Content area
Full Text
I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together, and all their different readings make one new one. Each writer writes the missing parts of the other writer's story. And the whole story is what I'm after.
-Alice Walker, "Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O'Connor"1
In a letter often quoted by scholars, Flannery O'Connor responds to her friend Maryat Lee, a social activist and playwright living in New York, who wants to set up a meeting between O'Connor and James Baldwin:
No I can't see James Baldwin in Georgia. It would cause the greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion. In New York it would be nice to meet him; here it would not. I observe the traditions of the society I feed on - it's only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia. (April 25, 1959, CW 1094-95)
Although in 1959 Flannery O'Connor refused to meet James Baldwin in Georgia, her keen moral observations of southern manners, especially as they play out in relationships of power based on race, gender, and class, are oddly similar to his. By declining Lee's invitation, O'Connor shows herself to be bound to the manners of her cultural environment at a particular moment in history. O'Connor and Baldwin produced much of their major work in the years after Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), when the old southern manners, ritualized under segregation, were under siege. "At such a moment," writes Baldwin in "Faulkner and Desegregation" (1956), "one clings to what one knew, or thought one knew; to what one possessed or dreamed that one possessed" {CE 209). Both authors were thus witness to white Southerners' nostalgia for the past and panic for the future at this moment of change, which involved, in Baldwin's words, "the breakup of the world" as they had always known it {CE 209). At the end of O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge," Julian, an adult son still living at home, lashes out in exasperation at his old-fashioned mother: "The old world is gone." Julian sees himself as progressive on racial issues and seeks to distance himself from his mother's worldview: "The old manners...