A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

by Flannery O'Connor

Her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.

Close to his foot the tail of a light-colored dog moved up and down between two floor boards as he scratched his back on the underside of the house. Bevel jumped on it but the hound was experienced and had already withdrawn when his feet hit the spot.

It occurred to him that he was lucky this time that they had found Mrs. Connin who would take you away for the day instead of an ordinary sitter who only sat where you lived or went to the park. You found out more when you left where you lived.

While he preached, Bevel’s eyes followed drowsily the slow circles of two silent birds revolving high in the air. Across the river there was a low red and gold grove of sassafras with hills of dark blue trees behind it and an occasional pine jutting over the skyline. Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.

The grin had already disappeared from his face. He had the sudden feeling that this was not a joke. Where he lived everything was a joke. From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke.

She didn’t like to admit it about her own kin, least about her own brother, but there he was—good for absolutely nothing. “I seen it after five minutes of him,” she had told Bill Hill and Bill Hill, with no expression whatsoever, had said, “It taken me three.” It was mortifying to let that kind of a husband see you had that kind of a brother.

She didn’t turn on the electric light but let the darkness collect and make the room smaller and more private. At regular intervals a light crossed the open window and threw shadows on the wall. She stopped and stood looking out over the dark slopes, past where the pond glinted silver, past the wall of woods to the speckled sky where a long finger of light was revolving up and around and away, searching the air as if it were hunting for the lost sun. It was the beacon light from the fair.

“The day is going to come,” Mr. Head prophesied, “when you’ll find you ain’t as smart as you think you are.”

The man across the aisle had left and there was no one near for Mr. Head to hold a conversation with so he looked out the window, through his own reflection, and read aloud the names of the buildings they were passing. “The Dixie Chemical Corp!” he announced. “Southern Maid Flour! Dixie Doors! Southern Belle Cotton Products! Patty’s Peanut Butter! Southern Mammy Cane Syrup!”

“Listen,” the big boy said, sitting down quietly in the water with the little one still moored to his shoulders, “it don’t belong to nobody.” “It’s ours,” the little boy said.

Probably My favorite story: A Circle in the Fire

The General didn’t give two slaps for her graduation but he never doubted he would live for it. Living had got to be such a habit with him that he couldn’t conceive of any other condition.

The graduates in their heavy robes looked as if the last beads of ignorance were being sweated out of them.

Having attended my own Southern graduation (and an even hotter wedding), this made me laugh

Her name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her legal name was Hulga.

“I don’t want to go to college. I want to devote my life to Chrustian service.

The phonetic spelling of "Chrustian" never got old for me. I kept chuckling

“I don’t work on Saturday,” he said. “I like to walk in the woods and see what Mother Nature is wearing. O’er the hills and far away. Pic-nics and things. Couldn’t we go on a pic-nic tomorrow?

"what Mother Nature is wearing"

She had never been kissed before and she was pleased to discover that it was an unexceptional experience and all a matter of the mind’s control. Some people might enjoy drain water if they were told it was vodka.

“She better quit messin with that there priest,” Mr. Shortley said. “He don’t look smart,” Mrs. Shortley said, “—kind of foolish.” “I ain’t going to have the Pope of Rome tell me how to run no dairy,” Mr. Shortley said. “They ain’t Eye-talians, they’re Poles,” she said.

Eye-talians

But with foreigners on the place, with people who were all eyes and no understanding, who had come from a place continually fighting, where the religion had not been reformed—with this kind of people, you had to be on the lookout every minute. She thought there ought to be a law against them. There was no reason they couldn’t stay over there and take the places of some of the people who had been killed in their wars and butcherings.

A lot of these rants in this story felt #tooreal in the Trump era

“Times are changing,” she said. “Do you know what’s happening to this world? It’s swelling up. It’s getting so full of people that only the smart thrifty energetic ones are going to survive,”

“Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping. Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother.

I love that comparison

Whenever he thought of Mrs Shortley, he felt his heart go down like an old bucket into a dry well.