A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

by Flannery O'Connor

At the deepest, most molten core of all of O’Connor’s work is her Catholicism, or, as she says, “the stinking mad shadow of Jesus.” Every story she wrote hinges upon her characters’ stain of original sin, and what grace they are sometimes allowed is hard won, fleeting, and almost always too late to make much of a difference in the end. Her violence, which is the most shocking and immediately apparent attribute of her work, is the violence of Catholicism, a religion in which in the central symbol—fondled on a rosary, hung over the bed, worn on a necklace at the throat—is a crucifix, an aestheticized rendering of the bloody, suffering, broken body of Jesus after he was nailed to a cross and left in the sun to die. She saw her Catholicism in harsh opposition to the wishy-washy moral relativism of the mostly agnostic or atheistic writers of her time.

The Christian novelist is distinguished from his pagan colleagues by recognizing sin as sin. According to his heritage he sees it not as sickness or an accident of environment, but as a responsible choice of offense against God which involves his eternal future.

One reason a great deal of our contemporary fiction is humorless is because so many of these writers are relativists and have to be continually justifying the actions of their characters on a sliding scale of values.

“Our salvation is a drama played out with the devil, a devil who is not simply generalized evil, but an evil intelligence determined on its own supremacy,”

“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!”

He and the grandmother discussed better times. The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now.

Daggum right

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

“That didn’t satisfy me none,” he said. “That was just something a woman in an office did, nothing but paper work and blood tests. What do they know about my blood? If they was to take my heart and cut it out,” he said, “they wouldn’t know a thing about me. It didn’t satisfy me at all.” “It satisfied the law,” the old woman said sharply. “The law,” Mr. Shiftlet said and spit. “It’s the law that don’t satisfy me.”

All those children were what did her mother in—eight of them: two born dead, one died the first year, one crushed under a mowing machine. Her mother had got deader with every one of them. And all of it for what? Because she hadn’t known any better. Pure ignorance. The purest of downright ignorance!

“How you know I never saw a nigger when I lived there before?” Nelson asked. “I probably saw a lot of niggers.” “If you seen one you didn’t know what he was,” Mr. Head said, completely exasperated. “A six-month-old child don’t know a nigger from anybody else.”

The group proceeded up the rest of the aisle and out of the car. Mr. Head’s grip on Nelson’s arm loosened. “What was that?” he asked. “A man,” the boy said and gave him an indignant look as if he were tired of having his intelligence insulted. “What kind of a man?” Mr. Head persisted, his voice expressionless. “A fat man,” Nelson said. He was beginning to feel that he had better be cautious. “You don’t know what kind?” Mr. Head said in a final tone. “An old man,” the boy said and had a sudden foreboding that he was not going to enjoy the day. “That was a nigger,” Mr. Head said and sat back. Nelson jumped up on the seat and stood looking backward to the end of the car but the Negro had gone. “I’d of thought you’d know a nigger since you seen so many when you was in the city on your first visit,” Mr. Head continued. “That’s his first nigger,” he said to the man across the aisle. The boy slid down into the seat. “You said they were black,” he said in an angry voice. “You never said they were tan. How do you expect me to know anything when you don’t tell me right?” “You’re just ignorant is all,” Mr. Head said

Then Mr. Head explained the sewer system, how the entire city was underlined with it, how it contained all the drainage and was full of rats and how a man could slide into it and be sucked along down endless pitchblack tunnels. At any minute any man in the city might be sucked into the sewer and never heard from again. He described it so well that Nelson was for some seconds shaken. He connected the sewer passages with the entrance to hell and understood for the first time how the world was put together in its lower parts.

Then he said, “Yes, but you can stay away from the holes,”

Mr. Head stood very still and felt the action of mercy touch him again but this time he knew that there were no words in the world that could name it. He understood that it grew out of agony, which is not denied to any man and which is given in strange ways to children. He understood it was all a man could carry into death to give his Maker and he suddenly burned with shame that he had so little of it to take with him.

He had never thought himself a great sinner before but he saw now that his true depravity had been hidden from him lest it cause him despair. He realized that he was forgiven for sins from the beginning of time, when he had conceived in his own heart the sin of Adam, until the present, when he had denied poor Nelson. He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own, and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise. Nelson, composing his expression under the shadow of his hat brim, watched him with a mixture of fatigue and suspicion, but as the train glided past them and disappeared like a frightened serpent into the woods, even his face lightened and he muttered, “I’m glad I’ve went once, but I’ll never go back again!”

“Every day I say a prayer of thanksgiving,” Mrs. Cope said. “Think of all we have. Lord,” she said and sighed, “we have everything,” and she looked around at her rich pastures and hills heavy with timber and shook her head as if it might all be a burden she was trying to shake off her back. Mrs. Pritchard studied the woods. “All I got is four abscess teeth,” she remarked. “Well, be thankful you don’t have five,” Mrs. Cope snapped and threw back a clump of grass. “We might all be destroyed by a hurricane. I can always find something to be thankful for.”