Savannah
I
n the fall of 1963 Flannery O’Connor delivered her final public lecture. The occasion was the 175th anniversary celebration of Georgetown University, in Washington, DC, where she read prepared remarks through her prominent eyeglasses for about forty-five minutes from the proscenium stage of the ornate Gaston auditorium in historic Healy Hall. “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” was the last of more than sixty such talks and readings she had given in the decade since the publication of her first novel,
Wise Blood,
enough for her to have confided about her “element of ham” to a friend: “I have a secret desire to rival Charles Dickens upon the stage.”
Early in her speech that evening, she cast back to the beginnings of her creative life. “The things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all,” she said softly, in a flat, dry Georgia accent, while leaning on crutches. “The South impresses its image on the Southern writer from the moment he is able to distinguish one sound from another. He takes it in through his ears and hears it again in his own voice, and, by the time he is able to use his imagination for fiction, he finds that his senses respond irrevocably to a certain reality, and particularly to the sound of a certain reality. The Southern writer’s greatest tie with the South is through his ear.”
For O’Connor these sights and sounds had their origins in Savannah, where she was born Mary Flannery O’Connor on March 25, 1925, at St. Joseph’s Hospital, and lived her first thirteen years, nearly a third of her life. The Savannah into which she was born was a classic Southern city, pungent in spring with blooming jasmine, though more sophisticated than other insular Georgia towns like Macon or Valdosta. No longer a booming nineteenth-century port, teeming with cotton brokers and shipping agents, the cosmopolitan center, with seventy-five thousand residents, still hosted a dozen or more foreign consulates; strangers with accents did not draw stares on the streets; and a cavalcade of steamers embarked daily from its harbor to ports in Germany, Britain, and Japan.
On the blustery spring day of her birth, the one-word weather forecast in the
Savannah Morning News
was dramatic enough: “unsettled.” Savannahians awoke that morning to word of President Calvin Coolidge calling for a naval conference on the readiness of the American fleet. Most of the local talk concerned a girl evangelist from Fresno, California, packing crowds into the Municipal Auditorium with her message, “Sinner Must Be Reborn in Christ.” Most auspicious for O’Connor’s Irish Catholic parents, Edward and Regina, was the the date in the Roman Catholic calendar: it was the Feast of the Annunciation, marking the visit of the angel Gabriel to the infant’s spiritual namesake, Mary, to announce her motherhood of Jesus.
O’Connor was born into a special corner of the life of Savannah simply by being born at St. Joseph’s Hospital. The homey redbrick building, with big porches on its first and second floors, took up an entire city block at the corner of Habersham and East Taylor, just a few blocks south of the O’Connors’ home. Known in the community as “old St. Joseph’s,” this intimate hospital, much trusted by Irish Catholics, was founded by Irish nuns, the Sisters of Mercy, who became local heroes in the summer of 1876 while caring for yellow fever victims crowded into the corridors of what was then Old Medical College. As their legacy, the founding sisters left behind, in the main entrance, a tall, stately statue of St. Joseph on a low pedestal that O’Connor’s parents walked by often.
St. Joseph’s was not only the hospital for the Irish Catholic community, but it was the O’Connors’ family hospital, the one Cousin Katie Semmes presided over as prime benefactress. Her father, Captain John Flannery, a Confederate officer in the Jasper Greens, Savannah’s Irish military corps, had parlayed his war record into success as a rich banker and a broker in the Savannah Cotton Exchange. When he died in 1910 he left all of his money, nearly a million dollars, to his only daughter, Katie, who used her inheritance to fund construction of a new adjoining east building, Flannery Memorial, in honor of Captain John and his wife, Mary Ellen Flannery. If O’Connor’s parents wished to give thanks in prayer for the birth of their daughter — her name itself a memorial to Cousin Katie’s mother — they stepped into the Flannery Memorial Chapel.
Named after the wife of a Civil War hero, the infant O’Connor was initiated at once into a social set haunted by the war still referred to in Savannah in the twenties and thirties as the “War Between the States” — a living memory for some, a single generation removed for others. The Catholic bishop of the Diocese of Savannah, Benjamin J. Keiley, retiring only two years before O’Connor’s birth, served in the war as a Confederate drummer boy. Katie Semmes’s deceased husband, Raphael Semmes, was the nephew of a famous Confederate admiral of the same name. Though O’Connor later swore, “I never was one to go over the Civil War in a big way,” she grew up among a set of older women who were forever slipping on white gloves, and putting on big hats, to go off to chapter meetings of the Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Irish families using St. Joseph’s Hospital had a double loyalty — to Confederate Memorial Day, and to St. Patrick’s Day, with St. Patrick winning by a nose. The Irish pride parade in March just managed to overshadow the annual Confederate Day parade held each April 26. As O’Connor later wrote to a friend, “I was brought up in Savannah where there was a colony of the Over-Irish. They have the biggest St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere around and generally go nutty on the subject.” She went on to exclaim incredulously that she had even heard her hometown compared to Dublin. Making up most Catholics in Savannah, the Irish were certainly a presence. In the year of her birth, two of the six city aldermen were Irish Catholics and so was the city attorney.
Yet the Irish Catholics of Savannah were given to a bunker mentality, with some justification. Catholics were expressly banned, along with rum, lawyers, and blacks, under the original Georgia Trust in 1733. While that law had long ago been overwritten, and waves of Irish immigrants arrived during the potato famines of the 1840s, an anti-Catholic law was still on the books at the time of O’Connor’s birth: the Convent Inspection Bill became Georgia law in 1916. Under this weird legislation, grand juries were charged with inspecting Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages, to search for evidence of sexual immorality and to question all the “inmates,” ensuring that they were not held involuntarily. Tom Watson, elected U.S. senator from Georgia in 1920, went so far as to accuse the bishop of Savannah of keeping “white slave pens” of missing girls.
With their ambiguous status, subdivided further into middle-class “lace curtain” and lower-class “shanty,” the Irish could at least take comfort that legal segregation didn’t apply to them as it did to the city’s blacks. Jim Crow laws kept Savannah strictly divided by race. St. Joseph’s Hospital was listed in the “White Department” rather than the “Colored” section of the
Savannah City Directory.
The Catholic diocese ran seven churches — four for whites, three for blacks. Growing up, O’Connor saw blacks mainly in menial roles, usually maids slipping through the back doors of distressed antebellum homes. Her cousin Patricia Persse, who remembers her own family’s electricity being turned off because of unpaid bills during the Depression, recalls, as well, “We had a black cook and nursemaid who came every day for fifty years, though she didn’t live with us.”
Edward and Regina O’Connor brought their newborn daughter home from the hospital to Lafayette Square, the epicenter of Roman Catholic life in Savannah, socially situated in the better half of the Irish ghetto, and one of twenty-one original squares put in place on a two-and-a-half-square-mile grid in an enlightened display of city planning. Settling the town in 1733, the English governor James Edward Oglethorpe had used as his model the design of a Roman military camp. A checkerboard of squares with allusive names such as Monterey, Chippewa, and Troup, Savannah was built from an inventory of architectural styles — Federal, Edwardian, Regency, Colonial, and Victorian — its tabby and cobblestone streets lined by live oaks hung with Spanish moss; chinaberry, Japanese maple, and Southern magnolia trees; and azalea and camellia bushes.
Each of the town’s squares, many a bit worn by 1925, filled with dirt, or cut by streetcar tracks, had a distinctive neighborhood feel. Lafayette Square reflected the self-sufficiency of the Irish Catholics. Opposite the O’Connors’ home, on the other side of the square, was the massive white-stucco French Gothic Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, occupying a full city block. Between the cathedral and their house was St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls and, diagonally opposite St. Vincent’s, its companion, Marist Brothers School for Boys. “I remember the square as a barren, sandy pile crawling with boys playing sports,” says an ex-Marist pupil, Dan O’Leary. A Presbyterian girl who lived across the street from the O’Connors has remarked, “It was so Catholic that I felt a bit like a fish out of water.” During the school year, hundreds of Catholic children (together the schools enrolled about seven hundred students) marched back and forth across the square.
Built in 1856 of Savannah gray bricks, covered in light tan stucco, the O’Connors’ three-story Georgian row house, its front door topped with a ruby etched-glass transom, was still joined, in 1925, with 209 East Charlton Street. Its twin, also a twenty-footer, was not torn down until three years later when Katie Semmes moved into 211 East Charlton and wanted an elevator attached to her sidewall. Mrs. O’Connor took pride in the modest elegance of her well-kept parlor floor with its small entrance foyer; attractive, dark green double living room with two black marble fireplaces, two chandeliers, and four eight-foot bay windows; large dining room with a heavy dark oak table, where the family would gather for formal meals; small kitchen; and back sunporch, where she kept her green plants. Upstairs, the parents’ front bedroom was connected by a doorway to their daughter’s back bedroom, both heated in winter by coal fireplaces.
The often-repeated Savannah comment that Flannery O’Connor “was conceived in the shadow of the cathedral” is not entirely rhetorical. Looming through her parents’ bedroom windows were always its pale green twin spires, topped by gold crosses — visible, indeed, for miles around. Clearly audible was the tremulous booming of the big bells every morning, noon, and evening, signaling the praying of the Angelus, in honor of Mary. Like St. Joseph’s Hospital, the cathedral — named St. John the Baptist, some said, to mollify a paranoid Protestant majority — was the handiwork of Captain John Flannery. A generous benefactor of the first cathedral, destroyed by fire in 1898, Captain Flannery then became chairman of the building committee for the present cathedral, dedicated in 1900. One of its three stained-glass windows, depicting a scene from the life of John the Baptist, was donated by him, “In Memory of Mary Ellen Flannery.”
So when Mary Flannery O’Connor’s parents carried her across the square for baptism at a four o’clock afternoon service on Easter Sunday, April 12, she wasn’t just any little girl, though she was one of many babies and their gathered parents and godparents. Far from the promise “You count now,” given by the Reverend Bevel Summers after he baptizes the young Harry in O’Connor’s story “The River,” was the Latin blessing pronounced that morning by the rector, Father T. A. Foley, as he marked the sign of the cross in water on her forehead: “Mary Flannery, ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.” Listed on her baptismal certificate, as “first sponsor,” was her father’s brother, John Joseph O’Connor, a dentist in town. Her “second sponsor” was Mary Cline, her mother’s oldest sister, who presided over the family’s mansion in Milledgeville.
Early on, her parents brought the infant girl by the home of Katie Semmes, who was still living in an imposing 1852 redbrick Greek Revival at Bull and Taylor streets on Monterey Square. As Katherine Doyle Groves has recalled: “My first memories of her, we are third cousins, our great-grandmothers were sisters, was when she was an infant and they didn’t have all this kind of equipment they have now for hauling babies. I remember a basket of some sort. We were visiting with my cousin, Mrs. Semmes. . . . We would go down, my mother and father, my sister and myself, in the evening to call on my cousin, and Ed and Regina, Flannery’s parents, would be there with this baby in the basket on the floor.” Groves has stressed that Flannery O’Connor actually bore no Flannery blood, as Captain Flannery was merely a cousin by marriage.
At home, the baby was rolled between the two second-floor bedrooms — all the windows kept wide open for ventilation in spring and summer — and into the backyard, as well, in an elaborate crib. The contraption was common enough nursery furniture in the 1920s, especially in the South — a waist-high, flat, rectangular box, painted white, five feet in length, screened on the top and sides, and pushed on large metal wheels. Marketed as a “Kiddie-Koop Crib,” with the insinuation of being a chicken coop for kids, the box doubled as a playpen, allowing a child to stand, or to be laid flat on a board through the middle, protected by its closed lid from the pesky flies and mosquitoes of coastal Georgia. As its successful 1923 ad slogan asked, “Danger or Safety — Which?”
When Mrs. O’Connor took her infant daughter for strolls around the perimeter of Lafayette Square, the child’s conveyance was a bit more deluxe: a perambulator with oversized metal wheels and a padded interior lined with dark brown corduroy, given as a baby gift by Katie Semmes. Fashioned of wood, with a long swan’s-neck metal handle and an adjustable protective hood of slatted wicker with portholes on either side, all painted in the same cream color, the elegant focal point was a monogram of the new baby’s initials — “MFOC” — embossed in gold on the side. At rest in the hallway, the pushchair complemented the gilt picture-rail molding in the parlor, as well as Mrs. O’Connor’s upholstered green brocade love seat, with gilded cabriole legs, and tea cart.