Facing the Truth

In his spiritual biography of Flannery O’Connor titled The Terrible Speed of Mercy, Jonathan Rogers gives us a key to O’Connor’s stories. He observes that she speaks with the ardor of an Old Testament prophet.

“She is like an Isaiah who never gets around to ‘Comfort ye my people.’ Except for this: there is a kind of comfort in finally facing the truth about oneself. That’s what happens in every one of Flannery O’Connor’s stories: in a moment of extremity, a character—usually a self-satisfied, self-sufficient character—finally comes to see the truth of his situation. He is accountable to a great God who is the source of all. He inhabits mysteries that are too great for him. And for the first time there is hope, even if he doesn’t understand it yet.”[1]

O’Connor’s stories are like parables that invite us to wrestle with truth. Fiction for her was a shocking plunge into reality.[2] There are as many clashes with truth as there are stories. The short story “Greenleaf” is a startling example. I will be your guide—better yet, your docent—to show how Rogers’ observation is true in “Greenleaf.”

There is good reason to reveal this key to the O’Connor corpus, for some of my readers have not encountered her narratives; while others, having read one or more of them, find them dissatisfying, disturbing, or even distasteful. Yet there is a great company of O’Connor devotees who consider her stories to be captivating, even beautiful. Possessing a key may open a door that leads to delight.

First, it is important to know that O’Connor wrote in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s in the South, during the dawn of the civil rights movement. The narrator’s voice and the voices of most of her characters—their accents and patterns of speech—reflect that milieu. Accordingly, some of her characters use racial epithets that were as offensive to mid-twentieth century readers as they are today. The offense was intentional: O’Connor wanted readers to experience the force of the language as the characters would have felt it.[3]

Then, we should expect to see God in O’Connor’s stories. In “Greenleaf” God takes the form of a bull; and the main character, Mrs. May, has to deal with this ugly and annoying animal that seems to resemble the person described in Isaiah 53:1-3—despised and held in low esteem.

It is also helpful to know that O’Connor was an avowed Roman Catholic writer.[4] Thus, reading the first sentence of “Greenleaf” from a Roman Catholic or sacramental perspective helps us understand her meaning: “Mrs. May’s bedroom window was low and faced on the east and the bull, silvered in the moonlight, stood under it, his head raised as if he listened—like some patient god come down to woo her—for a stir in the room.”

That sentence reveals a good deal. For example, the direction of Mrs. May’s bedroom—facing east—means that she is headed toward God.[5] The narrator also highlights the bull by pointing out that he is “silvered in the moonlight.” Even more obvious is the claim that the bull is “like some patient god come down to woo her.”

Before the end of the first paragraph we discover that this creature may be intentional, for he is “chewing steadily, with a hedge-wreath that he had ripped loose for himself caught in the tips of his horns.” He seems to want Mrs. May to recognize him, because “He took a step backward and lowered his head as if to show the wreath across his horns.”[6] A few paragraphs later we read that “The bull lowered his head and shook it and the wreath slipped down to the base of his horns where it looked like a menacing prickly crown.”[7]

If Rogers’ observation is true, we should expect Mrs. May to be a self-satisfied, self-sufficient woman. That is precisely what she is. Not unlike O’Connor’s mother, Regina, Mrs. May is a widow who owns and operates a dairy farm. The farm is her security, but it always seems to be on the razor’s edge between success and failure. So she cannot afford to have the breeding schedule of her cows ruined by some scrub-bull that has been there for three days. Her hired hand, Mr. Greenleaf, tells her that he put the creature in the bull pen, but he has torn out.

The protagonist’s security seems precarious, so she tries to manage the few things she can control—the people in her life. Mrs. May looks down on all of them. Mr. Greenleaf has worked for her fifteen years, but no one else would have had him for five minutes. She keeps him thinking she can’t do better. Mrs. Greenleaf is a “prayer healer.” The only way Mrs. May can endure the woman is by keeping entirely out of her sight. She is also critical of the two Greenleaf boys. They married French women and have an up-to-date dairy farm down the road. Wounded in World War II, they went to agricultural school and bought land with taxpayer money.

Mrs. May wishes her own sons would find wives. She believes that “Nice girls didn’t like Schofield but Wesley didn’t like nice girls.”[8] Scofield is an insurance salesman, the type Negroes call a “policy man.” Wesley teaches at a college twenty miles away. He hates the twenty-mile drive, hates the second-rate university, and hates the morons who attend it. The two live with her, but neither of them wants anything to do with the farm.

In the end, the story is about an exasperated woman trying to make a matter-of-fact man get rid of a pesky bull. Yet in a moment of extremity Mrs. May sees the truth of her situation. She is accountable to a great God who is the source of all. There is hope! I leave it to the reader to discover how it happens.

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[1] Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Nelson, 2012, xvii.

[2] Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose Selected and Edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, 78.

[3] Rogers, vii.

[4] See her essays, “Catholic Novelists and Their Readers” and “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” in Mystery and Manners, 169-209. The essay “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” (63-86) also conveys her sacramental assumptions. She observes, “Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction. It’s not a grand enough job for you” (68).

[5] The words “oriented” and “orientation” come from the idea of facing or going eastward. The altar in Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox churches typically faces east. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the voyagers traveled east, toward the dawn, to get to Aslan’s Country.

[6] Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, 501.

[7] Ibid., 502.

[8] Ibid., 509.