A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories

by Flannery O'Connor

Rufus was her baby brother who had just come back from the European Theater. He had come to live with her because Pitman where they were raised was not there any more. All the people who had lived at Pitman had had the good sense to leave it, either by dying or by moving to the city. She had married Bill B. Hill, a Florida man who sold Miracle Products, and had come to live in the city. If Pitman had still been there, Rufus would have been in Pitman. If one chicken had been left to walk across the road in Pitman, Rufus would have been there too to keep him company. 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 sat down and jumped quickly, feeling something under her. She caught her breath and then pulled the thing out: it was Hartley Gilfeet’s pistol. Nine inches of treacherous tin! He was a six-year-old boy who lived on the fifth floor. If he had been hers, she’d have worn him out so hard so many times he wouldn’t know how to leave his mess on a public stair. She could have fallen down those stairs as easy as not and ruined herself! But his stupid mother wasn’t going to do anything to him even if she told her. All she did was scream at him and tell people how smart he was. “Little Mister Good Fortune!” she called him. “All his poor daddy left me!” His daddy had said on his death bed, “There’s nothing but him I ever given you,” and she had said, “Rodman, you given fortune!” and so she called him Little Mister Good Fortune. “I’d wear the seat of his good fortune out!” Ruby muttered.

Mount St. Scholastica was a red brick house set back in a garden in the center of town. There was a filling station on one side of it and a firehouse on the other. It had a high black grille-work fence around it and narrow bricked walks between old trees and japonica bushes that were heavy with blooms. A big moonfaced nun came bustling to the door to let them in and embraced her mother and would have done the same to her but that she stuck out her hand and preserved a frigid frown, looking just past the sister’s shoes at the wainscoting. They had a tendency to kiss even homely children, but the nun shook her hand vigorously and even cracked her knuckles a little and said they must come to the chapel, that benediction was just beginning. You put your foot in their door and they got you praying, the child thought as they hurried down the polished corridor.

The child knelt down between her mother and the nun and they were well into the “Tantum Ergo” before her ugly thoughts stopped and she began to realize that she was in the presence of God. Hep me not to be so mean, she began mechanically. Hep me not to give her so much sass. Hep me not to talk like I do. Her mind began to get quiet and then empty but when the priest raised the monstrance with the Host shining ivory-colored in the center of it, she was thinking of the tent at the fair that had the freak in it. The freak was saying, “I don’t dispute hit. This is the way He wanted me to be.”

All over the car people were beginning to get up and take their luggage off the overhead racks. Women were putting on their coats and hats. The conductor stuck his head in the car and snarled, “Firstopppppmry,” and Nelson lunged out of his sitting position, trembling. Mr. Head pushed him down by the shoulder. “Keep your seat,” he said in dignified tones. “The first stop is on the edge of town. The second stop is at the main railroad station.” He had come by this knowledge on his first trip when he had got off at the first stop and had had to pay a man fifteen cents to take him into the heart of town. Nelson sat back down, very pale. For the first time in his life, he understood that his grandfather was indispensable to him.

At the second corner, Mr. Head turned and looked behind him at the station they had left, a putty-colored terminal with a concrete dome on top. He thought that if he could keep the dome always in sight, he would be able to get back in the afternoon to catch the train again. As they walked along, Nelson began to distinguish details and take note of the store windows, jammed with every kind of equipment—hardware, drygoods, chicken feed, liquor. They passed one that Mr. Head called his particular attention to, where you walked in and sat on a chair with your feet upon two rests and let a Negro polish your shoes. They walked slowly and stopped and stood at the entrances so he could see what went on in each place but they did not go into any of them. Mr. Head was determined not to go into any city store because, on his first trip here, he had got lost in a large one and had found his way out only after many people had insulted him.

Mr. Head’s ticket said, “You weigh 120 pounds. You are upright and brave and all your friends admire you.” He put the ticket in his pocket, surprised that the machine should have got his character correct but his weight wrong, for he had weighed on a grain scale not long before and knew he weighed 110. Nelson’s ticket said, “You weigh 98 pounds. You have a great destiny ahead of you but beware of dark women.” Nelson did not know any women and he weighed only 68 pounds but Mr. Head pointed out that the machine had probably printed the number upsidedown, meaning the 9 for a 6.

By now the sun was well forward in the sky. The odor of dinners cooking drifted out to them. The Negroes were all at their doors to see them pass. “Whyn’t you ast one of these niggers the way?” Nelson said. “You got us lost.” “This is where you were born,” Mr. Head said. “You can ast one yourself if you want to.” Nelson was afraid of the colored men and he didn’t want to be laughed at by the colored children. Up ahead he saw a large colored woman leaning in a doorway that opened onto the sidewalk. Her hair stood straight out from her head for about four inches all around and she was resting on bare brown feet that turned pink at the sides. She had on a pink dress that showed her exact shape. As they came abreast of her, she lazily lifted one hand to her head and her fingers disappeared into her hair. Nelson stopped. He felt his breath drawn up by the woman’s dark eyes. “How do you get back to town?” he said in a voice that did not sound like his own. After a minute she said, “You in town now,” in a rich low tone that made Nelson feel as if a cool spray had been turned on him. “How do you get back to the train?” he said in the same reedlike voice. “You can catch you a car,” she said. He understood she was making fun of him but he was too paralyzed even to scowl.

He suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before. He felt as if he were reeling down through a pitchblack tunnel. “You can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie,” she said. Nelson would have collapsed at her feet if Mr. Head had not pulled him roughly away. “You act like you don’t have any sense!” the old man growled.

He squatted down and put his mouth to the nozzle and turned a cold stream of water into his throat. Then he called out in the high desperate voice, “Come on and getcher some water!” This time the child stared through him for nearly sixty seconds. Mr. Head got up and walked on as if he had drunk poison. Nelson, though he had not had water since some he had drunk out of a paper cup on the train, passed by the spigot, disdaining to drink where his grandfather had. When Mr. Head realized this, he lost all hope. His face in the waning afternoon light looked ravaged and abandoned. He could feel the boy’s steady hate, traveling at an even pace behind him and he knew that (if by some miracle they escaped being murdered in the city) it would continue just that way for the rest of his life. He knew that now he was wandering into a black strange place where nothing was like it had ever been before, along old age without respect and an end that would be welcome because it would be the end.