I
n 1934, the city council of Milledgeville voted to designate the town a “Bird Sanctuary.” Writing up “the glad news” of the town’s nickname, the local historian and poet Nelle Womack Hines, in her
Treasure Album of Milledgeville,
gave credit to a “bird conscious” population, especially a circle of avid bird-watching professors at Georgia State College for Women. She whimsically recorded that, after the vote, “The rumor spread that several Robin Red Breasts were building nests in various parts of town — something almost unheard of.” To advertise the special event, the council and the local Audubon Society ordered road signs posted at all the main entrances to the city:
MILLEDGEVILLE, GA.
A BIRD SANCTUARY
These sturdy metal signs mounted on poles captured the attention of Mary Flannery O’Connor, as she moved to Milledgeville to complete the final two months of seventh grade. A wry version of this fascination still shows up in her adult letters. She occasionally liked to put as her return address, “Milledgeville / A Bird Sanctuary.” When one of her stories, “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” was televised in 1957, she reported to a former high school teacher, “It was
well
received here in the Bird Sanctuary and everybody thinks that I have now arrived.” Extending a backhanded invitation, in 1960, to her friend Maryat Lee, who was living in Manhattan, she asked, “Why don’t you take yourself a real vacation in that land of happy retreat, Milledgeville, a bird sanctuary?”
For the thirteen-year-old O’Connor, her family’s spring 1938 move to Milledgeville, though sudden, was not a total disruption. Her parents had been spending time in Milledgeville ever since she was a baby. The visits were regularly covered on the Social and Society page of the
Union-Recorder,
the local newspaper. When she was just fifteen months old, the paper reported, “Mrs. E. F. O’Connor and little daughter, of Savannah, are visiting the Misses Cline.” In November 1937, four months before their move from Savannah, an item appeared: “Mr. and Mrs. Ed O’Connor and daughter, of Savannah, were the week-end guests of Misses Mary and Katie Cline.” The motor trips of Mrs. Katie Semmes were all documented, as were trips by the Cline aunts to Savannah.
Milledgeville was
Our Town
done with a middle Georgia drawl. Described by one journalist as “a styling epicenter for the Deep South,” the sleepy community at the dead center of Georgia, with barely six thousand residents, blended provincial conservatism with much local color. “We have a girls’ college here,” O’Connor wrote, in the early fifties, “but the lacy atmosphere is fortunately destroyed by a reformatory, an insane asylum, and a military school.” Georgia State College for Women did provide the town’s grace notes — a steady supply of male and female professors. The reformatory was Georgia State Training School for Boys; the military school, Georgia Military College. Yet because of State Hospital, previously named Milledgeville Lunatic Asylum, the town was mostly synonymous, in Georgia slang, with “going crazy.” As one miffed character says to another in
Clock Without Hands,
by Carson McCullers, who grew up in Columbus, 130 miles away, “‘A thing like this makes me think you ought to be in Milledgeville.’”
Though hardly as cosmopolitan as Savannah, this fourth capital of Georgia from 1803 until 1868 was built on a similar geometric plan. As Nelle Womack Hines pointed out in her
Treasure Album,
the capital city, named for Governor John Milledge, “probably has the distinction of being one of two cities thus molded into shape for such a purpose, the other being our National Capital, Washington, D.C.” The original plan reserved four large squares for a capitol, governor’s mansion, penitentiary, and cemetery, with nineteen wide streets intersecting at right angles. Dubbed “a town of columns,” Milledgeville became identified with a “Milledgeville Federal” style of architecture, marked by colossal porticoes, cantilevered balconies, pediments adorned with sunbursts, and fanlit doorways. When O’Connor’s professor friend Ted Spivey visited, he found this early style “idealistic,” as opposed to the town’s midcentury Greek Revival mansions, recalling “the fanaticism of cotton barons defending slavery and states’ rights.”
Peabody Elementary, where Mary Flannery completed seventh grade, was an all-white school, mostly attended by girls. White boys typically went to Georgia Military College, fittingly located in the Gothic Revival Old State House of the Confederacy, with pointed arch windows and gray battlements, the scene of the Secession Convention of 1861. (“If war comes I’ll drink every drop of blood that’s shed,” Robert Toombs promised in one of the convention’s rallying speeches.) The Milledgeville City Cemetery, where Mary Flannery’s Cline and Treanor relatives were buried, was divided, with graves for whites on higher ground, and those for blacks, including slave plots, on the southern edge running steeply down to Fishing Creek. The Cline family had a decent legacy with the blacks in town, though. When Mayor Peter Cline, Jr., died, in 1916, the pastor of the Colored Presbyterian Church wrote a tribute, praising the mayor’s advocating “in public the rights of our race.”
The Ward-Beall-Cline Mansion at 311 West Greene Street, where mother and daughter moved that spring, while Ed O’Connor visited on weekends, was one of about forty remaining antebellum homes. A traditional Federal clapboard house, with four white, fluted, Ionic columns — built by General John B. Gordon in 1820 and used briefly as the Governor’s Mansion in 1838 and 1839 — the Cline Mansion developed into a showpiece with the slow accretion of architectural details: a pitched Victorian red metal roof, a wraparound front porch, a widow’s walk, a lace-brick wall, built by slaves, and an antique lamppost, imported from Savannah. Each spring, as the azaleas, dogwoods, and redbuds bloomed along the town’s elm-lined streets, the Cline Mansion ranked as an attraction for garden club tours and, beginning in the spring of 1939, the annual State Garden Club “pilgrimage of old homes.” O’Connor watched, as a young girl, while her neighbors “trouped through in respectful solemnity.” She signed the guest book with her own name and the names of all of her chickens and listed their joint address as “Hungry.”
The impresario of the Cline Mansion was Aunt Mary Cline, her mother’s oldest sister, then in her midfifties. A tall, thin woman, her salt-and-pepper hair tied back, with an elegant, patrician air and regal posture, “Sister,” as O’Connor called her, was the family’s ersatz matriarch. O’Connor’s college friend Betty Boyd assumed the nickname was a private joke on Aunt Mary’s appearance: “an austere nun . . . always in white.” Yet Regina O’Connor corrected this impression in a note she penned in the top margin of a memoir Boyd showed her years later: “Sister was the first girl to arrive in the family after five boys and everybody in the family called her Sister.” Indeed Mary Cline was the only girl in Peter Cline’s first family of seven children. When her father died, as had the two Mrs. Clines, she declined Katie Semmes’s invitation to move to Savannah; she chose instead to take on the responsibility of matron for home and family.
Extending hospitality to the O’Connor family during a time of trouble was a natural response for Aunt Mary. According to O’Connor’s first cousin Dr. Peter Cline, “Sister would always add another room on when somebody got sick.” The other residents in the home at the time were all unmarried women. A blunt, formidable companion was her sister Katie, working as a mail order clerk in the post office. Nicknamed “Duchess” by her clever niece, Aunt Katie — often dressed in a long coat with a big fur collar — was recalled by Betty Boyd Love as bearing “a strong resemblance to the illustrator John Tenniel’s Duchess in
Alice in Wonderland.
She was a woman of vigorous appearance, vigorous language, and vigorous opinion.” A satiric portrait of both aunts, Mary and Katie, worthy of “My Relitives,” shows up in Aunts Bessie and Mattie of “The Partridge Festival”: “The two of them were on the front porch, one sitting, the other standing. . . . They were box-jawed old ladies who looked like George Washington with his wooden teeth in. They wore black suits with large ruffled jabots and had dead-white hair pulled back.” On the top floor of the Cline Mansion lived a third relative, the more diminutive Great-aunt Gertie Treanor, white-haired, less than five feet tall, who devoted hours to stitching muslin covers for St. Christopher medals on her little sewing machine.
The interior of the Cline Mansion was as grand, and full of character lines, as its façade. Passing in the entrance hall under a cut-glass chandelier, guests to the home, or on a garden club tour, would walk into either a drawing room to the left, or a parlor to the right, where the Clines gathered in the evenings to recite the Rosary. Dominating the drawing room was a rosewood concert grand piano; on the Colonial mantel, silver candelabra were set on either side of a large, painted portrait of Katie Semmes as a three-year-old girl in a pretty blue dress. The parlor room, lit by a pair of crystal hurricane lamps, was a flickering vision of desks, chairs, and highly polished end tables, with a long portrait of a handsome cousin, John MacMahon. Following a visit to the virtually unchanged mansion in the midsixties, the scholar Josephine Hendin recorded her impression of many family pictures, hanging on walls and propped on tables, of “Infants, girls with sausage curls, and impressively mustachioed men.”
A step down, behind the parlor, was a dark wood–paneled dining room, its mahogany banquet table set with family silver and porcelain, and lined by Jacobean chairs. Miss Mary presided here over groups of sixteen or eighteen for large midday dinners, with the children seated at two little tables under far bay windows. Everyone helped themselves to trays of biscuits, and platters of sweet potatoes and fried chicken, prepared and served by a staff of three or more black cooks and servants. “We’d have these big Sunday lunches,” remembers O’Connor’s first cousin Jack Tarleton. “Mary Cline would sit at the head of the table and tinkle that silver bell, and here would come this entourage of people from the kitchen serving everybody around this big table. She could play that role to the hilt.” Great-aunt Julia Cline was said by her son-in-law to have been “a speaking likeness” of the grandmother in O’Connor’s story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Of a couple of reputed “alcoholic” uncles, Peter Cline says, “There were some oddballs in that family, too, but they kept them out of sight.”
When Mary Flannery, still the only child living in a houseful of adults, left the main floor and climbed the central staircase that split forward and backward — called “good morning stairs” for the greetings exchanged on the middle landing — she found herself in a familiar world. While Sister and Duchess kept bedrooms on the first floor, and Aunt Gertie stayed in “the big room” on the east side of the cavernous second floor, her parents’ bedroom adjoined hers in a separate apartment on the west side. Here the teenage girl could shut the door and be alone in her long, narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom, once again overlooking a backyard — where she kept geese and her mother planted daffodils — as well as the formal boxwood gardens of the Old Governor’s Mansion. She spent countless hours on her stool at a high-legged clerk’s desk, drawing and writing. To further escape the bustle downstairs, she retreated to a vast attic room, full of trunks and chests (a garret much like the third floor in Savannah) and with a front gabled window that looked out over Greene Street to the cemetery beyond.
The school where she was hastily enrolled was quite unlike either St. Vincent’s or Sacred Heart. First known as Peabody Model School when it was founded in 1891, Peabody Elementary was a lab school for practice teachers from the education department of Georgia State College for Women. Many of their supervising professors had studied at Teacher’s College at Columbia, testing ground for the liberal pedagogy of John Dewey, so the favored methods were eclectic and experimental. Mary Flannery’s classroom was on the second floor in the middle of a series of “Choo-Choo” buildings, connected by overhead walkways, on the main college campus. As of 1935, a new principal, Mildred English, an educator with a national reputation, made sure that all of her pupils were taught and graded not only in Reading, Social Studies, Science, and Arithmetic, but also in Arts, Health Activities, and Social Attitudes and Habits.
Though she had been in class for only two months when the year ended, her instructor, Martha Phifer, filed a full report card, including a special note: “Mary Flannery needs to work on her spelling this summer.” Otherwise she was rated satisfactory in most areas: “Speaks distinctly with well-pitched voice”; “Contributes information to group”; “Enjoys singing with the group”; “Has good posture.” Responding to a survey, Mrs. O’Connor answered with snappy honesty about her daughter. To the question “Approximate time spent on home work?” she answered, “Very little.” To “Does he have any home responsibilities?” the answer was “No.” To “Does he prefer being alone rather than with others?”: “Occasionally enjoys others.” She listed as her daughter’s only physical defect “Error in vision.”
Mary Flannery’s only friend in Milledgeville in the seventh grade was Mary Virginia Harrison, the daughter of the postmaster Ben Harrison and her mother’s friend Gussie Harrison. Their match was made by the mothers. “Her mother handpicked her few friends in Milledgeville,” recalls Jack Tarleton. Mary Virginia was an unlikely choice for the newcomer. While Mary Flannery was chronically shy, on the tall side for her age, gawky, and wearing glasses akin to her character Mary Flemming’s “gold-rimmed spectacles,” Mary Virginia was strikingly pretty, vivacious, and didn’t like being alone for a minute. Yet the girls clicked. Mary Flannery remade the Merriweather Club into a secret society for two, with its own official flower, the dandelion. She designed a pin for her friend inspired by the colors of a pet parrot, and together the girls memorized the signs for Burma Shave along the highway to Macon, where they visited their dentist.
Staying, otherwise, mostly to herself, O’Connor expressed her inner life through her birds. “I remember sitting on the swing on the front porch of Greene Street, and Flannery walking by with this little bantam on a leash, and that is really my first memory of her,” says her first cousin Frances Florencourt. Naming a pet quail “Amelia Earhart,” following the pilot’s disappearance over the Pacific in the summer of 1937, she startled a teacher and other girls on a field trip in nearby Nesbit Woods when she shouted, of her missing bird, “Oh, I’ve found Amelia Earhart! I’ve found Amelia Earhart!” Fellow Girl Scout Regina Sullivan has recalled one of her chickens with the middle name of her uncle Herbert Aloysius Cline, in Atlanta: “She would bring Aloysius to Scout meetings and he was dressed in little gray shorts, a little white shirt, a jacket, and a red bow. He just walked around us as we had our troop meeting.” As O’Connor explained in “The King of the Birds”: “I could sew in a fashion and I began to make clothes for chickens.”