with its black-and-white cover photograph of a thoughtful Jessie penning a “Dear Soldier” letter while lying on the campus lawn. “A few days later I was further startled by seeing another group of students chase a cat up a tree on the front campus,” complains her narrator, reminiscent of the myopic groom of Poe’s “The Spectacles,” as she mistakes roving dogs for college students. She signed this effort “M. F. O’Connor,” a half step to “Flannery O’Connor.” Tenderly echoed in the neutral signature, too, were the initials used by her father, “E. F. O’Connor.”
By the middle of the fall semester, Mary Flannery clicked into a congenial role for herself in the GSCW community: campus cartoonist. As she simply “moved over” from Peabody High to Georgia State, she likewise “moved over” as a cartoonist. The faculty adviser to the
Colonnade
was the same journalism instructor, George Haslam, who had invited her to contribute to the
Palladium.
Together they agreed that she would raise her rate of production to a cartoon every week and take over as art editor, beginning in November, in the newspaper offices in the basement of Parks Hall. She quickly adopted the campus as the setting for her cartoons, signified by a Greek column or a stone pediment. But instead of aligning herself with the idealistic view of Betty Boyd’s first-impressions piece, O’Connor fixed her gaze on its eyesores: packs of stray dogs; boards patching holes in the muddy lawn; glaring nighttime spotlights.
As with her first published college story, O’Connor marked her new artistic venue with a new signature, a monogram. Such monograms, formed by turning initials, or the letters of a name, into heraldic pictures, representing a person or a job, and used on stationery, handkerchiefs, and business cards, were a wartime fad; they were even highlighted in the popular Paramount Pictures “Unusual Occupations” series of ten-minute color newsreels, in a 1944 segment titled “‘What’s in a Name’ Monogram Art.” For her own identifying emblem, she mined her dearest obsession, scrambling her initials to make a design suggesting a bird: “M” for a beak; “F,” a tail; “O,” a face; “C,” the curve of a body. “It may look like a bird,” Betty Boyd Love wrote of the witty final result, “but I’m sure she would have said it was a chicken.”
O’Connor’s debut cartoon appeared on October 6, with her chicken logo fixed in the lower-left corner. Titled “The Immediate Results of Physical Fitness Day,” its subject was a spent girl in baggy sweater, skirt, and saddle oxfords, stiffly supporting herself with a cane, her tongue hanging out. The illustration accompanied a feature story: “Keeping Fit: Physical Fitness Program to Be Daily Feature at GSCW.” Over the next months, she concocted an unfolding frieze of such challenged types — some, like a harried, limp-haired girl, staggering under a load of books, an obvious self-portrait. “I thought of her then as a cartoonist who also tried her hand at writing,” says Gertrude Ehrlich, an Austrian “refugee student.” “She was a genius at depicting us ‘Jessies’ running around campus, with scarves hanging out of pockets, or messily draped on our heads.”
By the time O’Connor completed her eight cartoons of the first fall quarter, she had developed her favorite situation — a short, fat girl and her tall, thin sidekick, bouncing caustic remarks off each other. In an October 24 spoof of a faculty-student softball game, one of the pair of girls, loaded down with books, grouses to her friend, “Aw, nuts! I thought we’d at least have one day off after the faculty played softball!” The accompanying article: “Faculty Score 13 Over Seniors’ 12.” The steady outfitting of her odd couple with raincoats, galoshes, and umbrellas was a wink to a knowing audience. “It seemed to rain a lot in Milledgeville and we wore khaki-colored cotton gabardine raincoats most of the time,” explains Virginia Wood Alexander. “This is the way I remember Flannery. She would come ‘slouching’ along like the rest of us.”
A rare campus event that O’Connor truly enjoyed was the Golden Slipper, an annual drama contest between the freshmen and sophomore classes, with a small golden slipper as the award. “I remember her being behind some of the brilliant backdrops and scenery in this competition,” says her classmate Frances Lane Poole. The production that November was especially important to her, as the freshman entry, “Blossoms on Bataan,” was directed by Betty Boyd. It was set in a foxhole during the Battle of the Philippines, an American defeat in April 1942. The equally topical sophomore production “The Bell of Tarchova” took place in a village church during the 1939 Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia. When the sophomore class won, O’Connor’s November 14 cartoon featured her trademark girls, defeated, in highly elongated saddle shoes, with the caption “Doggone the Golden Slipper Contest. Now we have to wear saddle oxfords.”
Enough excitement was generated by these cartoons that at the end of her first school year the
Macon Telegraph and News
ran a profile, written by Nelle Womack Hines, alongside a freshman photo of a grinning O’Connor wearing round glasses, her hair done in the typical pin-curled style of the 1940s. The piece was headlined “Mary O’Connor Shows Talent as Cartoonist.” Hines found herself with an easily quotable subject in the girl she characterized as “fast making a name for herself as an up-and-coming cartoonist”: “When asked how she went about her work, Miss O’Connor replied that first — she caught her ‘rabbit.’ In this case, she explained, the ‘rabbit’ was a good idea, which must tie up with some current event or a recent happening on the campus.” Hines rightly observed, with coaching from the cartoonist, “Usually Mary presents two students in her cartoons — a tall, lanky ‘dumb-bunny’ and a short and stocky ‘smart-aleck’ — female, of course.” The interviewer’s conclusion was politic: “A keen sense of humor enables her to see the funny side of situations which she portrays minus the sting.”
I
N
J
ANUARY 1943
, World War II came marching onto the campus of Georgia State College for Women. By that winter, the global conflict had intensified. GSCW students and faculty heard daily news reports of battles from Guadalcanal to Tripoli and Stalingrad, as they worked in the Civilian Morale Service’s Key Center, operating out of Russell Library. But the war came home in a more startling way when Waves began drills on campus, and moved into their dorms and classrooms. Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services were among eighty-six thousand female soldiers pressed into navy service on the home front. With lobbying from the powerful Milledgeville Congressman Carl Vinson, House chairman of the Naval Affairs Committee (who helped Ed O’Connor win his FHA appointment), GSCW was chosen as one of four campuses for on-site training (Smith was the only other women’s college).