A
N EVENTFUL YEAR
in Mary Flannery’s life was 1931. Not only had she been filmed by Pathe News, but she took her first steps into an ever-so-slightly larger world by entering the first grade at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls. This parochial school was housed in the Gerard mansion, an early-nineteenth-century, three-story converted private home, with an iron lattice balcony across its second floor, and a low iron picket fence. Though St. Vincent’s was located a mere forty yards from the O’Connors’ door, each morning the child would make the brief walk to the front gate holding her mother’s hand, taking part in a ritual in which, as one student recalls, “All the mothers walked the little girls to school.”
Outside the stone walls of the elegant box-shaped school, with its eaves and pillared portico, Savannah, like much of America, was coping with the aftershocks of the stock market crash of 1929 and the deepening, worldwide Great Depression: real estate values were declining, businesses stagnating, property rapidly changing hands, grand town houses being cut into apartments renting for as little as eight dollars a month. The poorer population was moving downtown, where charity food lines were appearing for the first time since Sherman’s occupation. An economic downshift was felt in middle-class homes as well. O’Connor later claimed that at the height of the Depression her family had eaten ground round steak and turnip greens for supper
“every day
.
”
O’Connor’s father had invested all of his business hopes in the vulnerable real estate market. The year his daughter entered the first grade, the downward graph of Edward O’Connor’s business career was already visible in the
Savannah City Directory.
In 1927, he had officially entered his new business for the first time, listing himself as manager of the Dixie Realty Company. In 1927 and 1928, the company’s most successful years, he took out display ads pitching his company as buying, selling, renting, and insuring properties. In 1930, he added the Dixie Construction Company to the business entry, but by the next year the affiliated venture had disappeared. At the height of the economy, in 1928, Dixie Realty Company was one of a hundred companies placing such ads; by 1930, one year into the Depression, that number had already decreased to eighty-five.
Whatever tensions the girls entering St. Vincent’s were sensing in their own homes, the school maintained a nearly medieval aura of Latinate order and spirituality. Run by the Sisters of Mercy, who also ran St. Joseph’s Hospital, where Mary Flannery was born, St. Vincent’s was an enclave of parochialism of the sort she would later label the “novena-rosary tradition.” Each morning the “big girls” of grades five through eight, with their classes on the top floor, lined the long interior staircase, while the “little girls,” including Mary Flannery during most of her years at the school, remained standing in their classrooms on the floor below, adding their high, quivering voices to sing the opening daily hymn, “Veni Creator Spiritus,” or “Come, Holy Ghost.” Prayers were then dutifully recited before classes, before and after lunch, and at the dismissal.
In preparation for a special “Communion Sunday” during the school year, the girls gathered before intricately carved, dark wood confessionals, with velvet drapes and sliding panels — two at the back, two at the transept at the front of the cathedral — to count their sins and rehearse the formula of the sacrament of penance: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.” They fasted from midnight on the day before the Communion, and, like their parents and other family members, abstained from eating meat on Fridays. For a florid May Day procession, all the girls — 324 of them, taught by nine sisters the year she began — lined up in matching white dresses, clutching bouquets of spring flowers, and marched into the cathedral to recite the rosary and sing sentimental Marian hymns: “O Mary we crown thee with flowers today / Queen of the angels, queen of the May.”
She caught glimpses, too, of the activities of boys — unfamiliar outsiders in her enclosed world. Mostly these were among the 340 pupils of Marist Brothers School, run, in 1931, by nine Brothers of Mary. Underlining the awkward divide between the two companion schools and genders, Dan O’Leary, enrolled at Marist while O’Connor was at St. Vincent’s, recalls being enlisted to deliver a note to one of the nuns: “I delivered my message, and the sister said, ‘Thank you, son.’ I said, ‘You’re welcome, brother.’ All the girls cracked up and I retreated with my ears burning.” On Sundays, chosen Marist boys served as acolytes or altar boys, dressed in white surplices, little hats, and Buster Brown collars, swinging censers and reciting brief Latin responses at the Italianate marble high altar of the cathedral, or singing, as boy sopranos, at midnight mass.
In such a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world, O’Connor found herself a misfit from the start. In an autobiographical sketch for a Magazine Writing course at Iowa, she remembered herself as “a pidgeo-ntoed, only-child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex” that did little to reassure her parents of their good fortune. Showing her irascibility at St. Vincent’s, she bragged of substituting “St. Cecilia” for “Rover” in third-grade composition exercises such as “Throw the ball to Rover.” A thinly disguised only child named “Mary Flemming” in a student story of O’Connor’s wears orthopedic “Tarso-Supernator-ProperBuilt shoes” and needs to “take toe exercises every night and remember to walk on the outsides of her feet.”
This bravado that O’Connor adopts on the page when telling tales of her childhood was not always the tone of the earliest memories of her classmates. Rather, Mary Flannery was usually pegged as quiet, painfully shy, self-reliant but remote, the introvert on the sidelines whose cousin remembers her wearing “some sort of corrective shoes, she had a distinctive kind of loping walk.” On rare occasions when she went with other little girls to Broughton Street, the main shopping strip downtown, she clutched her pocketbook tightly in her hand. “If I took off with some of the other children to go through Colonial Cemetery, she’d stand on the side and watch,” a girlfriend remembers of their shortcuts. “She would not go through the cemetery, no way.” She was never seen at the playground two blocks from her home, though she did walk the eight or nine blocks to the movie theater, with a friend, and roller-skated around the block.
The six-year-old girl was much more likely to be found upstairs, secluded, in her small, pine-floored corner bedroom, with one east window facing Katie Semmes’s home, and two rear windows looking down into the family’s walled backyard and the Charlton Lane service alley behind. In this hideaway, sparsely furnished with two single, matching, unpainted, pine beds — camp cots of a Sears, Roebuck catalog style — a little green doll’s bed, and a narrow closet full of clothes, many sewn for her by her mother, she kept the precious crayons and paper she preferred as gifts to candy and sweets. Removed from all the comings and goings downstairs, she spent most of her free time making drawings, usually of birds. As she later wrote of her sketches to her friend Betty Hester, “I suppose my father toted around some of my early productions. I drew — mostly chickens, beginning at the tail, the same chicken over and over, beginning at the tail.”
Sometime during 1931, she picked up a pencil and blue crayon and traced a jumble of capital letters from the alphabet she had been learning onto the thickly lined, pulpy page of a school tablet — an E, a backward D, other shaky letters at odd angles, while a steadier adult hand modeled letters on the same page. Next to the scattered alphabet, she attempted the unfinished form of a face with large, round eyes and dark, pronounced pupils. When she turned the page over, she completed, much more surely, an instantly recognizable turkey with featherless crown and wattle, its feet planted on the ground, and a smiling child in a tall, square hat gleefully flying overhead. Cut in the shape of a two-inch square, just the right size for her father’s wallet, this joyful depiction of whimsical role reversal — grounded bird, soaring child — survives as her earliest cartoon.
Taught that first year by Sister Mary Consuela, O’Connor earned decent grades. She did well in Reading, 93, but her overall average, 88, was brought down by her worst grade, 81, in Arithmetic, lowered even further to a 70 her second year, when she was taught by Sister Mary Franzita. Her strongest showing was in Catechism, where she scored 96 her first year, and 98 her second. A graded class in Roman Catholic theology, Catechism was taught at the time in American parochial schools and churches using a pale blue hardcover edition of the
Baltimore Catechism.
The book was organized in a simple Q-and-A format, leading students to memorize rote answers to fundamental questions in a singsong litany with the nuns:
Q: Who made us?
A: God made us.
Q: Why did God make us?
A: He made us to know him, to love him, to serve him in this world and to be happy with him forever in the next.
Q: From whom do we learn to know, love, and serve God?
A: We learn to know, love, and serve God from Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who teaches us through the Catholic Church.
O’Connor later revisited this set piece of her childhood in her story “The Enduring Chill,” when a large, red-faced country priest, blind in one eye and introducing himself as “Fahther Finn — from Purrgatory,” examines Asbury, an arty intellectual who has been living too long in Manhattan. To the primary question, “Who made you?” Asbury replies, “Different people believe different things about that,” and to “Who is God?” he says, “God is an idea created by man.” Channeling some of the no-nonsense faith of the priests and teaching nuns of St. Vincent’s, Father Finn grumbles, “You are a very ignorant boy.”
A flash of the contrary girl O’Connor was on her way to becoming was revealed as early as the first grade. Each Sunday, a mandatory children’s mass was held in the basement of the cathedral, and the nuns devoted several minutes on Monday mornings to addressing their attendance records. With the support of her parents, she always attended the later adult mass. Indeed, when the children’s mass was once shifted from eight to ten a.m., the O’Connor family chose to switch to the earlier mass. Each Monday morning, Leonora Jones, another first-grader, whose family lived near a golf course outside town, and Mary Flannery, who lived near the church and had no such excuse, would be lined against the blackboard to explain their absences. As Jones recalled of her bold classmate, “She’d stand there and tell sister, ‘The Catholic Church does not dictate to my family what time I go to Mass.’ I was five and she was six, and I knew she was different.”
In the third and fifth grades, O’Connor was taught by Sister Mary Consolata, “just off the boat” from Ireland, and installed as a teacher while still very young. “When we were in the third grade, Sister Consolata used to give Mary Flannery a real hard time about her compositions,” recalled a classmate who lived a few doors down at 302 East Charlton Street. “She said that she always wrote about ducks and chickens and she said she never wanted to hear about another duck or a chicken.” Though discouraged by the nun in her obsessive fixation on birds, the young girl was getting lots of outside support, not only from Katie Semmes, a bird lover herself, but also from her uncle Dr. Bernard Cline, a bird-watcher, who was later profiled in the
Atlanta Constitution
for keeping a “backyard quail farm.” Yet Sister Mary Consolata remained unimpressed. “Nothing remarkable at all about her as a student,” she later observed curtly. “She was a little forward with adults.”
O’Connor did more than write stories starring chickens to antagonize Sister Mary Consolata. Though braces were rare, during the Depression, because they were expensive, Mary Flannery, like Mary Flemming in her untitled early story, had a mouth “full of wire where her teeth were being straightened and there were small rubber bands that hooked onto the top and bottom and had to be changed twice a day.” Lillian Dowling, one of twenty-six third-graders crowded in a class picture with O’Connor, everyone outfitted with Mickey and Minnie Mouse ears and shoes — Disney having just formed the original Mickey Mouse Club in 1929 — remembers that she sometimes “pulled the rubber bands and let them sail across the room,” or caked them with peanut butter. One day, she brought snuff to school after observing black servants at home pull out their bottom lips to insert a pinch. To discourage others from sharing her lunch, she would sometimes bring castor oil sandwiches.
If Sister Mary Consolata remembered O’Connor as an “unremarkable” student, she was most likely thinking of her performance in either Arithmetic or Spelling. O’Connor did much better in English, and in her social science classes, Geography and History, which were folded into the school’s classical curriculum after the second grade. But misspelling remained for O’Connor a lifelong issue; as she later put it, she was “a very innocent speller.” Lillian Dowling’s sister, Ann, was present when the poor speller brought home one of these report cards, preparing her mother for its mixed results in her slow nasal drawl: “Mother, I made an 82 in Geography but I woulda’ made a hundred, if it hadn’t been for Spellin’; I made a 85 in English, but I woulda’ made a hundred if it hadn’t been for Spellin’; and I made a 65 in Spellin’ and I woulda’ made a hundred, if it hadn’t been for Spellin’.”
A composite of Sister Mary Consolata and other Mercy nuns shows up in O’Connor’s fiction in the guise of Sister Perpetua. In an early draft of
Wise Blood,
Sister Perpetua, a Sister of Mercy, teaches at Immaculate Conception, and is seen by one cowering pupil as able to “smash an atom between her two fingers.” In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” another Sister Perpetua, also a Sister of Mercy, advises her teenage girls to warn forward boys, “Stop sir! I am a Temple of the Holy Ghost!” When the story’s protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Mary Flannery — her braces “glared like tin” — visits Sister Perpetua’s school chapel, a nun reaches out for an embrace, but the girl instead “stuck out her hand and preserved a frigid frown, looking just past the sister’s shoes at the wainscoting.” Evidently revealing her own adolescent thoughts, O’Connor writes, “You put your foot in their door and they got you praying, the child thought as they hurried down the polished corridor.”