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

Peter Cline. This house, called “the Cline house,” was built by slaves who made the bricks by hand. O’Connor’s biographers are always impressed by this fact, as if it adds the blessed sign of aristocracy, but whenever I read it I think that those slaves were some of my own relatives, toiling in the stifling middle-Georgia heat, to erect her grandfather’s house, sweating and suffering the swarming mosquitoes as the house rose slowly, brick by brick.
    Whenever I visit antebellum homes in the South, with their spacious rooms, their grand staircases, their shaded back windows that, without the thickly planted trees, would look out onto the now vanished slave quarters in the back, this is invariably my thought. I stand in the backyard gazing up at the windows, then stand at the windows inside looking down into the backyard, and between the me that is on the ground and the me that is at the windows, History is caught.
    O’Connor attended local Catholic schools and then Georgia Women’s College. In 1945 she received a fellowship to the Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa. She received her M.A. in 1947. While still a student she wrote stories that caused her to be recognized as a writer of formidable talent and integrity of craft. After a stay at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in upstate New York, she moved to a furnished room in New York City. Later she lived and wrote over a garage at the Connecticut home of Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, who became, after her death, her literary executors.
    Although, as Robert Fitzgerald states in the preface to O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, “Flannery was out to be a writer on her own and had no plans to go back to live in Georgia,” staying out of Georgia for good was not possible. In December of 1950 she experienced a peculiar heaviness in her “typing arms.” On the train home for the Christmas holidays she became so ill she was hospitalized immediately. It was disseminated lupus. In the fall of 1951, after nine wretched months in the hospital, she returned to Milledgeville. Because she could not climb the stairs at the Cline house her mother brought her to their country house, Andalusia, about five miles from town. Flannery O’Connor lived there with her mother for the next thirteen years. The rest of her life.
    The word lupus is Latin for “wolf,” and is described as “that which eats into the substance.” It is a painful, wasting disease, and O’Connor suffered not only from the disease—which caused her muscles to weaken and her body to swell, among other things—but from the medicine she was given to fight the disease, which caused her hair to fall out and her hipbones to melt. Still, she managed—with the aid of crutches from 1955 on—to get about and to write, and left behind more than three dozen superb short stories, most of them prizewinners, two novels, and a dozen or so brilliant essays and speeches. Her book of essays, Mystery and Manners, which is primarily concerned with the moral imperatives of the serious writer of fiction, is the best of its kind I have ever read.
    â€œWhen you make these trips back south,” says my mother, as I give the smiling waitress my credit card, “just what is it exactly that you’re looking for?”
    â€œA wholeness,” I reply.
    â€œYou look whole enough to me,” she says.
    â€œNo,” I answer, “because everything around me is split up, deliberately split up. History split up, literature split up, and people are split up too. It makes people do ignorant things. For example, one day I was invited to speak at a gathering of Mississippi librarians and before I could get started, one of the authorities on Mississippi history and literature got up and said she really did think Southerners wrote so well because ‘we’ lost the war. She was white, of course, but half the librarians in