Race and the Moment of Grace in Flannery O'Connor

Introduction: Race as a Spiritual Device

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 (The 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 (The 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 examines 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.

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 her story "The Artificial Nigger." The word "nigger" appears in O'Connor's work — written in the mid-twentieth century — at a time before it took on the full weight of significance it carries today. As the stories show, a racial charge ran like an electric current through the minds of most of her Southern characters, characters who barely even understood what it was that they were so on guard for.

The Artificial Nigger: Humility and Redemption

"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. 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). Just as Vergil leads Dante through the Inferno, Mr. Head intends to lead his young ward through the city, where "it'll be full of niggers," as he tells Nelson.

Nelson has no idea what a "nigger" is and is, in fact, surprised when Mr. Head points one out to him — a sleeping African-American man in their train car. Nelson is puzzled because the man looks no different from any other, only with slightly darker skin. He had been anticipating something monstrous and grotesque from the way Mr. Head always spoke venomously on the subject. 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 effectively switch roles: the guardian denies the ward, just as Peter denied Christ. Mr. Head, in an attempt to teach the boy how badly he needs the older man's guidance, devises a scheme 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. Nelson is distracted by a 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 situation. Mr. Head refuses to acknowledge that he knows the boy, which deeply shocks and offends Nelson. Nelson gradually makes Mr. Head pay for this betrayal, and Mr. Head does feel sorry for it, especially as he becomes increasingly lost in the city with the child following at a safe distance behind. Finally, Mr. Head cries out to a passing stranger: "I'm lost! 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). The two are given directions — and it is at that very moment that they encounter the "artificial nigger" in the front yard of a nearby home.

Both Mr. Head and Nelson are humbled at that moment, and the object that brings them together in their shared need for saving is the "artificial nigger" — a decorative lawn ornament. For O'Connor, it functions as a powerful symbol: "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 through their recognition of the "wild misery" of the artificial nigger — because it reflects their own condition and yet, in a mysterious way, gestures toward a suffering far greater than anything they have known: a symbol, ultimately, of their redemption. As O'Connor explains in Mystery and Manners, looking upon the artificial nigger constitutes "the working of grace for the characters" (O'Connor, Mystery and Manners 116).

Pride, Condescension, and False Solidarity

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 brought to accept that they are essentially in the same boat as the people they objectify. This sense of all being in the same boat is explored in other stories as well — 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 toward them is condescending and inauthentic. The latter concerns an older woman who must be accompanied to her gym class 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 toward African-Americans and, in fact, worse in this regard than his mother, whom he despises. His mother's condescension is open and rooted in charity and love; her son's is rooted in pride and aggression. The point O'Connor draws from these two stories is one she makes again and again in her fiction — from "The Lame Shall Enter First" to "Judgment Day." The point is this: racial tension is born in pride, and only through humility, charity, and love can it ever be dissolved, for it is these qualities that allow God's grace to shine, while pride drives it away. It is no 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.

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," Asbury tells the Negro workers on the dairy farm that they should not feel restricted by his mother's rule against drinking unpasteurized milk from the pail. In his Marxist-informed thinking, they are the ones who have put in the work and should reap the rewards of their labor. To show "solidarity" — or simply to encourage them to break his mother's rules — Asbury takes the first drink from the pail himself. Later, he falls ill and believes he is dying. He is not dying; he has merely become infected from the unpasteurized milk, which is precisely why his mother had forbidden anyone from drinking it. Young Asbury had assumed the rule was racist rather than practical.

While suffering on what he believes is his deathbed, Asbury asks his mother to send for a priest like one he had met at an intellectual's party. The priest who arrives, 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 is confronted with the problem of looking in the mirror and seeing that he is not the radical, revolutionary promoter of racial equality he believed himself to be. (Had the Negro workers listened to him, after all, they would all be sick.) Moreover, Asbury reveals the contempt he actually harbors when he asks to say "goodbye" to the workers and they file into his room, telling him how well he is looking. Their apparent "lies" make him boil with rage — yet their simplicity and manner is precisely what he fails to understand and what endears them to others, such as Julian's mother in "Everything That Rises Must Converge."

Conclusion

Tanner is clearly simply trying to make a friend — and while he is condescending, he is so in a way that is rooted in simplicity and affection rather than in pride and aggression. This makes no difference to his African-American neighbor, who eventually assaults and kills Tanner over his use of the word "nigger." None of this, however, is even the main point of the story, because immediately after Tanner dies, his daughter buries him in the city — only to be haunted by his ghost, since Tanner had demanded before his death to be buried in the South. When his daughter finally relents and sends Tanner's body back home, "her good looks" return (O'Connor, "Judgment Day" in The Complete Stories 550).

The fact that the daughter's distress is not relieved until she has fulfilled her father's wishes regarding burial points to the story's underlying argument: the urban Northern world and the Southern world do not understand one another when it comes to race, and the two must be allowed to keep to their own separate ways. Taken together, O'Connor's stories on race suggest that racial tension is, at its root, a spiritual problem born of pride — and that the only path through it lies in the humility, charity, and love that make the moment of grace possible.

Works Cited

Dowell, Bob. "The Moment of Grace in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor." College English, vol. 27, no. 3 (Dec. 1965): 235–239.

Gleeson-White, Sarah. "A Peculiarly Southern Form of Ugliness: Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O'Connor." The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 36, no. 1 (2003): 46–57.

O'Connor, Flannery. "The Artificial Nigger." Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

O'Connor, Flannery. "The Enduring Chill." The Complete Stories. NY: Noonday Press, 1970. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. "Everything That Rises Must Converge." Web. 27 Apr. 2017.

O'Connor, Flannery. The Habit of Being. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. "Judgment Day." The Complete Stories. NY: Noonday Press, 1970. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Print.

Smith, J. Oates. "Ritual and Violence in Flannery O'Connor." Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 545–560.

Wood, Ralph C. Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2004. Print.