Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

She felt irked and wrenched her attention loose and squinted at the price tag. The suit had cost him $11.98. She felt that that placed him and looked at his face again as if she were fortified against it now.

Eastrod filled his head and then went out beyond and filled the space that stretched from the train across the empty darkening fields. He saw the two houses and the rust-colored road and the few Negro shacks and the one barn and the stall with the red and white CCC snuff ad peeling across the side of it.

Mrs. Hitchcock said she knew a man who lived in Chi … “You might as well go one place as another,” he said. “That’s all I know.”

At intervals her hand holding the cigarette would pass the spot on her neck; it would go out of his sight and then it would pass again, going back down to the table; in a second a straight line of smoke would blow in his face. After it had blown at him three or four times, he looked at her.

There was no window. He was closed up in the thing except for a little space over the curtain. The top of the berth was low and curved over. He lay down and noticed that the curved top looked as if it were not quite closed; it looked as if it were closing. He lay there for a while, not moving. There was something in his throat like a sponge with an egg taste; he didn’t want to turn over for fear it would move. He wanted the light off. He reached up without turning and felt for the button and snapped it and the darkness sank down on him and then faded a little with light from the aisle that came in through the foot of space not closed. He wanted it all dark, he didn’t want it diluted. He heard the porter’s footsteps coming down the aisle, soft into the rug, coming steadily down, brushing against the green curtains and fading up the other way out of hearing. Then after a while when he was almost asleep, he thought he heard them again coming back. His curtains stirred and the footsteps faded. In his half-sleep he thought where he was lying was like a coffin. The first coffin he had seen with someone in it was his grandfather’s. They had left it propped open with a stick of kindling the night it had sat in the house with the old man in it, and Haze had watched from a distance, thinking: he ain’t going to let them shut it on him; when the time comes, his elbow is going to shoot into the crack. His grandfather had been a circuit preacher, a waspish old man who had ridden over th...

He was going to be a preacher like his grandfather and a preacher can always do without a foot. A preacher’s power is in his neck and tongue and arm. His grandfather had traveled three counties in a Ford automobile. Every fourth Saturday he had driven into Eastrod as if he were just in time to save them all from Hell, and he was shouting before he had the car door open. People gathered around his Ford because he seemed to dare them to. He would climb up on the nose of it and preach from there and sometimes he would climb onto the top of it and shout down at them. They were like stones! he would shout. But Jesus had died to redeem them! Jesus was so soul-hungry that He had died, one death for all, but He would have died every soul’s death for one! Did they understand that? Did they understand that for each stone soul, He would have died ten million deaths, had His arms and legs stretched on the cross and nailed ten million times for one of them? (The old man would point to his grandson, Haze. He had a particular disrespect for him because his own face was repeated almost exactly in the child’s and seemed to mock him.)

The boy didn’t need to hear it. 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. Where he wanted to stay was in Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling the familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose. When he was eighteen and the army called him, he saw the war as a trick to lead him into temptation, and he would have shot his foot except that he trusted himself to get back in a few months, uncorrupted.

he was offered the chance he had been waiting for; the invitation. He took his mother’s glasses out of his pocket and put them on. Then he told them he wouldn’t go with them for a million dollars and a feather bed to lie on; he said he was from Eastrod, Tennessee, and that he was not going to have his soul damned by the government or any foreign place they … but his voice cracked and he didn’t finish. He only stared at them, trying to steel his face. His friends told him that nobody was interested in his goddam soul unless it was the priest and he managed to answer that no priest taking orders from no pope was going to tamper with his soul. They told him he didn’t have any soul and left for their brothel.

He was wounded and they remembered him long enough to take the shrapnel out of his chest—they said they took it out but they never showed it to him and he felt it still in there, rusted, and poisoning him—and then they sent him to another desert and forgot him again. He had all the time he could want to study his soul in and assure himself that it was not there. When he was thoroughly convinced, he saw that this was something that he had always known. The misery he had was a longing for home; it had nothing to do with Jesus.

The house was as dark as the night and open to it and though he saw that the fence around it had partly fallen and that weeds were growing through the porch floor, he didn’t realize all at once that it was only a shell, that there was nothing here but the skeleton of a house. He twisted an envelope and struck a match to it and went through all the empty rooms, upstairs and down. When the envelope burnt out, he lit another one and went through them all again.

She would come with that look on her face, unrested and looking; the same look he had seen through the crack of her coffin. He had seen her face through the crack when they were shutting the top on her. He was sixteen then. He had seen the shadow that came down over her face and pulled her mouth down as if she wasn’t any more satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself: but they shut it.

“I understand,” the driver said. “It ain’t anybody perfect on this green earth of God’s, preachers nor nobody else. And you can tell people better how terrible sin is if you know from your own personal experience.” Haze put his head in at the window, knocking the hat accidentally straight again. He seemed to have knocked his face straight too for it became completely expressionless. “Listen,” he said, “get this: I don’t believe in anything.” The driver took the stump of cigar out of his mouth. “Not in nothing at all?” he asked, leaving his mouth open after the question. “I don’t have to say it but once to nobody,” Haze said. The driver closed his mouth and after a second he returned the piece of cigar to it. “That’s the trouble with you preachers,” he said. “You’ve all got too good to believe in anything,” and he drove off with a look of disgust and righteousness.

The pink tip of Mrs. Watts’s tongue appeared and moistened her lower lip. She seemed just as glad to see him as if he had been an old friend but she didn’t say anything. He picked up her foot, which was heavy but not cold, and moved it about an inch to one side, and kept his hand on it. Mrs. Watts’s mouth split in a wide full grin that showed her teeth. They were small and pointed and speckled with green and there was a wide space between each one. She reached out and gripped Haze’s arm just above the elbow. “You huntin’ something?” she drawled. If she had not had him so firmly by the arm, he might have leaped out the window. Involuntarily his lips formed the words, “Yes, mam,” but no sound came through them. “Something on your mind?” Mrs. Watts asked, pulling his rigid figure a little closer. “Listen,” he said, keeping his voice tightly under control, “I come for the usual business.” Mrs. Watts’s mouth became more round, as if she were perplexed at this waste of words. “Make yourself at home,” she said simply.

The black sky was underpinned with long silver streaks that looked like scaffolding and depth on depth behind it were thousands of stars that all seemed to be moving very slowly as if they were about some vast construction work that involved the whole order of the universe and would take all time to complete. No one was paying any attention to the sky.

Haze’s shadow was now behind him and now before him and now and then broken up by other people’s shadows, but when it was by itself, stretching behind him, it was a thin nervous shadow walking backwards. His neck was thrust forward as if he were trying to smell something that was always being drawn away.

He had on dark glasses and his cheeks were streaked with lines that looked as if they had been painted on and had faded. They gave him the expression of a grinning mandrill.

“I come a long way,” Haze said, “since I would believe anything. I come halfway around the world.”

“Listen,” she said in a louder voice, “this here man and woman killed this little baby. It was her own child but it was ugly and she never give it any love. This child had Jesus and this woman didn’t have nothing but good looks and a man she was living in sin with. She sent the child away and it come back and she sent it away again and it come back again and ever’ time she sent it away, it come back to where her and this man was living in sin. They strangled it with a silk stocking and hung it up in the chimney. It didn’t give her any peace after that, though. Everything she looked at was that child. Jesus made it beautiful to haunt her. She couldn’t lie with that man without she saw it, staring through the chimney at her, shining through the brick in the middle of the night.”

“Fornication and blasphemy and what else?” the blind man said. “They ain’t nothing but words,” Haze said. “If I was in sin I was in it before I ever committed any. There’s no change come in me.” He was trying to pry the fingers off from around his arm but the blind man kept wrapping them tighter. “I don’t believe in sin,” Haze said, “take your hand off me.” “Jesus loves you,” the blind man said in a flat mocking voice, “Jesus loves you, Jesus loves you…” “Nothing matters but that Jesus don’t exist,” Haze said, pulling his arm free. “Go to the head of the stairs and distribute these tracts and…” “I’ll take them up there and throw them over into the bushes!” Haze shouted. “You be watching and see can you see.” “I can see more than you!” the blind man yelled, laughing. “You got eyes and see not, ears and hear not, but you’ll have to see some time.”

“Sweet Jesus Christ Crucified,” he said, “I want to tell you people something. Maybe you think you’re not clean because you don’t believe. Well you are clean, let me tell you that. Every one of you people are clean and let me tell you why if you think it’s because of Jesus Christ Crucified you’re wrong. I don’t say he wasn’t crucified but I say it wasn’t for you. Listenhere, I’m a preacher myself and I preach the truth.” The crowd was moving fast. It was like a large spread raveling and the separate threads disappeared down the dark streets. “Don’t I know what exists and what don’t?” he cried. “Don’t I have eyes in my head? Am I a blind man? Listenhere,” he called, “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.” The few people who were left glanced at him once or twice. There were tracts scattered below over the sidewalk and out on the street. The blind man was sitting on the bottom step. Enoch Emery was on the other side, standing on the lion’s head, trying to balance himself, and the child was standing near him, watching Haze. “I don’t need Jesus,” Haze said. “What do I need with Jesus? I got Leora Watts.”

His eyes glinted through his tears and his face stretched in an evil crooked grin. “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.”

Since the night before was the first time he had slept with any woman, he had not been very successful with Mrs. Watts. When he finished, he was like something washed ashore on her, and she had made obscene comments about him, which he remembered off and on during the day.

Mrs. Watts’s grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle. It was plain that she was so well-adjusted that she didn’t have to think any more. Her eyes took everything in whole, like quicksand. “That Jesus-seeing hat!” she said.

All he could see were the backs of the men. He climbed up’on a bench and looked over their heads. They were looking down into a lowered place where something white was lying, squirming a little, in a box lined with black cloth. For a second he thought it was a skinned animal and then he saw it was a woman. She was fat and she had a face like an ordinary woman except there was a mole on the corner of her lip, that moved when she grinned, and one on her side. “Had one of themther built into ever’ casket,” his father, up toward the front, said, “be a heap ready to go sooner.” Haze recognized the voice without looking. He slid down off the bench and scrambled out of the tent. He crawled out under the side of the outside one because he didn’t want to pass the barker. He got in the back of a truck and sat down in the far corner of it. The carnival was making a tin roar outside.

“What you seen?” she said. “What you seen,” she said, using the same tone of voice all the time. She hit him across the legs with the stick, but he was like part of the tree. “Jesus died to redeem you,” she said. “I never ast him,” he muttered. She didn’t hit him again but she stood looking at him, shut-mouthed, and he forgot the guilt of the tent for the nameless unplaced guilt that was in him. In a minute she threw the stick away from her and went back to the wash-pot, still shut-mouthed.

The next day he took his shoes in secret out into the woods. He didn’t wear them except for revivals and in the winter. 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.

His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

Haze leaned against the car and started to roll a cigarette but he couldn’t get it rolled. He kept spilling the tobacco and then the papers.

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.

He had come to the city and—with a knowing in his blood—he had established himself at the heart of it. Every day he looked at the heart of it; every day; and he was so stunned and awed and over whelmed that just to think about it made him sweat. There was something, in the center of the park, that he had discovered. It was a mystery, although it was right there in a glass case for everybody to see and there was a typewritten card over it telling all about it. But there was something the card couldn’t say and what it couldn’t say was inside him, a terrible knowledge without any words to it, a terrible knowledge like a big nerve growing inside him. He could not show the mystery to just anybody; but he had to show it to somebody. Who he had to show it to was a special person. This person could not be from the city but he didn’t know why. He knew he would know him when he saw him and he knew that he would have to see him soon or the nerve inside him would grow so big that he would be forced to steal a car or rob a bank or jump out of a dark alley onto a woman. His blood all morning had been saying the person would come today.

The blue figure was still sitting there in the same position. He had the look of being held there, as if by an invisible hand, as if, if the hand lifted up, the figure would spring across the pool in one leap without the expression on his face changing once.

Hazel Motes cut off the motor. His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth.

Enoch’s brain was divided into two parts. The part in communication with his blood did the figuring but it never said anything in words. The other part was stocked up with all kinds of words and phrases. While the first part was figuring how to get Hazel Motes through the FROSTY BOTTLE and the zoo, the second inquired, “Where’d you git thisyer fine car? You ought to paint you some signs on the outside it, like ‘Step-in, baby’—I seen one with that on it, then I seen another, said…”

Her name was Maude and she drank whisky all day from a fruit jar under the counter.

Omniscient POV

It was as if something inside Hazel Motes was winding up, although he didn’t move on the outside. He only looked pressed down in that blue suit, as if inside it, the thing winding was getting tighter and tighter. Enoch’s blood told him to hurry. He raced the milkshake up the straw.

She snickered and put two fingers in front of her teeth. The little boys’ faces were like pans set on either side to catch the grins that overflowed from her.

When he came to again, Hazel Motes was gone. He lay there a minute. He put his fingers to his forehead and then held them in front of his eyes. They were streaked with red. He turned his head and saw a drop of blood on the ground and as he looked at it, he thought it widened like a little spring. He sat straight up, frozen-skinned, and put his finger in it, and very faintly he could hear his blood beating, his secret blood, in the center of the city. Then he knew that whatever was expected of him was only just beginning.

“You then,” he said impatiently, pointing at the next one. “What church you belong to?” “Church of Christ,” the boy said in a falsetto to hide the truth. “Church of Christ!” Haze repeated. “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.”

“Listen, you people, I’m going to take the truth with me wherever I go,” Haze called. “I’m going to preach it to whoever’ll listen at whatever place. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two. Nothing matters but that Jesus was a liar.”

He wasn’t looking at the girl; he was staring at the black glasses and the curious scars that started somewhere behind them and ran down the blind man’s cheeks. “What I give you the other night,” she said, “was a looker indignation for what I seen you do. It was you give me the eye. You should have seen him, Papa,” she said, “looked me up and down.” “I’ve started my own church,” Haze said. “The Church Without Christ. I preach on the street.”

Haze had expected a secret welcome.

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

“Even if he don’t,” she said, “that’s all right. That’s howcome I can get him easy. I want him and you ought to help and then you could go on off like you want to.”

Echo of Enoch’s family, single parent trying to get rid of chid

He felt that he should have a woman, not for the sake of the pleasure in her, but to prove that he didn’t believe in sin since he practiced what was called it; but he had had enough of her. He wanted someone he could teach something to and he took it for granted that the blind man’s child, since she was so homely, would also be innocent.

The mouth had a look that might have been either holy or calculating, but there was a wildness in the eyes that suggested terror.

“Nobody with a good car needs to be justified,”

His jaw tightened and he entrenched himself behind it