In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker Read Free Book Online Page A

“one good thing you gave us. It was right here that I got my first washing machine!”
    In fact, the only pleasant thing I recall from that year was a field we used to pass on our way into the town of Milledgeville. It was like a painting by someone who loved tranquility. In the foreground near the road the green field was used as pasture for black-and-white cows that never seemed to move. Then, farther away, there was a steep hill partly covered with kudzu—dark and lush and creeping up to cover and change fantastically the shapes of the trees… . When we drive past it now, it looks the same. Even the cows could be the same cows—though now I see that they do move, though not very fast and never very far.
    What I liked about this field as a child was that in my life of nightmares about electrocutions, lost cats, and the surprise appearance of snakes, it represented beauty and unchanging peace.
    â€œOf course,” I say to myself, as we turn off the main road two miles from my old house, “that’s Flannery’s field.” The instructions I’ve been given place her house on the hill just beyond it.
    There is a garish new Holiday Inn directly across Highway 441 from Flannery O’Connor’s house, and, before going up to the house, my mother and I decide to have something to eat there. Twelve years ago I could not have bought lunch for us at such a place in Georgia, and I feel a weary delight as I help my mother off with her sweater and hold out a chair by the window for her. The white people eating lunch all around us—staring though trying hard not to—form a blurred backdrop against which my mother’s face is especially sharp. This is the proper perspective, I think, biting into a corn muffin, no doubt about it.
    As we sip iced tea we discuss O’Connor, integration, the inferiority of the corn muffins we are nibbling, and the care and raising of peacocks.
    â€œThose things will sure eat up your flowers,” my mother says, explaining why she never raised any.
    â€œYes,” I say, “but they’re a lot prettier than they’d be if somebody human had made them, which is why this lady liked them.” This idea has only just occurred to me, but having said it, I believe it is true. I sit wondering why I called Flannery O’Connor a lady. It is a word I rarely use and usually by mistake, since the whole notion of ladyhood is repugnant to me. I can imagine O’Connor at a Southern social affair, looking very polite and being very bored, making mental notes of the absurdities of the evening. Being white she would automatically have been eligible for ladyhood, but I cannot believe she would ever really have joined.
    â€œShe must have been a Christian person then,” says my mother. “She believed He made everything.” She pauses, looks at me with tolerance but also as if daring me to object: “And she was right, too.”
    â€œShe was a Catholic,” I say, “which must not have been comfortable in the Primitive Baptist South, and more than any other writer she believed in everything, including things she couldn’t see.”
    â€œIs that why you like her?” she asks.
    â€œI like her because she could write, ” I say.
    â€œ ‘Flannery’ sounds like something to eat,” someone said to me once. The word always reminds me of flannel, the material used to make nightgowns and winter shirts. It is very Irish, as were her ancestors. Her first name was Mary, but she seems never to have used it. Certainly “Mary O’Connor” is short on mystery. She was an Aries, born March 25, 1925. When she was sixteen, her father died of lupus, the disease that, years later, caused her own death. After her father died, O’Connor and her mother, Regina O’Connor, moved from Savannah, Georgia, to Milledgeville, where they lived in a townhouse built for Flannery O’Connor’s grandfather,