Essay by Amy Alznauer
Photo by J.R. Ward II
Editor’s note: This spring, Amy Alznauer sent us an advance copy of her new children’s book The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor. It launched the same day that The New Yorker published Paul Elie’s, “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” The timing couldn’t have been more perfect or terrible. We were curious to know what Alznauer thought. As a feminist and one of the curators of a future Emory University exhibit on the work of O’Connor and Benny Andrews, she had a lot to say. Her column reveals some of the blind spots in Elie’s essay about the odd, peacock-loving writer from Milledgeville, Georgia.
Paul Elie has a new piece in The New Yorker, sensationally titled as an exposé: “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?” Elie argues that practically everyone — the executors, editors, exegetes, and fans — have “side-stepped,” “held close,” “justified,” or “downplayed,” American author Flannery O’Connor’s racist remarks, which she made in correspondence throughout her life.
The apparent occasion for this piece is the recent release of Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s newest book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor. A component of this book is O’Donnell’s original research in the O’Connor archives and with the O’Connor estate, which brings to light a few additional racist comments in O’Connor’s letters and postcards.
I read Elie’s piece with my mouth falling open, more incredulous as I read. Not because I was shocked to discover that O’Connor made blatantly racist remarks throughout her life. That has been known by anyone who has cared to look ever since the 1970s. What surprised me was his minimization or omission of so many of the people who have written on O’Connor and race. He claims that the reluctance to face these facts keeps us from “approaching her with the seriousness a great writer deserves,” implying that no serious engagement has yet happened. Maybe it shouldn’t surprise me that much of the work he misreads or flat-out ignores has largely been done by women and Black Americans.
But first, I'd like to note that the very occasion for Elie’s essay is problematic. Elie seems to think that O’Connor’s racism has been newly firmed up by O’Donnell’s discovery and publication of a few additional offensive O’Connor letters and postcards. This strikes me as a particularly unreflective thing to say, an error which O’Donnell herself does not make. “People of color,” she says, “who live a different reality with regard to the pervasiveness of white racism, would likely find [these discoveries] less surprising.”
Let’s begin with Alice Walker. Elie mentions Walker, noting that her brothers once delivered milk to the O’Connor farm, and also references in passing the 1975 essay Walker wrote on O’Connor, “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor.” But he doesn’t say much of substance about it. This is particularly surprising because Elie knows this piece well, and spent two pages summarizing Walker’s story in his celebrated book (which I myself happen to love) The Life You Save Might be Your Own.
In this powerful personal essay, Walker travels to Milledgeville to visit both the dilapidated house her family lived in for a year (which had since been converted into an open shed for storing hay) and O’Connor’s well-preserved estate just down the road.
Walker embarked on this voyage and wrote about it, she says, in order to get “the whole story” and not have her life, literature, and history “split up.” For when she first read O’Connor, she says, “the perfection of her writing was so dazzling I never noticed that no black Southern writers were taught.” When she finally discovered these Black writers, she put O’Connor’s books away in rage and shut her out. Until, she began to miss her.
Walker maintains this push-pull throughout the entire essay. Her anger culminates in the moment when she stands on O’Connor's porch and knocks at the door.
“What I feel in the moment of knocking is fury that someone is paid to take care of her house, though no one lives in it, and that her house still, in fact, stands, while mine — which of course we never owned anyway — is slowly rotting into dust. Her house becomes — in an instant — the symbol of my own disinheritance, and for that instant I hate her guts.”
A few minutes later, walking about the yard, “listening to the soft sweep of the peacocks’ tails,” she says, “She also cast spells and worked magic with the written word. The magic, the wit, and the mystery of Flannery O’Connor I know I will always love.”
Then, immediately after declaring her love for O’Conner, Walker says, “I also know the meaning of the expression ‘Take what you can use and let the rest rot.’” One does not come away from Walker’s essay feeling that anything has been side-stepped, justified, or downplayed. She wrote this 45 years ago.
Or take writer and theater critic Hilton Als, not mentioned once in Elie’s “exposé,” who in 2001 wrote an essay titled, “This Lonesome Place: Flannery O’Connor on race and religion in the unreconstructed South.” Als calls O’Connor’s work original, honest, electric, and genius. But in response to her refusal to see James Baldwin in Georgia and also how her illness caused her to “cleave to the world as she knew it,” he says, “Her regionalism was both a strength and a weakness; the emotional distance caused by her physical suffering was the axis on which both her comedy and her cruelty turned.” And I should add that this article, like Elie’s, appeared in the New Yorker.
Or consider artist Benny Andrews, whom Elie also fails to mention, whose paintings now hang in the MoMA and who was born five years after O’Connor, just 30 miles from Milledgeville. In 2005, Andrews illustrated O’Connor’s short story Everything that Rises Must Converge for an elephantine limited edition. In a stunningly beautiful afterword, Andrews set himself the task of describing why he chose to illustrate a story by O’Connor, a task which required, he said, facing up to the deeper meaning of her roots.
“To many of her kind,” he wrote, “we were just a few years and steps removed from being living farm equipment … No, Flannery O’Connor would not have given me an audience during her lifetime. I would have never been invited to her home or probably been given much time to say anything of significance at her lectures.”
A few paragraphs later Andrews wrote, “I’ll say up front, Flannery O’Connor is in my mind a great writer. She depicted things bigger than the physical world she lived in. Nevertheless, she also retained a lot of the very worst that she lived in. The truth is that the society that she lived in was sustained by cruelty, oppression and murder. It was an inhumane world.” Again, in Andrews’ writing, there is no rug in sight under which O’Connor’s racism might be swept.
“So why did I take this dare?” Andrews asks. “The reason is that I’ve looked into O’Connor’s works, and I’ve found more than the superficial, much more. She confronts the leaping flames and churning waters. I’ve looked into her works, and I have found revelations.” Is this, too, a failure to approach a great artist with the seriousness she deserves?
Elie does mention Toni Morrison, but again strangely not the passages in her 2017 book The Origin of Others, which explicitly discuss O’Connor and race. In the foreword for this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates summarizes, “Morrison’s book joins a body of work, evolving over the last century, that has effectively argued for the indelible nature of white racism.” And later, “Racism matters. To be an Other in this country matters – and the disheartening truth is that it will continue to matter.” To get at the idea of how Othering happens, Morrison analyzes the journey of O’Connor’s character Mr. Head and his nephew Nelson to the big city. She writes, “Flannery O’Connor exhibits with honesty and profound perception her understanding of the stranger, the outcast, the Other.”
Morrison also mentioned O’Connor in a 2016 interview for Natur & Kulturs with Nadifa Mohamed. Their final exchange goes like this:
NM: Who do you admire now?
TM: There’s a woman I love, she’s really hostile, Flannery O’Connor, she’s really really good.
Does Elie exclude these statements by Morrison because they don’t fit his argument? Or does he think Morrison herself is at risk of overlooking O’Connor’s personal, racist statements, yet another failure to approach her with the seriousness a great author deserves? What seems much truer is that Morrison, Walker, Als, and Andrews, never side-step O'Connor's racism; rather, it is known implicitly and viscerally as an ingrained fact.
And this brings me to Elie’s central claim that commentators, O’Donnell included, have largely contextualized O’Connor’s racist remarks away. “The context arguments go like this,” he says. “O’Connor was a writer of her place and time, and her limitations were those of ‘the culture that had produced her.’” In other words, these many commentators (he doesn’t list them) grant O’Connor agency as a writer, but see her racism as a product of her time. O’Donnell, Elie asserts, “winds up reprising those earlier arguments in current literary-critical argot, treating O’Connor as ‘transgressive in her writing about race’ but prone to lapses and excesses that stemmed from social forces beyond her control.”
But just as he omitted the writings of so many, he omits much of O’Donnell’s painstakingly careful analysis. “Though O’Connor’s art often constitutes a victory over her own prejudices, that victory is a partial one,” says O’Donnell. And later, comparing O’Connor and Faulkner, she says, “The complicated nature of O’Connor’s attitude deserves similar attention … Rather than try to deny, defend, or resolve her contradictions, it seems more fruitful to explore them, to discover and document the particular ways in which they manifest themselves in her writings.”
Elie worries that a “neat line” has been drawn “between O’Connor’s fiction and her other writing where race is involved.” He worries that critics, and we have to assume he is targeting O’Donnell (or possibly Ralph Wood) since he doesn’t cite any others by name, have at once used her letters and essays in an “effort to move her from the margins to the center” but have chalked up her racist remarks as “literary ephemera.” Elie then declares, as if he is the only one who has thought of it, that the letters “belong to the author’s body of work; they help show us who she was.” Lest this comment hit readers with the force of revelation, let's be clear that O’Donnell’s entire book is devoted to exactly that, engaging both her stories and her correspondence:
“This study explores the complexity, the development, and the limitations of O’Connor’s vision with regard to race as embodied in her writings, and the radical ambivalence in which her attitudes toward race are rooted. This ambivalence manifests itself in O’Connor’s correspondence … as well as in her fiction. Accordingly, the study will examine the relationship between the ideas about race expressed in her letters and those represented in the stories.”
In Elie’s essay, which complains repeatedly about side-stepping and down-playing, it is particularly troubling to find him adopting a similar approach. In order to shore up his own argument, which seems intended to offer himself as one of the only people willing to look O’Connor and race squarely in the eye, Elie has mischaracterized the work of O’Donnell and largely ignored the writing of so many on this very subject. One comes away from the essay with the distinct impression that O’Connor and race has been a topic that almost every critic (until now!) has largely tiptoed around or minimized. And indeed, the ensuing Twitter storm often referenced Elie’s “discoveries.”
In contrast to Elie’s tendency toward omission, O’Donnell devotes the first chapter of her book to outlining “the treatment of race in O’Connor criticism from the 1970s to the present.” The chapter begins with Alice Walker and then moves on to other scholars, only one of whom (Ralph Wood) Elie mentions. Melvin Williams in his essay, “Black and White: A Study in Flannery O’Connor’s Characters” offers a counter to Walker. “Black characters are for the most part only ‘issues’ instead of people,” says Williams. “They never change, never are explored on a more than superficial level.” Feminist scholar Claire Kahane, O’Donnell says, argues along similar lines. Then, to further complicate the landscape, O’Donnell writes:
“This critique of O’Connor’s black characters has continued to develop and proliferate in O’Connor studies, though there are plenty of critics who counter it as well, among them Toni Morrison, Ralph Wood, and Doreen Flower, all of whom see in O’Connor a more complex and knowing treatment of race more in keeping with Walker’s view.”
To give Elie his due, there certainly have been attempts to remove offensive remarks from the published letters (O’Donnell details these), efforts to keep problematic letters from publication, critical works devoted to contextualizing O’Connor’s racist remarks into obscurity, and many readers who would rather not deal with the issue of O’Connor and race at all. But there have also been many works by prominent scholars, writers, and artists — with O’Donnell offering the most recent and comprehensive account — that confront O’Connor and race head on.
So, what are we to do with this complicated terrain? Elie is concerned that the reluctance to face up to O’Connor’s racist remarks is a stumbling block to taking her seriously. But as I have shown here, many writers have already provided a portrait of a dazzling, profound, and revelatory writer who at the same time is cruel, has parts of herself that should be left to rot, and who retained much of the inhumane world she lived in. These writers were not waiting for Elie’s belated invitation to take O’Connor and race seriously.
In the final paragraph of his essay, Elie almost acknowledges that this important work has already begun. For he says that the way “forward” can be seen in the theatre productions of O’Connor stories by Karin Coonrod (another brilliant woman) completed twenty years ago. Rather than summarize Coonrod’s work, which Elie actually does quite nicely, I would like to offer another model for going “forward.”
Benny Andrews concludes his afterward with an arresting metaphor: “The Negro and the white lady have met down at the crossroads but that’s just where they are, at the crossroads. It is up to the reader of the story and the viewer of my art work to look at two Southerners and wonder, wonder, and hopefully wonder more.”
Flannery O’Connor’s words (all of them) will ultimately be judged by the same test all authors endure — the slow assessment of history: the combined, complex, intertwined effect of time, people, life, and the world. But here, at this moment in history, if we wish to engage with O’Connor, we might imagine ourselves standing at a crossroads, aware of all of it, the cruelty, the rot, and the power of her brutal revelations, which led her to truth about the grotesque heart of the South and the very heart of being human. Or as Als puts it “the shit and the stars.”
Update: An earlier version of this used the words afterward and forward. They have been corrected to foreword and afterword.
Amy Alznauer is the recipient of the Christopher Award and the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She is the author of many books for children and adults, including The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor (illustrated by Ping Zhu, Enchanted Lion Books). And she is one of the curators for a future dual exhibit at Emory University on the work of Flannery O’Connor and Benny Andrews. Find Amy at www.amyalz.com.
