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When Flannery O'Connor called her story "The Artificial Nigger" "my favorite and probably the best thing I'll ever write" (MM 209), she must have recognized its unique ability to tell the truth she wanted told. In that short work O'Connor invokes the oldest storytelling mode of the fairy tale that grew out of the folk tradition. O'Connor, and most of her critics, note that her fiction, while framed in the realism of the rural South, is always shaped to reveal something about the life of the spirit, the cosmic life of the soul. However, if we read this story through the lens ofthat ancient way of reaching for a deeper truth located in the fairy tale, we find her work less culturally situated. Rather than narrowly interpreting O'Connor as a southern or Catholic writer, we can read her work from the framework of a fairy tale to discover its timeless expansiveness, its social message with the plus of spiritual content, its core as Gospel. In "The Artificial Nigger," we find a tale of mourning turned to gladness, of Christian redemption clothed in secular mythic quest. And as the fairy tale masks its social message with its surface story, so does O'Connor's tale subvert its revolutionary Christian intent, but only to the point where the author feels forced to "come clean" at the end.
Much more than bedtime stories for children, fairy tales began as social statements crafted by and aimed at grown-ups. The earliest fairy (or wonder) tales are primarily ascribed to pre-literate peasant storytellers speaking to an audience of adult peers, and they address, through allegory or subversion, social issues in the lives of common people. In the introduction to The Classic Fairy Tales, Maria Tater calls the tale an "effort ... to develop maps for coping with personal anxieties, family conflicts, social frictions, and the myriad frustrations of everyday life" (xi). Jack Zipes, a contemporary scholar of the fairy-tale genre, says, in When Dreams Come True, that the earliest tales addressed communities struggling against concrete terrors and "fostered a sense of belonging and hope that miracles involving some kind of magical transformation were possible to bring about a better world" (2). Sitting around a fireside, women and men whiled away the long, dark...