Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

His grandfather had been a circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over three counties with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger.

Now there were no more Motes, no more Ashfields, no more Blasengames, Feys, Jacksons … or Parrums—even niggers wouldn’t have it.

That boy had been redeemed and Jesus wasn’t going to leave him ever. Jesus would never let him forget he was redeemed. What did the sinner think there was to be gained? Jesus would have him in the end!

There was already a deep black wordless conviction in him that the way to avoid Jesus was to avoid sin. He knew by the time he was twelve years old that he was going to be a preacher. Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.

When the army finally let him go, he was pleased to think that he was still uncorrupted. All he wanted was to get back to Eastrod, Tennessee.

He kept the glasses in case his vision should ever become dim.

Jesus made it beautiful to haunt her.

“I’m going to preach a new church—the church of truth without Jesus Christ Crucified. It won’t cost you nothing to join my church. It’s not started yet but it’s going to be.”

“You act like you think you got wiser blood than anybody else,” he said, “but you ain’t! I’m the one has it. Not you. Me.”

He took them out of the box and filled the bottoms of them with stones and small rocks and then he put them on. He laced them up tight and walked in them through the woods for what he knew to be a mile, until he came to a creek, and then he sat down and took them off and eased his feet in the wet sand. He thought, that ought to satisfy Him. Nothing happened. If a stone had fallen he would have taken it as a sign. After a while he drew his feet out of the sand and let them dry, and then he put the shoes on again with the rocks still in them and he walked a half-mile back before he took them off.

When he got up to it, he saw that one door was tied on with a rope and that it had an oval window in the back. This was the car he was going to buy.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

“There’s no person a whoremonger, who wasn’t something worse first,” Haze said. “That’s not the sin, nor blasphemy. The sin came before them.”

“I don’t have to run from anything because I don’t believe in anything,”

That morning Enoch Emery knew when he woke up that today the person he could show it to was going to come. He knew by his blood. He had wise blood like his daddy.

A long way off he saw the blue figure spring and pick up a rock, and he saw the wild face turn, and the rock hurtle toward him; he shut his eyes tight and the rock hit him on the forehead.

“Well, I preach the Church Without Christ. I’m member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way. Ask me about that church and I’ll tell you it’s the church that the blood of Jesus don’t foul with redemption.”

He said no mam, it was Protestant.

She seemed at once to have to balance her face so that her expression would be the same on both sides.

Inside, Hawks took off his dark glasses and, from a hole in the window shade, watched him get in his car and drive off. The eye he put to the hole was slightly rounder and smaller than his other one, but it was obvious he could see out of both of them.

“I like his eyes,” she observed. “They don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking.”

“Well, look what you used to be,” she said. “Look what you tried to do. You got over it and so will he.”

“Listen here,” she said, sitting down on the cot with him, “you help me to get him and then you go away and do what you please and I can live with him.”

I’m just crazy about him. I never seen a boy that I liked the looks of any better. Don’t run him off.

He crossed and uncrossed his knees and then he crossed them again.

“I can’t save you but you can save yourself.” “That’s what I’ve already done,” Haze said. “Without the repenting. I preach how I done it every night on the…”

He took his hat off and put it on again and got up and stood looking around the room as if he were trying to remember where the door was.

He had been possessed of as many devils as were necessary to do it, but at that instant, they disappeared, and he saw himself standing there as he was.

“This is a good car,” Haze said. “I knew when I first saw it that it was the car for me, and since I’ve had it, I’ve had a place to be that I can always get away in.”

At the other garage he went to, there was a man who said he could put the car in the best shape overnight, because it was such a good car to begin with, so well put together and with such good materials in it, and because, he added, he was the best mechanic in town, working in the best-equipped shop. Haze left it with him, certain that it was in honest hands.

‘Dear Sabbath, Light necking is acceptable, but I think your real problem is one of adjustment to the modern world. Perhaps you ought to re-examine your religious values to see if they meet your needs in Life. A religious experience can be a beautiful addition to living if you put it in the proper prespective and do not let it warf you. Read some books on Ethical Culture.’

“Was he a very evil-seeming man before he came to believe,” he asked, “or just part way evil-seeming?”

“I can save you,” she said. “I got a church in my heart where Jesus is King.”

“I believe in a new kind of jesus,” he said, “one that can’t waste his blood redeeming people with it, because he’s all man and ain’t got any God in him. My church is the Church Without Christ!”

The thing in his mind said that the truth didn’t contradict itself and that a bastard couldn’t be saved in the Church Without Christ.

This car’ll get me anywhere I want to go. It may stop here and there but it won’t stop permanent.

“Nothing,” the man said with the same level look. “Not a thing.”

If he had been much given to thought, he might have thought that now was the time for him to justify his daddy’s blood, but he didn’t think in broad sweeps like that, he thought what he would do next.

For the time, he knew that what he didn’t know was what mattered.

“I preach there are all kinds of truth, your truth and somebody else’s, but behind all of them, there’s only one truth and that is that there’s no truth,” he called. “No truth behind all truths is what I and this church preach! Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.

he saw the man in the glare-blue suit and white hat up on the nose of it.

To his mind, an opportunity to insult a successful ape came from the hand of Providence. He suddenly regained all his reverence for the new jesus. He saw that he was going to be rewarded after all and have the supreme moment he had expected.

It was the first hand that had been extended to Enoch since he had come to the city. It was warm and soft.

“You may not see me again,” he said, “—the way I am.”

No gorilla in existence, whether in the jungles of Africa or California, or in New York City in the finest apartment in the world, was happier at that moment than this one, whose god had finally rewarded it.

“Them that don’t have a car, don’t need a license,” the patrolman said, dusting his hands on his pants.

She leaned closer and closer to his face, looking deep into them, trying to see how she had been cheated or what had cheated her, but she couldn’t see anything. She shut her eyes and saw the pin point of light but so far away that she could not hold it steady in her mind. She felt as if she were blocked at the entrance of something. She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light. BOOKS BY FLANNERY O’CONNOR