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Flannery O'Connor: In Celebration of Genius

My mentor in that English Department, the late C. Hugh Holman, told me about taking Katherine Anne Porter to Andalusia. After they had seen peacocks and other poultry and were resting with cool drinks indoors, Porter asked if there were never any problems with marauding dogs. O'Connor drew a drapery aside and from behind it lifted a leaning--rifle or shotgun. She sighted down the barrel through the window glass. "Not any more," she allegedly said, and then replaced the gun. Later Hugh drove a silent Porter quite a long way from the farmhouse while she stared blankly through the windshield, at last turning to say to him with a sigh, "That woman scares me to death."

Was this story true? Apocryphal? In The Habit of Being I find only that in March of 1958 Porter came with the Gossets and "two professors from North Carolina."

Perhaps he told me because he sensed that in some ways Flannery O'Connor scared me to death as well.

--Doris Betts, "Talking to Flannery O'Connor" in Flannery O'Connor: In Celebration of Genius edited by Sarah Gordon(University of South Carolina Press, 2010)

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Hattaras Journal

As I sat in my darkened house and listened to the wind, it was difficult not to think of those dire predictions. Yet realistically I could conjure up no cause for great alarm. Despite the draftiness of my house, it has withstood enough storms to acquire an atmosphere of assorted personal histories; it is the kind of old, musty dwelling that would serve as a good home for ghosts. Its very longevity was testimony to its sturdiness, I decided, as the squeak of the damper again sent prickles up my spine. I briefly considered walking out to the beach to peek over the dunes at the surf, but settled instead on passing the hours before bedtime by baking a cake.

In the amber light thrown off by two kerosene lamps, I leaded through a dog-eared cooked to a pecan upside-down cake that could easily be mixed by hand. Grabbing some unshelled pecans from a plastic bag under the sink, I began cracking them open, feeling cozy and snug. A particularly strong gust shook the house, and I thought of the shorebirds I had seen feeding on the beach a few days before, the earliest of the flocks that would soon come migrating through. In this kind of weather they would be huddled back in the marsh. The ghost crabs that had only begun to dig out of their winter burrows would have ducked back underground. Some animals were bound to die tonight, and if the ocean jumped the primary dune, most of the shrubs to the east of the highway would no doubt be choked by salk. I turned on the gas oven--for warmth as much as for the cake--an poured a yellow batter into a pan on top of a frothing mixture of butter, brown sugar, and nuts.

--Jan DeBlieu, Hattaras Journal (John F. Blair, Publisher, 1998)

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A Book of Minutes Even in the winter, green. It's why
we call  you live.
That or the way
gray mosses stay,
amidst your leaves, their own demise.
What human cries,
old man, have you
been witness to?
You're not talking, though. Just silence
and through your dense
knotted limbs, a
revenant wind.

-Cathy Smith Bowers, from A Book of Minutes (Iris Press, 2004)

 

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Tales from a Free-Range ChildhoodBeing the firstborn child in our household and the first grandson in Mama's entire extended family, I experienced early confusion about exactly what my name was supposed to be. When you are a child, you do not learn your name by reading it on your birth certificate. No, you infer your intended label by the repeated observation of what you happen to be called by those adults (or available children) whom you happen to trust.

According to this process, I soon determined that my given name was Baby! After all, that was the constant oral label placed upon me by Mama, Daddy, and even my trustworthy grandmother. After all, I was the first (in our family) baby.

In case anyone without this experience wonders, it is important to know that Baby is not a bad name. No, it is in fact a very good name. When your name is Baby, you get to do exactly whatever you want to do! It was spoiling and wonderful!

I got along very well being the singular family Baby for nearly three years. But when the unanticipated arrival of my little brother interfered with the established order of things, even my name changed. Suddenly, everyone started calling me Donald. And my old, dear name, Baby, went to my uninvited (by me) little brother.

People came to see him in droves. Their assessment was always the same: "Look at that beautiful baby! He is so gorgeous!" My disgust was profound.

--Donald Davis, Tales from a Free-Range Childhood (John F. Blair, 2011)

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Bastard Out of CarolinaIn August the revival tent went up about half a mile from Aunt Ruth's house on the other side of White Horse Road. Some evenings while Travis and Ruth sat and talked quietly, I would walk up there on my own to site outside and listen. The preacher was a shouter. He'd rave and threaten, and it didn't seem he was ever going to get to the invocation. I sat in the dark, trying not to think about anything, especially not about Daddy Glen or Mama or how much of an exile I was beginning to feel. I kept thinking I saw my uncle Earle in the men who stood near the highway sharing a bottle in a paper sack, black-headed men with blasted, rough-hewn faces. Was it hatred or sorrow that made them look like that? their necks so stiff and their eyes so cold?

Did I look like that?

Would I look like that when I grew up?

I remembered Aunt Alma putting her big hands over my ears and turning my face to catch the light, saying, "Just as well you smart; you ain't never gonna be a beauty."

--Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina, 20th Anniversary Edition (Plume, 2012)

 

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The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories

It was the year after Mildred's first nervous breakdown, and Drayton, the great specialist in whose care she had been for some months, advised me to take her away from Washington until she recovered her health. As a busy man I couldn't spend the whole week out of town; but if we could find a place near enough--somewhere in Virginia! we both exclaimed, I remember--it would be easy for me to run down once a fortnight. The thought was with me when Harrison asked me to join him for a week's hunting on James River; and it was still in my mind, though less distinctly, on the evening when I stumbled alone, and for the first time, on Dare's Gift.

...From the warm red of its brick walls to the pure Colonial lines of its doorway, and its curing wings mantled in roses and ivy, the house stood there, splendid and solitary. The rose of darkened windows sucked in without giving back the last flare of daylight; the heavy cedars crowding thick up the short avenue did not stir as the wind blew from the river; and above the carved pineapple on the roof, a lonely bat was wheeling high against the red disc of the sun.

--Ellen Glasgow, "Dare's Gift" in The Signet Classic Book of Southern Short Stories, edited by Dorothy Abbott and Susan Koppelman (Signet, 2005)