Flannery O’Conner was one of my fave authors when I was in high school. I related so much to how she saw the South (I lived in a small, racist Arkansas town). And she really knew how to write. Here’s one of my favorite lines of hers: “Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own, but she was able to use other people’s in such a constructive way, she never felt the loss.” Ha.
But I digress, as is my way. This is a short excerpt from the hilariously dark story “Revelation” where Mrs. Turpin gets all tangled up trying to figure out the social pyramid . . . You can read the whole story (pdf) here.
And here’s the excerpt from the story I’ve been think about lately:
The gospel hymn playing was, "When I looked up and He looked down," and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally,"And wona these days I know I'll we-eara crown.
Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people's feet. Thewell-dressed lady had on red and grey suede shoes to match her dress.Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent -leather pumps. The ugly girl had on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them-exactly what you would have expected her to have on.
Sometimes at night when she couldn't go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn't have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, "There's only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white trash," what would she have said? "Please, Jesus,please," she would have said, "Just let me wait until there's another place available," and he would have said, "No, you have to go right now", and I have only those two places so make up your mind." She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, "All right, make me a nigger then-but that don't mean a trashy one." And he would have made her a near clean respectable Negro woman, herselfbut black.
Next to the child's mother was a redheaded youngish woman, readingone of the magazines and working a piece of chewing gum, hell for leather, as Claud would say. Mrs. Turpin could not see the woman's feet. She was not white trash, just common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them -- not above, just away from -- were the white-trash; then above them were the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to which she and Claud belonged, Above she and Claud were people witha lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the people with a lot of money were common and ought to be below she and Claud and some of the people who had good blood had lost their money and had to rent and then there some colored people who owned their homes and land as well. There was a colored dentist in town who had two red Lincoln’s and a swimming pool and a farm with registered whiteface cattle on it. Usually by the time she had fallen asleep all the classes of people were moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed in together in a boxcar, being ridden off to be put in a gas oven.