African American and Mother

Race in the Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor While O'Connor stated that "The Artificial Nigger" communicated everything she had to say about race, it was not the last story of hers that took race as at least an indirect subject. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" was another that used race as a launching point from which O'Connor could deliver a more, as she felt, pertinent message.

For O'Connor, race and racism were facts of life, which meant that they were tools for the fiction writer -- aspects of society and reality -- that she could use to deliver to her reader "the indication of Grace, the moment when you know that Grace has been offered and accepted," as she wrote to another writer in 1959 (O'Connor Habit of Being 367).

These moments were always the endpoints of O'Connor's fiction, "prepared for" by the clash of wills and the setting up of a final showdown, so to speak, between the main character and God (O'Connor Habit of Being 367).

In some cases these moments were achieved through generational conflict, as in "A View of the Woods," sometimes through sexual conflict, as in "Good Country People," and sometimes through race, as in "Judgment Day." The fact that race appears frequently as a theme in O'Connor's stories indicates that racial conflict was, after all, a matter of fact -- both in the South where she lived and in the larger cities of the north, where she had had some experience prior to the onset of her illness.

This paper will examine how O'Connor uses race in her stories as a triggering device for the "moment of grace" that she, ultimately, seeks to deliver to her characters in the stories. As Ralph C. Wood states, "the idea of race is largely a product of the Enlightenment" (93) -- and it is false "enlightenment" that O'Connor seeks to overcome in her stories.

The most obvious example of the idea of "race" being overcome in a spiritual sense is in O'Connor's story entitled "The Artificial Nigger." "Nigger" is a term that is used in O'Connor's work (mid-century) at a time before it took on the significance that it has today. As the story shows, a racial charge was running like an electric current through the heads of most of her characters in the South, characters who barely even understand what it is that they themselves are so on guard for.

"The Artificial Nigger" tells the story of Mr. Head, the old guardian of the young Nelson: the two are alike in many ways but are also night and day when it comes to religion. Mr.

Head wants to teach the obstinate Nelson that the straight and narrow path to God is the best path to follow: that he views Nelson as obstinate and sinful and himself as "Vergil summoned in the middle of the night to go to Dante or better, Raphael, awakened by a blast of God's light to fly to the side of Tobias" (O'Connor "The Artificial Nigger" 1). And just as Vergil leads Dante through the Inferno, Mr.

Head is going to lead his young ward through the city, where "it'll be full of niggers," as Mr. Head tells Nelson. Nelson has no idea what a "nigger" is and in fact is surprised to have it pointed out to him when the they are on a train together to the city and Mr. Head points to a sleeping African-American in their car. Nelson is surprised because the "nigger" looks no different from any other man, just with slightly browner skin.

Nelson is puzzled by this because he was anticipating something monstrous and grotesque from the way Mr. Head always spoke venomously about "niggers." It is a surreal moment for Nelson, as J. Oates Smith notes, and marks the beginning of Nelson's "harshly and defiantly spiritual" journey through an O'Connor "parable" on suffering and redemption (Oates 545). As the story unfolds, Mr. Head and Nelson switch roles, so to speak: the guardian denies the ward, just as Peter denied Christ.

The occasion is one in which Head, in an attempt to teach the young boy how badly the child needs the older man, it into his mind to show Nelson what it would be like to be on his own in the city. The proud old man, in other words, is trying to teach the proud young man to be humble. It happens this way: Nelson is distracted by matronly African-American woman (the boy has no mother-figure in his life and is drawn to her quite naturally).

Not watching where he is stepping, he causes an accident on the sidewalk and an officer approaches to assess the matter. Mr. Head refuses to acknowledge that he knows the boy, which deeply shocks and offends Nelson -- who gradually makes Mr. Head pay for this betrayal -- and Mr. Head does feel sorry for it, especially as he becomes more and more lost in the city with the child following at a safe distance behind. Finally, Mr.

Head admits his mistake, crying out to a stranger passing on the street: "I'm lost!" he called. "I'm lost and can't find my way and me and this boy have got to catch this train and I can't find the station. Oh Gawd I'm lost! Oh hep me Gawd I'm lost!" (O'Connor "The Artificial Nigger" 10). Mr. Head and the child are given directions -- and it is at that moment that they see the "artificial nigger" in the front lawn of a home. At that moment, both Mr.

Head and Nelson are also humbled -- and the object that brings them together in their cry of need for saving is the "artificial nigger" -- a lawn ornament. For O'Connor, the "artificial nigger" was a symbol, for Mr. Head and Nelson are re-united before the symbol in a spiritual way: "They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another's victory that brought them together in their common defeat.

They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy" (O'Connor "The Artificial Nigger" 10). The grace the two characters receive comes by way of their recognition of the "wild misery" of the "artificial nigger" -- because it is a reflection of their own and yet in a mysterious way a symbol of a much greater suffering than they have ever known -- a symbol of their redemption, too. As O'Connor puts it in Mystery and Manners, the moment of grace for Mr.

Head and Nelson is accepted as they look on at the artificial nigger, which is "the working of grace for the characters" (O'Connor Mystery and Manners 116). O'Connor's use of race is not quite as mystical in her other stories as it is in "The Artificial Nigger," where the ignorant racist attitudes of Mr. Head and Nelson are, if not wholly removed from them, at least made to accept the fact that they are essentially in the same boat as the "niggers" they objectify and look down on.

This sense of all being in the same boat is explored by O'Connor in other stories as well -- in particularly in "The Enduring Chill" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge." The former is a story of a proud, young student who wants to preach equality to the Negro workers on his mother's dairy farm (the irony being that he does not really believe in equality, since his attitude towards them is so condescending and inauthentic).

The latter is a story about an older woman who must be accompanied to her gym by her young son (another student) who resents his mother for her "ignorant" Old World attitudes. Like the main character in "The Enduring Chill," the son in "Everything That Rises" is just as condescending towards African-Americans and, in fact, worse towards them than his mother, whom he despises, as her condescension is open and based in charity and love (her son's is based in pride and aggression).

The point that O'Connor draws from these two stories is one she makes again and again in her fiction -- from "The Lame Shall Enter First" (another story in which a white character condescends towards a black character out of pride rather than out of charity -- and pays a steep price for it) to "Judgment Day." The point is this: racial tension is born in pride -- and only through humility and charity and love can the tension ever be dissolved, for it is the latter qualities that allow God's light and Grace to shine, while pride drives the light and Grace away.

It is not a coincidence that O'Connor's stories typically end with the main character experiencing a brutal about-face -- a moment in which the actual condition of the soul is laid bare before the eyes. As Bob Dowell noted, O'Connor's reading public often accused her of writing stories about "freaks" (235) -- but as far as she was concerned, she was writing about the freakish aspect of the soul without Grace. Race was one of the most obvious ways to approach this freakishness.

In "The Enduring Chill," for example, Asbury (the young student) tells the Negroes on the dairy farm that they should not feel restricted by his mother's rules about them drinking the cow's milk from the pail -- after all, they are the ones who have put in the work and milked the cows so (in Asbury's Marxist-informed mind) they should be the ones to reap the rewards of their labor.

To show "solidarity" with them -- or simply just to encourage them to break his mother's rules -- Asbury takes the first drink from the pail of unpasteurized milk. Later, he becomes sick and thinks he is dying. (He is not dying, he has simply become infected from the milk -- which is the real reason his mother has forbidden the Negroes from drinking it: unpasteurized milk can cause sickness; young Asbury thought the rule was racist rather than practical).

While suffering on what he believes his deathbed, Asbury asks his mother to send for a priest like the one he met at an intellectual's party once.

The priest who arrives for Asbury, however, is an old school Father who sees Asbury for what he is and warns: "The Holy Ghost will not come until you see yourself as you are -- a lazy ignorant conceited youth!" The admonition lands with force -- and Asbury faces the problem of looking in the mirror and seeing that he is not the radical, revolutionary, promoter of racial equality that he thought he was. (Had the Negroes listened to him, after all, they'd all be sick).

Moreover, Asbury reveals the contempt that he actually has for the Negroes when he asks to say "goodbye" to them all, and they file into his room to say how well he is looking! Their "lies" make him boil with rage -- but their simplicity and manner is what he does not understand about them and what endears them to others -- like Julian's mother in "Everything That Rises Must Converge." "In Everything That Rises," Julian is another Asbury-type character: he resents having to accompany his mother to the gym, and he is embarrassed by the manner in which she approaches a young Negro child on the bus and dares give a penny to the child.

The Negro child's mother is enraged and shouts, "He don't take nobody's pennies!" before hauling off and walloping Julian's mother upside the head with her purse (O'Connor "Everything That Rises Must Converge" 9). Julian's mother's condescension is not rooted hostility and pride the way that Julian's is -- but rather in real love and affection (after all, the mother speaks lovingly and nostalgically of her own nurse, named Caroline -- a Negress -- who cared for her as a young child).

The mother even calls for Caroline at the end of the story -- "Tell Caroline to come get me" (O'Connor "Everything That Rises" 10) -- much to Julian's shock, as he realizes his mother is having a stroke and is about to be taken from him. The story is really about Julian's moment of grace -- not his mother's. It is the reason she is never named in the story.

Julian is the one filled with pride: her attitude towards the African-Americans stems from her own innocence and not from a place that is brimming with hatred. Racial hatred, after all, does not cause one to give a penny or a nickel to a child of another race: such an action is an expression of joy at the commonality of all people -- of all children. As Sarah Gleeson-White notes, "the ideal of southern womanhood has always been bound up with the south's particular relationship to race" (46).

It is this relationship that Julian does not understand and wants no.