“Andalusia, Home of Flannery O’Connor.”
So announces the small sign on Highway 441
just on the outskirts of Milledgeville.
More tasteful than one of Red Sammy’s billboards but just as
selling—selling, at least in part, the idea of home.
Throughout this past July, I found myself
thinking a lot about home since I was far from the place I give that
title. Co-directing the 2014 NEH Summer
Institute, “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor,” I had moved from Texas into a
temporary residence in Georgia College’s Bell Hall along with 20 other O’Connor
scholars gathered to study, discuss, and most of all think about the life and
work of the woman who called the white farm house a hundred or so yards off the
highway home.
Except she didn’t. She called it
“Andalusia.”
Brad Gooch’s biography of O’Connor reports
that O’Connor herself is responsible for the name, having learned by a chance
encounter while on a bus trip to Atlanta, that the property, then owned by her
uncle, Bernard Cline, and called Sorrel Farm for years had been called
“Andalusia” in the nineteenth century—a reference to a region of Southern
Spain. Something about the name led her
to lobby her mother to press her uncle about rechristening Sorrel Farm with the
name “Andalusia,” and he must have liked the idea since he did.
But why “Andalusia”? Was there something about the landscape that
brought Spain to her mind? I’d like to
think she knew the supposed derivation of the word from the Arabic Al-Andalus, itself derived from
“Vandalusia” or “Land of the Vandals”—a perfect setting for Powell in “A Circle
in the Fire” or Manley Pointer of “Good Country
People.” But these stories came after
the name change which itself came when O’Connor had no idea this rustic spot
would be her home for the last decade and more of her life.
So what did O’Connor see in this rural
Georgia tract?
When the onset of lupus mauled her just in
time for Christmas in 1950 and the decision was made for she and her mother to
leave their Milledgeville home on Greene Street and take up residence on the
farm, what did she see when she arrived?
An early letter to Robert and Sally Fitzgerald after the move records
not her own feelings but her mother’s:
“She is nuts about it out here, surrounded by the lowing herd and other
details,” she writes (Habit of Being 26). But what of her feelings?
In much of the fiction she wrote in her
front room of the house—a room where she intentionally turned her desk away
from the windows to avoid distraction—the Andalusia stand-ins are sites of
frustration, struggle, and violence.
Powell and his friends from the city set the woods on fire; Hulga has
her leg stolen; Mrs. Shortley dies and Mrs. McIntyre declines into invalidism;
Mrs. May is gored while Mrs. Greenleaf wallows in the dirt; Mary Fortune has
her brain beaten out against a rock.
As I wandered the grounds this past summer,
it couldn’t help but be personal for me.
Through many previous visits, I’ve marveled at O’Connor’s
resourcefulness in using this actual space as a canvas for her
imagination. But two years ago, my own
child, a junior at Harvard, was sent home by a debilitating illness, forced to
move back onto his upstairs room whose contents had shifted from Texas to
Cambridge. As he has struggled to
understand and deal with his illness, so he has struggled too with returning to
a place he assumed would never be more than a way station for holiday visits or
summer vacations—a temporary base from which to show his Harvard friends the terra incognita that is the Lone Star
State. But illness made it a bar-less
cell of indefinite duration.
In the famous photograph of O’Connor with
her crutches on the front steps of Andalusia, is she welcoming us or attempting
her escape? When she writes to Betty
Hester that, “there won’t be any biographies of me because … lives spent
between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy” (Habit of Being 290-91), is she being
merely amusing or finding a way to come to terms with her limited life? Would O’Connor, returning to Andalusia today,
find in the peacocks protected from predators in their wood and mesh bird
palace the most apt symbol of her own experience there?
To ask such questions, to see one’s own
experience in this landscape, does not, I believe—I hope—diminish it. Rather, it reminds us what we see touring
Andalusia is both a physical reality that offers a glimpse of Georgia’s—the
South’s, America’s—rural past, but also a complex mystery that is entered, as
surely as we enter the milking barn, through the doors of O’Connor’s
fiction. The crutches beside her desk,
her narrow bed and barrister bookcases:
these are the daily materials of one writer’s life but also the debris
left over from constructions of the imagination.
I will go to Andalusia again, to see it
again, to think about it again, to measure my own life against the shadow of
its past and present. I will take away
from Flannery O’Connor’s an awareness of both her and my physical existence and
an awareness that, along with her stories, she created from imagination and
dirt, vision and a white siding, a home of the mind for me.
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Image Courtesy of the Flannery O'Connor Collection, Georgia
College and State University, Ina Dillard Russell Library
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--Robert Donahoo is the co-editor of Flannery O'Connor in the Age
of Terrorism (U of Tennessee P) and co-director of the 2014 NEH Summer
Institute, "Reconsidering Flannery O'Connor." He has published
essays on O'Connor in a variety of journals and essay collections as well as
articles on the drama of Horton Foote, Mississippi novelist Larry Brown,
Tolstoy's novel Resurrection, and American cyperpunk fiction. A
past president of the Flannery O'Connor Society and editor of Cheers!,
the newsletter of the O'Connor Society, he is currently a Professor of English
at Sam Houston State University.
