The thing about Flannery O’Connor’s short stories is their simplicity: In very few pages, and using very few “big” words and even fewer plot tricks, they strike me as winding trails of nuance, one on which you cannot avoid finding something new each and every time. Which is what I’ve been experiencing with “The Geranium,” her first published work. The story can be read as a series of beautifully crafted sentences. It can be read as an account of moving from one environment into another. It can be read as a commentary on family dynamics both rejected and embraced from one generation to the next. It can be read simply as a story about missing home.
And it can be read, of course, as an analysis of how people organize their thoughts and instincts – or not – along the lines of color and race. Last week, PBS aired an American Experience documentary commemorating the 50th anniversary of the summer that some very brave young people boarded buses for a little ride through the South. I could not help but be inspired by the group that has been indexed into our history under the name Freedom Riders.
Technically speaking, desegregation had been outlawed by the time the riders boarded their buses a mere five years before my birth and an easy day’s drive from where my birth took place. But thanks to politicians whose mindsets allowed them, phenomenally, I think, to use words like “freedom” and “equality” while at the same time refusing to appear in public with a black person, it was not only not safe for black people to travel in certain states, it was not safe for black people to sit next to white people while travelling through certain states, or while stopping at bus depots in certain states. It’s an understatement, I think, to call places like Anniston, Ala., Birmingham and Jackson, Miss. war zones. That term was so apt, in fact, that many of the people on the buses drew up their wills before joining the crusade. And they referred to themselves as soldiers.
One of the risks of reading history, I’m learning, is that it’s not unlike discovering that your parents really did enjoy oral sex quite a bit: In history, the myths implode, and in reading Taylor Branch’s account of the early 1960s in this country, disappointment waits on almost every page. The Kennedys? I’ve never been a big fan, and I’m less of one now. Inspiring speeches about hope and change, I suppose, but in terms of addressing the fact that millions of U.S. citizens couldn’t vote without endangering not only their own lives but the lives of their families and friends as well, well, publically addressing the civil rights of black people was considered “belittling” to the president, who was more interested in the space program. The supreme court – which I consider a national disgrace to begin with – didn’t help: It set a horrid precedent by letting a southern man of the law walk free after beating a black man to death because it could not be proven, specifically, that the officer intended to deprive his victim of his civil rights. The lawman’s name was Screws, which would have been a stretch in the symbolism department even for Flannery O’Connor’s fiction.
Unfortunately, the black people in the story of the civil rights movement are not exactly free of blemishes. And that’s the wall I keep running into. Is it acceptable to dismiss the movement’s leaders because their bigotry toward the gays was drawn from the same well as the bigotry that drove white people in the south to resort to terrorist tactics – there’s no other way to phrase that, in my opinion – at the mere thought of being seated beside a black person at a diner? Is it okay to dismiss the actions of individuals for the sake of what the cause achieved overall? Martin Luther King kicked a man named Bayard Rustin out of the club because of an indirect threat from Adam Clayton Powell – a black U.S. congressman from Harlem – who promised to fire up the rumor mill in order to link King and Rustin “in a homosexual affair” unless King dismissed Rustin from organizing efforts. Ultimately, King did not dismiss Rustin, who had dedicated years of his life to the movement, who had stood beside King through some of his most difficult times and who was not only black and gay but a communist as well: He had someone else do it for him.
Although they clearly have no qualms about tossing the gays right off the bridge, I think Barack Obama and Bill Clinton give amazing speeches, but neither of them, in my opinion, are quite as artistic as Martin Luther King when it comes to sheer oratory octane. Which brings me to another wall: The church. The civil rights struggle in this country took root in “the black church,” which, like all churches I’ve found thus far, is where people go to absorb the finer points of division. Even when it’s preaching to millions of systematically disenfranchised souls, a Christian church will find a scapegoat, so is taking note that blatant homophobia was at play as buses full of principled young people roared across Alabama in 1961 an overreaction on my part?
I cannot decide. On the one hand, I don’t think it’s fair to hold it against the people who put their lives on the line to make it happen the fact that churches were the foundation of the civil rights movement: Black people, after all, were not exactly welcome at the city hall, or the department store or the departure lounge at the Greyhound bus terminal. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to consider the ability to splice and dice the word “equality” as anything other than a character defect – and a pretty major one at that. The ease with which Barack Obama can sell the gays to the highest bidder is inexcusable. As for Bill Clinton, I guess I do sort of make excuses for him by sympathizing with him because of the fact that there is no number of Ivy League degrees and million-dollar wedding ceremonies that will ever liberate him from his hillbilly inclinations and instincts. But Martin Luther King?
For me, the best way to read Flanner O’Connor’s story is as a configuration of three men. The main character, Old Dudley, Rabie, a black man back home in a small Southern town and another black man, one who lives in the apartment next door to Old Dudley’s daughter in New York City and who remains nameless. Old Dudley, who has left his home to go live with his daughter, is appalled that she lives in the same building with a black person, so much so that he initially assumes the next door neighbor is a servant. His mere presence is an affront not only to the order of the world but to Old Dudley’s child-rearing skills. It’s all as bad as it sounds, until it gets worse. Old Dudley clearly considers Rabie a friend – he longs for his presence, actually – but there are conditions, of course. While he’s offended by having a black person in the apartment next door, living beneath the same roof as people whose skin color is different than his own does not represent a new frontier for Old Dudley. Back home, Rabie and he lived in the same building, but it was a boarding house, and Rabie, who was more or less the maintenance man, didn’t live right next door but in a location that fit more smoothly into Old Dudley’s scheme of things: in the basement.
