Flannery O'Connor Adult Affirmation

The platform at the Milledgeville station smelled of coal smoke and wet pine when the train from Connecticut slowed. I stood with her uncle near the baggage cart, watching the cars hiss to a stop. She stepped down last, one hand on the rail, the beret still angled the way Sally Fitzgerald had described from the northern station. Up close the jaunty tilt looked wrong. Her face had thinned to the bone, skin the color of old paper. The uncle took her elbow without a word and guided her toward the car.

She said little on the short drive. When the uncle asked about the novel she answered that the pages were in a trunk and she would get back to them once the stiffness left her hands. By the time we reached the house the stiffness had spread to her knees. She climbed the steps one at a time, pausing on each riser.

The doctor came the next morning. He listened to her joints, asked about her father’s death at forty-five, and ordered blood work. The results arrived two weeks later. Disseminated lupus erythematosus. The same disease. She received the news in the front room while her mother stood at the window with her back turned. No one raised their voice. The doctor left a list of medicines and a warning against travel.

By March she could walk the length of the porch without stopping. She wrote her editor that she would not be returning to Connecticut for some time. The Fitzgeralds sent letters and books. She answered each one from the same chair, the pages stacked on a board across her lap. When the weather warmed she asked to be driven out to the farm north of town.

Andalusia sat on five hundred acres of red clay and pasture. The dairy barn stood at the end of the drive, cows moving in and out of the shade. Regina took over the bookkeeping and the hiring of hands. Flannery chose a bedroom on the second floor and placed a wardrobe between her desk and the door that opened from her mother’s room. The arrangement let her hear footsteps but kept the desk out of sight.

She began work again in the mornings. The novel moved forward in short sessions between doses of medicine. In the afternoons she walked the fields when the sun was low, watching the peacocks that had been brought in from a neighboring place. The birds followed at a distance, their calls carrying across the pasture. She noted their habits in the margins of her manuscripts.

The first review of Wise Blood arrived in the spring of 1952. She read it at the kitchen table while Regina counted milk receipts. The reviewer called the book strange and Catholic. She folded the clipping and placed it inside the front cover of her notebook. Two more stories were finished by summer.

Relations with her mother settled into a pattern of separate work. Regina rose before dawn to check the herd and the feed. Flannery stayed upstairs until the light changed. They met at meals and spoke of the farm accounts, the price of hay, the cost of cortisone. When Regina cleaned the bedroom one afternoon and hung new curtains, Flannery removed them the same evening and stored them in the wardrobe. The dust stayed where it had fallen.

A virus came through the house in 1953. It passed through her quickly and left the lupus active again. She spent six weeks in bed, revising the stories that would form the collection published two years later. The hands that held the pencil shook, yet the sentences stayed exact. She mailed the final pages from the same desk behind the wardrobe.