In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

O’Connor as Miscegenationist Marshall Bruce Gentry A variety of positions on the topic of O’Connor and race have been presented reasonably. I can agree with Timothy P. Caron that O’Connor’s southern religiosity ironically led her into problems on the subject of race, or with Julie Armstrong’s whiteness-studies approach to O’Connor’s works, in which Armstrong finds some stereotyping. I also agree with Margaret Earley Whitt when she suggests that O’Connor’s racial views became increasingly enlightened , and with Ralph C. Wood on the subject of race when he says that whatever O’Connor’s personal struggles with racial issues, her Catholicism guided her fiction toward an enlightened stance. I appreciate Wood’s pointing out “the anthropologists’ claim that everyone is at least the forty-fifth cousin of everyone else” (93). Perhaps we can all agree that O’Connor struggled with race and that she was more enlightened than a lot of people. In this reconsideration of O’Connor and race, I intend to avoid what some reasonably consider an unfair shortcut—references to O’Connor’s letters, essays, and interviews. Instead I will focus on the fiction. My thesis, which I think is original, is that Flannery O’Connor, a “white” writer of Irish ethnicity, writes as a miscegenationist, that she advocates race-mixing more than she would be comfortable acknowledging.1 For those who find my claim as startling as I have at times—after all, the Supreme Court did not throw out state laws against miscegenation until after O’Connor’s death—let me review three sources of encouragement. One is a book I am attempting to gain permission to publish: Clif Boyer, formerly of the Georgia College Library, has prepared a double-column, singlespaced index—of well over two hundred pages—to O’Connor’s The Complete Stories. While waiting for permission for Boyer to quote in this index virtually every word of The Complete Stories, I flip through the index from time to time, and I am impressed by O’Connor’s color palette, her use of complex colors, compound or hyphenated colors, such as, of course, rat-colored (CS 83), but also chocolate purple (88), dead-silver (294), dried yellow (93), fox-colored (314), freezing-blue (289), gold sawdust (242), gray-purple (241), “a green that was almost black or a black that was almost green” (99), green-gold (164), molecolored (96), monkey white (61), polluted lemon yellow (85), sticky-looking Marshall Bruce Gentry 190 brown (277), sweet-potato-colored (169), toast-colored (285), tobacco-colored (218). Of course one might say that O’Connor had a sharp eye for shades of color because she was a painter and a visual writer. But did she learn to notice and enjoy colors mixed and in flux because she was a writer, or was she a good writer because she was inclined to mix colors, to notice the mixing of color all around her? I assume O’Connor noticed a mistake constantly being made—the separating into mere black and white of a wide range of colors, racial and otherwise . (I am emphasizing black-white race-mixing here, though it is also true of course that O’Connor notices the mixing of Native Americans with other races.) When O’Connor describes skin, she seems to enjoy noting gradations of color, mixes, changes: burnt-brown (CS 121), cinnamon (215), coffee (254), gray (415), purple (414), red (198), tan (255), yellowish (198). O’Connor records the ways “white” skin isn’t white, the ways that changes in skin from white to other colors often mark the emotion of revelation: “white” skin in O’Connor is mottled (41) or speckled (161). The Judge is “clay pink” (218), Mr. Cheatam “nearly the same color as the unpaved roads” (237). “White” people are given names like Ruby, Red Sam, Tanner. I particularly like the way O’Connor makes white an unnatural color in this description: Old Tarwater’s “skin between the pockmarks grew pink and then purple and then white and the pockmarks appeared to jump from one spot to another” (301). And notice how many colors Julian’s mother’s face is in “Everything That Rises Must Converge ”: “her florid face” (485) becomes “an angry red” (492), then “unnaturally red” (495), and then she is “purple-faced” (495) and seems “almost gray” (495), and then Julian’s mother’s face is transformed into “a face he had never seen before” just before...

Share