Flannery O'Connor Era 001

Lessons in grace.

Read so far:

Short Stories:

• “The River”

• “A Stroke of Good Fortune”

Essays:

• “The King of the Birds”

• “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature”

• “The Fiction Writer and His Country”

I am reading my mom’s copies of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, and Mystery and Manners and it is fun to come across what she’s underlined and starred. Her marks add clues to these mysterious stories I’m trying to understand and terrified of connecting with.

At the top of the Table of Contents of the Complete Short Stories, my mom wrote the following question: “Who is offered grace?” That has been a good guiding question for me because it distinguishes between grace being offered and grace being accepted. I think I’ve been reading O’Connor’s stories looking for the acceptance of grace, and in return watching out for a change in a person. Think Scrooge waking up and realizing it was all a nightmare and then he pays for Tiny Tim’s surgery and buys everyone a turkey.

I realize though, this is my limited and consequently tidy equation of God’s grace: grace is offered + person accepts = person is changed and thrilled about it. That is not how it works in O’Connor’s stories, which is probably why I find them so terrifying, but it is also why I find them so true.

Take “A Stroke of Good Fortune,” a story that takes place entirely in a stairwell. Ruby, the main character, has to climb several flights of stairs to get to her apartment after grocery shopping.

“The steps were thin black rent in the middle of the house, covered with a mole-colored carpet that looked as if it grew from the floor. They stuck straight up like steeple steps, it seemed to her. They reared up. The minute she stood at the bottom of them, they reared up and got steeper for her benefit. As she gazed up them, her mouth widened and turned down in a look of complete disgust. She was in no condition to go up anything. She was sick.”

Ruby isn’t actually sick. She’s pregnant, and she realizes this after a neighbor who is scary and seems insane tells her.

Here, I think, is grace being offered, but Ruby is not interested. She’s not interested because she’s exhausted. She’s scared. She understands something about what motherhood does and she doesn’t want to break in that way.

At the end of the story, Ruby is at the top of the stairs clutching the banister to steady herself. She is dizzy; overwhelmed with what she now knows about herself. “Good fortune,” she says, and then, “baby,” and the echo from the stairwell calls back three times, “Good fortune, Baby.” Three is a number that is religiously significant. It suggests wholeness, completeness, the Trinity. And could this be redemption? Ruby utters the words. She is hollow and full of doubt and fear, but she says them. Could this be God taking all that we have - even doubt (especially doubt) and using it?

“A writer will be interested in what we don’t understand rather than what we do,” O’Connor writes in her essay, “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Literature.”

Here’s where the story lies. Here’s where grace is “resting and waiting, with plenty of time.”