The word used over and over by friends to describe O’Connor’s childhood is “protected,” or, just as often, “overprotected.” As a daughter in a Southern family with extended circles of relatives, especially unmarried female cousins and aunts, she was hardly overlooked. Thanks largely to her mother, she was kept as sealed during her early years as she was as a baby in her Kiddie-Koop — the brand name almost too neatly predicting her identification with fowl as her friends. Yet along with excessive control was entitlement and encouragement; the embossed initials on the perambulator predicted the heightened attention that would be paid, at least by the adults in the family, to each creative and sometimes downright peculiar gesture of this only child.
O’C
ONNOR WAS BORN
into a clan of strong women, beginning with the family of her mother, the regally named Regina Lucille Cline. She was undoubtedly thinking of her mother’s side of the family when writing to a friend of her relatives, “I don’t think mine have ever been in a world they couldn’t cope with because none of them that I know of have left the 19th century.” Known around the region as “Old Catholic,” both the Cline and Flannery families could be traced back to the Irish Treanors and Hartys, who settled, in the late eighteenth century, in old Locust Grove, in Taliaferro County, Georgia.
Flannery’s great-grandfather Hugh Donnelly Treanor, who emigrated from county Tipperary in 1824, had a reputation for being well read. He developed a prosperous water-powered grist mill on the Oconee River in Milledgeville, in central Georgia, which became the family seat; as O’Connor later reported in a letter from Milledgeville, “Mass was first said here in my great-grandfather’s hotel room, later in his home on the piano.” After Hugh Treanor died, his widow, O’Connor’s great-grandmother Johannah Harty Treanor, also Irish-born, settled with her family in the Locust Grove community. She donated the land on which Sacred Heart, the Catholic church at the corner of Hancock and Jefferson streets in Milledgeville, was built in 1874.
One of Hugh Treanor’s daughters, Kate, married Peter J. Cline, a successful dry-goods store owner in Milledgeville, and when she died, her sister, Margaret Ida, married him, in turn. The two bore a total of sixteen children, with Regina, born in 1896, being the second-youngest daughter of the second family. Like Haze’s father in a draft of
Wise Blood,
Peter Cline’s father was a humble Latin scholar, a schoolteacher in Augusta. Peter’s wealth sufficiently trumped his oddity as a small-town Irish Catholic to allow him to buy an antebellum mansion in Milledgeville soon after the Civil War, to be unanimously elected its mayor in 1889, and to have his every movement covered in the local paper: he set off “a grand pyrotechnic display” in front of his home on Christmas Eve 1890, and left town “for the northern markets” in March 1903.
As a young daughter of a first family in town, Regina was often sassy. One afternoon when she was walking with some girlfriends, a laborer rolling a wagon along the street called out to her, “Little girl, what you got in your bag?” She snapped her blond head about and startled her playmates by shouting back, “I’ve got the biscuits. Have you got the honey?” After elementary school, she went away to Mount St. Joseph Boarding and Day School for Girls, in Augusta, a convent school supported with funding from its alumna Katie Semmes, who paid for the school’s own Flannery Hall, and whose aunt, Mother Gabriel, served as its Mother Superior. At her high school graduation, in May 1916, Regina recited a Latin poem, “Fortiter et Recte,” while her younger sister, Agnes, graduating as well, played a piano selection from Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger.
Of a visit at age four to the school, O’Connor later wrote to her friend Father James McCown: “I don’t know anybody in Augusta. I visited there once when I was four — at the convent where my cousin was Mother Superior and celebrating her something-or-other jubilee. They had ice cream for dessert in the shape of calla lilies. That was the only time I was ever tempted to join an order — I thought they ate that way every day.”
This childhood visit impressed her enough for Mount St. Joseph to be echoed in the name Mount St. Scholastica in her story “A Temple of the Holy Ghost.” The rest of the description of its fictional double resembled Sacred Heart Academy, located in downtown Augusta on Ellis Street. It was a redbrick house set back in a garden in the center of town, surrounded by a high black grillwork fence.
A protracted six years after graduation, Regina Cline met her future husband, Edward Francis O’Connor, Jr., at the wedding of her youngest brother, Herbert Aloysius Cline, to O’Connor’s younger sister Anne Golden O’Connor. The simple ceremony at the Sacred Heart Chapel of the cathedral in Savannah, on July 18, 1922, was characterized in a newspaper announcement as an “interesting, quiet wedding . . . neither bride nor bridegroom having an attendant.” As Regina Cline was twenty-six years old at the time, some of the older women in her family might have felt — like Lucynell Crater for her daughter in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — “ravenous” for a suitor. Apparently the pretty young woman with the heart-shaped face had once been disappointed in love when a Protestant family living in Pennsylvania convinced their son, who was working in Milledgeville, not to marry her on religious grounds.
Ed O’Connor, also twenty-six, and also on the rebound from an unhappy love affair, made a likely candidate. With a stage actor’s good looks, direct pale blue eyes, and the flair of a mustache, he cut quite a figure in Irish circles about town. As his sister recalled, he loved to “put on his white linen suit, tilt his straw boater over his eye, and go out to Tybee Island dancing of a summer evening.” The oldest of eight children, he was educated at Benedictine College, a military prep school in Savannah, and attended Mount St. Mary’s College in Emmetsburg, Maryland, after failing to secure a spot at Annapolis because of a low math score — a lack of aptitude for numbers inherited by his daughter. Her friend Robert Fitzgerald recalled a photograph of him as “a robust, amused young man. . . . sitting like the hub of a wheel with his five gay younger brothers beside and behind him.”
After college, Ed O’Connor served between May 1916 and August 1917 in the Georgia National Guard taking part in the “Mexican Expedition” led by General John J. Pershing to patrol the border of New Mexico against incursions by the rebel general of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa, often vilified in the press as a bandit and horse thief. The “Expedition” included punitive invasions into Mexican territory. During World War I, O’Connor was deployed overseas, between April 1918 and May 1919, in the 325th Infantry of the 82nd Division of the American Expeditionary Force, the “All Americans” out of Camp Gordon, Georgia, with their famed “AA” shoulder patches. For helping rout the German Imperial Army from France, he was awarded, at the rank of second lieutenant, a World War I Victory Medal and Victory Button.
A nagging downside for Regina Cline, in choosing a husband, was Ed O’Connor’s background — his family never achieved the social stature of the Clines of Milledgeville, or the Flannerys of Savannah, though they led comfortable middle-class lives. His grandfather Patrick O’Connor, a wheelwright, emigrated from Ireland with his brother Daniel in 1851, and established a livery stable on Broughton Street. His father, Edward Francis O’Connor, Sr., was a wholesale distributor of candies and tobacco; he was a prominent enough businessman, though, to have been president of the People’s Bank, and a director of the Hibernia Bank. When Regina Cline met him, her future husband was living with his parents at 115 East Gwinnett Street, working as a salesman in his father’s company, and hoping to make a start in the real estate business.
Their courtship was quick. Less than three months after they met, one of Regina Cline’s older brothers, Dr. Bernard Cline, placed an engagement announcement in the
Savannah Morning News,
promising, “The wedding will take place at an early date.” Just a week later, on Saturday, October 14, 1922, the couple was married at Sacred Heart Church, in Milledgeville, by the Reverend T. J. Morrow. The newlyweds then moved into a small set of rooms that the young husband could afford in the recently built Graham Apartments, downtown, on Oglethorpe Square. In March 1923, Katie Semmes generously intervened with a favorable deal so that they could move into the pretty Charlton Street town house that she owned on Lafayette Square. Ed O’Connor agreed to pay a minimal monthly rental fee against a modest purchase price loan, basically a private mortgage, of forty-five hundred dollars, to be repaid when his real estate business took off.
During their first years on Charlton Street, Regina O’Connor’s cool attitude toward her husband’s family grew more pronounced. From conversations with family members, O’Connor’s close friend, as well as editor and biographer, Sally Fitzgerald, later concluded, “There seems little doubt that there were little failures of kindness and tact on the young wife’s part.” One of the faux pas was the announcement of their child’s impending birth, at an evening party. Small cards accompanying the refreshments declared the happy occasion, so the paternal grandmother-to-be learned the news along with the other casual guests. She was “wounded,” and relations with her daughter-in-law grew more strained. Ed O’Connor insisted that his daughter be named after his mother, but since the name Mary could fit either Mary Elizabeth O’Connor or Mary Ellen Flannery, Regina did not find compliance terribly difficult.
Ed O’Connor’s sense of being outvoted by the women in his wife’s family may well have increased in late 1929 — four years after their daughter’s birth — when Mrs. Semmes departed Monterey Square to move into her Greek Revival home at 211 East Charlton Street, adjacent to, and dwarfing, the O’Connors’ house. With her, she brought not only lots of construction work, but also her unmarried cousin Annie Treanor, an aunt of Regina O’Connor. A few years later, she was joined by Miss M. C. Hynes and the widow Mrs. Fitzpatrick Forston. An early photograph of “Aunt Annie” shows a severe woman in wire-rim spectacles, her white hair gathered in a bun, wearing a long, dark skirt and sweater, dark stockings, and lace-up oxfords, evidently one of those family members that O’Connor felt had never “left the 19th century.” A cousin recalled these Treanor aunts as having a penchant for the word “’umbled, omitting the ‘h.’ Humility was a great message in our family.”
O’Connor’s early childhood is captured in a collection of family photographs. In the earliest, a series of studio portraits taken for a family Christmas card, the little girl is smiling and charming, legs crossed on a stage prop of a bench, showing all the signs of being, as one family friend has recalled, “beautifully cared for” — in some she is hugging a doll; in others she is posed next to her mother, who reveals a sultry beauty as she stares quietly into the camera. In these staged portraits, mother and daughter look together into the camera. In pictures with her father, the girl turns her beaming face toward his, and he returns her smile. Both parents communicate fond doting in all the shots. A solo portrait of O’Connor, age two or three, sitting on an ottoman, brow furrowed, satin bow in hair, frowning with full concentration into the curled page of a book on her lap, reveals a remarkably self-possessed expression of adult intensity.
As a little girl, O’Connor’s appearance favored her father. She bore his direct gaze and his clean, handsome features. This resemblance is striking in her confirmation portrait, taken at seven years old. In a dress trimmed in white lace, with her short, straight brown hair combed slickly to the side, she is the mirror image of her clear-eyed father. The adult Flannery O’Connor would become fascinated by the cloning of features between generations, considering them as a sign of some spiritual bond. In “A View of the Woods,” the grandfather finds his granddaughter Mary Fortune’s face “a small replica of the old man’s,” and feels “she was like him on the inside too.” In “The Artificial Nigger,” Mr. Head’s ten-year-old nephew Nelson has a “face very much the same shape as the old man’s.” Calhoun is horrified in “The Partridge Festival” when his aunt Bessie reminds him, “You look very like Father.”
The affinity between Ed O’Connor and his daughter was certainly “on the inside too.” His pride in her could amount to infatuation. From 1927 until 1931, he included a separate listing for “Miss Mary Flannery O’Connor” in the
Savannah City Directory,
an unusual, whimsical gesture for a preschool child. Another fond touch shows up in a 1936 diocesan bulletin, “Roll of the Female Orphanage Society,” crediting Mary Flannery O’Connor as a contributor rather than her parents. A coconspirator in her world of childhood fantasy, wishing sometimes to be a writer himself, he slipped her notes signed “King of Siam.” In their games, she dubbed herself “Lord Flannery O’Connor.” She would hide little poems or drawings under his breakfast plate, or tuck them into his napkin for him to discover when he sat down at the kitchen table. He liked to fold up these tokens of affection, stick them in his wallet, and show them off to friends during the day.
Her relationship with her mother was just as intimate, though more fraught. Regina told a friend of having to spank her six-year-old daughter to make her wear hose and a dress for her first piano recital. A cartoon that O’Connor drew when she was nine years old shows a child walking with her father and mother. In a balloon coming from the mother’s mouth are the words: “Hold your head up, Mary Flannery, and you are just as bad, Ed.” To which the girl, dragging along, snidely replies, “I was readin where someone died of holding up their head.” As a family friend summed up the difference in attitude of the parents, “Ed would not have put the kind of pressure on her that Regina did. He liked her just as she was.” Regina’s devotion to her daughter often took the form of trying, unsuccessfully, to mold her into the perfect Southern-style little girl.
Yet there is no evidence that O’Connor’s childhood was troubled. As far as pressuring went, she was quite capable of digging in her heels. Her self-confidence was clear in her bold act of calling her parents by their first names — they were “Regina” and “Ed” to her from early on. They were also her first audience. When the O’Connors went out for the evening, their little daughter, in the care of the babysitter, would write letters, or make drawings, to surprise them. One of these was done on a piece of white cardboard bent in half, with a red silk cord threaded through two holes at the fold. On one side, she traced her mother’s initials “R.C.O’C.,” pasting a cutout drawing, childishly hand-colored, of a pretty little girl on a bridge, watching ducks swimming in the stream below. On the flip side, for her father, “E.F.O’C.,” she glued an illustration of an old clockmaker, peering intently through wire-rim glasses, tinkering at his worktable.