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A week ago, all I knew of O’Connor was her name and that she’d written A Good Man is Hard to Find (see my review HERE). I didn’t care for the horror or religiosity of that, and given that this is named after the final book of the Bible, expected more of the same. As with A Good Man, this starts with satire around a judgemental and hypocritical southern matriarch and ends with religious introspection, but it was somewhat dialled down in comparison, and all the better for it, imo.

Intersection of class and race

Intersectionality is a fairly new term, but that's what O'Connor explored in 1964.

A doctor's waiting room is an excellent location for a short story: a confined and neutral space for a range of strangers to meet, with nervous tension, and for conversation to start and be cut short as people come and go. They all seem to be white, apart from an errand boy, bringing drinks. The N-word is used a lot and quoted below.

Mrs Turpin is a moderately well-to-do farmer’s wife. She’s 47 and they seem to be childless. She is obsessed with social class - more than race - but as a good Christian lady, she counts her blessings (specifically, that she was not born black, white-trash, or ugly) and proudly does good deeds:
��To help anybody out that needed it was her philosophy of life. She never spared herself when she found somebody in need, whether they were white or black, trash or decent.��

She mentally categorises everyone in the waiting room, and has particular disdain for an old woman and child who were ��kind of vacant and white-trashy�� and notes the woman’s cotton print dress matches the sacks of chicken feed they have on the farm. She thinks such people ��Worse than niggers any day��, so probably considers herself enlightened, rather than racially prejudiced.

To the background of gospel music on the radio, someone else suggests sending all the black people “back�� to Africa. Mrs Turpin disagrees:
��There's a heap of things worse than a nigger... It's all kinds of them just like it's all kinds of us.��

I know people like Mrs Turpin. They’re mostly elderly, snobbish, and always polite to people of colour (albeit excessively, patronisingly so). They may even befriend one or two families, and thus believe they are not prejudiced. But they still make derogatory generalisations and would be horrified if their own child or grandchild were to date, let alone marry, a person of colour - or someone poor and trashy. Poverty (white-trash) is deemed more of a choice, and more worthy of contempt, than being black, therefore, they don't see themselves as un-Christian or prejudiced.

Back to the Bible

The first part of the story was a thought-provoking and well-written exposé of pride, hypocrisy, and self-delusion. It was funny and sometimes shocking.

Then something dramatic happens, which Mrs Turpin interprets as a religious revelation. Back home, that spurs her to talking to the farm hands (cotton pickers are hard to find and retain) and then to God, when she's in the Pig Parlor (pigs are unclean in the Old Testament, but not the New). There’s a serpent (kind of), a vision, and maybe a secondary revelation. Meh.


Image: Hogwash ()

Quotes

�� “The table was cluttered with limp-looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass ashtray full of cigarette butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on them.�� [A doctor’s waiting room!]

�� “On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them -- not above, just away from -- were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged, Above she and Claud were people with a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there some colored people who owned their homes and land as well��
Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a box car, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.��

�� “It was not just that they didn't have anything. Because if you gave them everything, in two weeks it would all be broken or filthy or they would have chopped it up for lightwood. She knew all this from her own experience. Help them you must, but help them you couldn't.�� [white trash, not black people]

Postscript - my (incomplete) revelation

After I wrote the review above, a link to a New Yorker article, , was shared in the short story group. Because I'd read this story as a strong denouncement of prejudice and hypocrisy of all kinds, including racism, I assumed the article would either conclude “not very��, or over-apply modern sensibilities. That was not the case.

You could perhaps ignore personal letters, written when she was very young, but I think this is hard to defend:
��On May 3, 1964—as Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, led a filibuster in the Senate to block the Civil Rights Act—O’Connor set out her position in a passage now published for the first time: “You know, I’m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don’t like negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.�� Two weeks after that, she told Lee of her aversion to the “philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind.�� Ravaged by lupus, she wrote Lee a note to say that she was checking in to the hospital, signing it “Mrs. Turpin.�� She died at home ten weeks later��

So much for my assuming she hated Mrs Turpin: she identified AS her. You could say she was joking, but that's the usual defence of those called out for racist, misogynistic, gaslighting behaviour.

I'm left confused about the story and O'Connor's motive and message:
�� Is she really calling out prejudice, as I first assumed?
�� Is it all a confection, more in tune with the social satire at the start?
�� Or is it confession of and penance for her own flaws?

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story .

You can join the group here.