Flannery O'Connor's Georgia

Barbara McKenzie

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780820305189, 9780820305172
• eBook ISBN: 9780820346519
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

Succinct text from photographer Barbara McKenzie and a foreword by Robert Coles provide context for this moving collection of photographs of the middle Georgia Flannery O'Connor depicted in her fiction. Whether capturing highway signs proclaiming Christ or a restaurant five hundred yards up the road, the frenzied motions of persons seized by the Holy Spirit, or quiet folks, black and white, sitting on benches in town squares, these photographs portray strikingly and sympathetically the world O'Connor wrote about in her remarkable stories.

Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia

“The Georgia writer’s true country is not Georgia, but Georgia is an entrance to it for him”—Flannery O’Connor.

The Georgia countryside looks much the same to me now as it did almost twenty years ago when I first visited Milledgeville. There is less space between the towns, subdivisions have divided the farms, and franchised convenience stores have replaced the country grocery. But the landscape endures: the pitted, gullied red-clay banks, the graceful formality of a pecan grove contrasting with the dark line of pine trees at the horizon, brick chimneys standing as silent markers of vanished houses, signs nailed to trees advertising their province as Christ or a restaurant 500 yards up the road. At times the landscape plunges us into a darker agrarian past. At times the countryside oppresses. I think of John Wesley’s impetuous command in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”: “Let’s drive through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much.”

These used-car bodies appeared caught in a waterless cascade made strangely beautiful by the slanting sunlight and the surrounding foliage. They belonged to the violent broken landscape perceived by Tarwater in The Violent Bear It Away as he looks at the city in the indistinct light of dawn.

“The South blossoms with every kind of complication and contradiction,” Flannery O’Connor once told an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter. I was intrigued by the crossing of purposes and values my camera was recording, and I saw in these photographs a radical discontinuity of things that supported O’Connor’s recognition of the paradoxes of the modern South.

Sometimes, as I traveled through middle Georgia, the patched-together stores and filling stations of the countryside outdid their fictional counterparts.

A combination grocery store and gas station comprises Goat Town. After guests had toured the Governor’s Mansion and Milledgeville, Flannery O’Connor liked to take her Yankee visitors to Goat Town to show them “what the South was really like.”

Stone Mountain, grey and bald, rises on the horizon a few miles outside of Atlanta. You have to climb its granite sides or view the carving of the Confederate leaders from the cable car to comprehend its monumentality. Otherwise you might as well continue reading and, like John Wesley and June Star in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” ignore its presence entirely.

Toomsboro is a small town close to Milledgeville. With its empty stores and abandoned buildings, the town suits its name, which foreshadows the denouement of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” I was convinced that reality is at least as strange as fiction when I saw the name of the highway that connects the two towns.

“When I went to college twenty years ago, nobody mentioned any good Southern writers to me later than Joel Chandler Harris. … As far as I knew, the heroes of Hawthorne and Melville and James and Crane and Hemingway were balanced on the Southern...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia
• Footnote