Manley Pointer II: The Prince of the King of the Birds

I had forgotten to commemorate the occasion properly at the first of the month, but it’s been right at a year since we held our first peacock funeral, very nicely summed up here by Kay Powell for the Bitter Southerner.  It was rainy last January, too, and likely as cold.  Fresh off the first Sunday of my tenure as interim choir director for the First United Methodist Church, I led a rather rainy, squishy processional to the burial site and was deeply unprepared for the challenges in walking and singing while being out of shape.  Nevertheless, I was pleased that those in attendance were familiar with the first two verses and refrain of “I’ll Fly Away.”  Even the cadre of collegians from Mercer who braved the unfortunate weather were undaunted by the ways of their cousins from down the hill in Milledgeville. It was indeed a situation right out of an O’Connor story, and I wager she’d have had a chuckle or two at us had she been in attendance.

Since then, Manley Pointer II has taken up the place of his namesake and is proving to be as big of a hit with our guests. Manley II is young yet; I’ve seen him doing laps around the aviary, and I know now how the assessment of Flannery’s visitor so many years ago came about: “I bet that rascal could outrun a bus.” Joy/Hulga, older and no doubt well-versed in the ways of aviary life, tends to give him sidelong looks and is no doubt bemused at the ways of her new companion.  He has opened his tail once while I’ve been on duty at the farm; the feathers are short and his strut is a bit too exuberant to be called such. But the sight is remarkable nevertheless—no doubt practice for Spring and a new crop of feathers.

The prideful ways of the peacock are a frequent topic in Flannery’s prose, but I believe that the pride of a peacock is in equal share a projection of our pride and self-assurance onto the bird putting itself on display in its strut.  I think here of Father Flynn in “The Displaced Person,” who is so deeply in thrall to the display of feathers that divinity is made anew each time he sees them, when he clearly has a decent grasp of God’s nature if his discussions with the troubled Mrs. McIntyre are any indication. We relish the peacock’s confidence, even moreso if it’s a display by one so young and brash. In that spirit we at the farm are proud indeed of Manley II, and for the growth yet to come for him and for Andalusia in 2016.

Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Assistant, Man-About-Town, and Bon Vivant at Andalusia. He is no longer choir director at First United Methodist Church, but has his baton at the ready if duty calls once more.

  

New in 2016

Happy New Year to all of you from the staff at Andalusia. We’ve got all manner of new things on tap for 2016, some of which were in the most recent newsletter, which you can get by subscribing via the contact form at the bottom of the landing page for andalusiafarm.org. 2015 was a banner year indeed, and more is to come in 2016.  

First of all, we’re pleased to welcome a new Visitor Services Manager, Ross Sheppard, to the fold after the promotion of April Carlson to Assistant Director.  Milledgeville needs to keep the young and talented within its confines, and Ross’s return from a sojourn in Athens is a sign that one can indeed go home again.  A promotion to Bon Vivant may well be in the cards if he proves himself after the several years of training requisite of the position.  

Not as recent of an arrival but equally as exciting is that of Manley Pointer II, our new peacock in the aviary.  Almost exactly a year ago, Manley I succumbed to “January’s arctic blast,” as put by Kay Powell for the Bitter Southerner. Manley II is still a young fellow; those tailfeathers aren’t yet at their full complement. He will strut occasionally, no doubt practicing for springtime.  He joins Joy/Hulga, who is no doubt delighted to have some company.  

In terms of non-living additions, a new program space is in the backyard. The Nail House Deck now occupies the location of the storage building behind the house.  Long a casualty of a fallen tree, the Nail House gave way in the Fall to a proper outdoor stage that will no doubt be well-used when warm weather returns. Keep a sharp eye on our social media pages for these events in the coming months.

During the cooler months, however, the programming remains inside with the February Four Lecture Series. This year’s set will discuss Wise Blood during every Sunday afternoon in February and comes on the heels of last year’s very well-attended series. Those who were unable to attend in person did so in spirit via the podcast, and they will have that same chance this year.  These lectures are no doubt a good excuse to give another look at the novel, one that I haven’t revisited as often as I should have over the years.  So too, if you’ve not seen the film version of Wise Blood, copies of it are on offer here in the gift shop.  The film has grown on me over the years, as Brad Dourif’s image is the one that comes to mind when I think of Hazel Motes.  I am further fascinated by Macon as it looked in the early 1970s; one can actually rent out Haze’s apartment to this day in a house not far from Mercer University. 

There’s much to anticipate in the coming year.  Meeting all the Andalusia “pilgrims” as I like to call them remains a delight each time I come to the farm, and as much as we offer in programming, I find that the visitors keep this place fresh for me.  Even if I have to do a little “mission work” as far as Flannery’s fiction goes, welcoming these folks to the farm and to Milledgeville is the central delight that the special programs help to bring about. Thus, Happy New Year, and I’ll see you shortly out here on the farm. 

 Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Assistant and Bon Vivant at Andalusia Farm.  When not greeting visitors and consulting with peafowl on the important issues of the day, he can be found with still more museum visitors at the Old Capital Museum and Brown-Stetson-Sanford House.

Flannery Fandom

During my first visit to Andalusia last summer, one of the biggest surprises to me was the containers of dirt for sale in the gift shop. T-shirts, postcards, books—these I expected. Even the peacock feathers made sense. But dirt? I’m told that when they didn’t sell it, fans would dig it up themselves. Or try to steal signs, fauna, scraps of wood—any sort of material souvenir of O’Connor’s home has been fair game. What do we make of such weird fandom? Flannery O’Connor attracts serious scholars. The annual Flannery O’Connor and Other Southern Women Writers Conference reflects the scholarship that her work continues to elicit. A quick library database search returns nearly fifty peer-reviewed articles which have been published about her work in the past three years, and I can only imagine that in the next few years, the attention garnered by the newly available archives at Emory University will only cause this output to increase.

However, she also attracts serious fans—some scholars, but many not. It’s well known that artists including U2, Bruce Springsteen, and REM have cited her as an influence (and I have written elsewhere about her surprising influence on punk music). There are novels such as Ann Napolitano’s 2011 novel A Good Hard Look, which imagines O’Connor’s life in Milledgeville and her effect on her neighbors there, as well as Carlene Bauer’s 2013 novel Frances and Bernard, a fictional “what-might-have-been” account of her intense friendship with poet Robert Lowell. And then there’s the annual birthday parade at O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, Georgia. Every year, to commemorate her birthday in March, people assemble at Lafayette Square in Savannah in costume to parade, play music, and generally make a joyful noise in appreciation of O’Connor’s life and work.

There are people in minister’s hats and gorilla suits, in tribute to characters in Wise Blood; there are costumes with peacock themes; and there are plenty of people dressed as O’Connor herself, imitating her hairstyle, glasses, and the 1950s dresses so many of us know from her photographs.
I can only imagine how ridiculous O’Connor herself would have found such shenanigans. Even when she was alive, she had a wry attitude toward what she referred to as the “lunatic fringe” of her fandom. Complaining about a letter she had received asking for an autographed photo, O’Connor observed that “I feel that since I have now reached the lunatic fringe there is no place left for me to go.” 1

Although authors do come from everywhere, it’s tempting to think that artists emerging from Milledgeville are unlikely, I suppose. Visit a city, and every third barista has written a novel. Visit Milledgeville, and you see a cute college town: less hipster than Athens; less self-conscious, perhaps, than Oxford, Mississippi. There’s nothing unusual about Milledgeville water, and unlike (so many) other Southern writers, O’Connor is not known for her drinking—so, the argument that it’s something in the water of central Georgia that produced O’Connor is a hard sell. What Georgia does have is its dirt—even the Georgia Writers’ Association has an annual Red Clay Writers’ Conference. And
although it has become clichéd to speak of the centrality of place in Southern writing, I believe that O’Connor paid enough attention to it in her work—whether essays such as “The Regional Writer and His Country” or The Grotesque in Southern Fiction” or stories such as “The Displaced Person” or “A Circle in the Fire”—that it’s safe to say that the land occupied a certain amount of her writerly attention.

But enough to merit its commoditization? Perhaps. Fans of living authors will camp out for hours for a few minutes in the presence of their hero. To have your name articulated in speech and in an autograph implies an added layer of intimacy to that you already feel you have, from living with the novel or poem or song your hero has created. It feels like you’ve forged an even stronger connection with the novel or poem or song that you love. What, then, about the artists we can’t wait in line to see? That’s a big reason, I believe, that such superfandom occurs.

When we (and yes, I’ll admit “we” here, as I have been known to emulate O’Connor’s sense of style) dress up like O’Connor and her characters—or want dirt from Andalusia—I think that we’re trying to similarly forge more intimate connections to things we have strong emotional reactions to. It’s more complicated than “the things that we love”—no one just “loves” O’Connor’s work. We’re struck by it, challenged by it, and feel confused by it. So we keep returning to it.

We literary tourists want to inhabit the outer versions of the worlds we have built in our heads. We want to connect physically with the imaginations with which we’ve already connected. O’Connor herself understood the desire for souvenirs—she often sent her friends and admirers peacock feathers, whose symbolism represented her own values.2 I hope, then, that she would forgive our desire for dirt.

1. Apparently, parades of people in sweater sets and pearls or gorilla costumes were beyond even her own active imagination. 

2. If you haven’t read her essay “King of Birds” about her fascination with peacocks, go do so now. In fact, even if you have read it, go read it again. And then listen to REM’s song with the same title.

Monica Miller is the Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program and a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech. Her current work focuses on the figure of the ugly woman in southern literature.

Keeping Andalusia Beautiful

Fresh off a wildly successful 11th Annual Bluegrass Festival, the Executive Director of Keep Milledgeville-Baldwin Beautiful, takes to the blog this week to describe the efforts that his organization took to make the festival a minimal-waste event.  Thanks to KMBB, an event that drew nearly 600 people had a cumulative 4 bags of waste taken to the local landfill. Thanks Andy!

There are many things all people have in common, and of those, having a good time is a favorite. All across our planet people like to get together for food, music and all sorts of fellowship. Some rituals date back millennia, and new traditions are created everyday.

In planning a celebration, of any sort, people can focus on sustainability. Specifically, people can strive to reduce their impact on our planet by planning minimal waste events. The amount of fun doesn't have to be sacrificed to make an event more environmentally responsible. In fact, the fun can be continued afterwards in knowing that your impact on the earth was minimized.

Andalusia hosted its 11th annual Bluegrass Festival as a minimal waste event.  The food and beverage vendors used recyclable materials and Keep Milledgeville Baldwin Beautiful provided recycling bins for their disposal. Volunteers were on site to help facilitate. In addition to providing a family-friendly event featuring world-class musicians, hopefully this year's festival will inspire others planning events to consider more responsible waste management options.

So after banjos and mandolins are put away, we can whistle and hum those tunes in the months to come knowing that the fun had on the farm did not come with a hidden cost.

Hidden in the Corners

When people come into the "big house" here at Andalusia, their first stop isn't difficult to predict: the sign-in sheet and donation box (at least, if I have any influence to offer).  The second attraction is close by: Flannery's room. Cordoned off as it is, there are a few things of hers that are difficult to see; some are really hidden in plain sight.

The eye, upon first looking into Flannery's room, is drawn, of course, to the typewriter on the desk, located directly behind the wardrobe.  I admire anyone who can write the alphabet, much less enduring literature, while facing a closet.   There's a method to that madness, though: sunlight streams onto that desk over the course of the daylight hours thanks to the array of windows on the front wall of the room. That layout may be practical, but I imagine it no doubt helps one focus: facing the windows would have no doubt hindered the reflections necessary to find divine truth in Flannery's own life and those of her characters.

Several years ago, my predecessor in this space, Mark, catalogued Flannery's record collection here.  Flannery certainly loved her classical music.  She and I have high-church choral music in common.  The exception to all the classical is Souer Sourire, Jeanne Decker at her birth and the Singing Nun to Americans, who had an international hit in 1962 with "Dominique." "Sister Smile," as her stage name is translated, took her own life in 1985, citing severe financial difficulties. In order to reinvigorate her musical career and pay off some debts, Decker released a heavily synthesized, disco version of "Dominique" in 1982. This re-recording failed to gain traction.  I've no doubt Flannery would, had she lived to hear it, have offered up some trenchant commentary on why the new version of the old hit didn't serve its purpose.

The mantel has some intriguing pieces that are either hidden by the wardrobe in the middle of the room or are too small to be seen clearly from the doorway. A picture of Flannery from what appears to be her late teenage years and a pill bottle tell a story all too succinctly of her time in Milledgeville: school and then a return several years later due to lupus. There are books, too, of course: a series of paperback novels that aren't nearly as well-used as the Aquinas and Bible on the nightstand.

I hope you're inspired to linger a little while more at Flannery's doorway on your next visit to Andalusia; you'll likely spot something I've passed over or be reminded of a passage from your favorite story that has slipped back in the recesses of my memory.  We look forward to seeing you!

--Daniel Wilkinson's blog entries are sponsored by James Keller & Sons Marmalade, available where all fine jams and jellies are sold in 1862.  Keller & Sons: Only the Best for the Best Visitor Services Bon Vivants. 

A Cleaning Out Party

A recent Monday found me at Andalusia at an ungodly early hour to take stock of an upstairs room with my fellow staff members and a local moving company.  Needless to say, I did not envision that my unofficial title of Bon Vivant would entail profuse sweating and heavy lifting, but such is the price of a view of Andalusia and of Flannery that few have the privilege to get.  As with the cow barn, equipment shed, and other uncurated spaces (to use a $5 term from the museum studies crowd), the contents of that upstairs room were fascinating. 

Chairs and bedframes reminded us of the people who lived here before and after Flannery's time. Bank statements showed the real, business side of a farm that is too frequently remembered only for the outrageous fictional events that took place there: a prosthesis theft in "Good Country People" or an unfortunate goring in "Greenleaf."  Dishes and kitchenware brought back memories of the designs and color schemes of the previous century and made me wonder how people could drink coffee from something that pink and not be blinded. We certainly felt Regina O'Connor's presence as we found several bolts of fabric that would have allowed her to ply her seamstress talents.  

Beyond the furniture and other household goods up there, I found myself taken in even by their containers.  Copies of the Union-Recorder that protected the more fragile items told stories of a Milledgeville gone by in advertisements for Goldstein's on Wayne St., Belk's on Hancock St., and Georgia State College for Women.  Still other items were wrapped in announcements of weddings and funerals that took place at First United Methodist Church, then itself right across from the college on Hancock St.  Suitcases and valises in the mold of Manley Pointer's and the Grandmother's from "A Good Man His Hard to Find" awaited their arrival at the site of Flannery's next lecture.

Several days' worth of laughs came from an item from Kidd's Drug Store, which formerly occupied a corner of Hancock and Wayne Sts. downtown.  It was a cardboard fan clearly designed for the hot Sunday afternoons in church, when the ceiling fans and open windows didn't quite get the temperature cool enough to stand.  The little boy pictured upon it has a very pensive, almost troubled look about him, and he's taken to his evening prayers to assuage his worries. A highly unfortunately-located staple also leads someone not paying attention to believe this boy has further taken a cigarette to his makeshift altar.   I could only assume that taking communion with that kid must be a good time, indeed. 

A magazine from a local doctor proved as startling as the fan did hilarious.  This was no waiting room Time, but rather the manual for lupus medication.  We were barely a couple of weeks removed from the anniversary of her death; happening upon this book in one of many boxes proved a bit of a shock.  "The wolf" as Flannery called it is a mystery to me still; I regard it mainly in my mind as a scapegoat rather than a degenerative disease. 

To detail all of the items that came out of that upstairs room would be quite an undertaking, but one that would provide us and our visitors with a better understanding of the goings and comings here at the farm. However, I'm not sure I'd like a full accounting. Coming across an item of unknown purpose and provenance is always exciting, even if it's something as mundane as a horse collar or cardboard drugstore fan.

  

--Daniel Wilkinson is a Visitor Services Bon Vivant at Andalusia Farm where he sits on the porch and muses for this blog when not visiting with Andalusia's guests.    

Normalcy in Milledgeville, and a Word of Welcome

In my almost 10 years in Milledgeville, I can say with relative certainty that normalcy isn’t our strongest suit here. From our first days as the literal “wild west” of Georgia, the arrival of the first politicians, and the long service of Central State Hospital, the townspeople have seen a steady stream of Misfits. They could be outright charlatans, ill, or just plain eccentric. They could be a doctor, professor, politician, or have no job at all. Such characters are the charm of most any small Southern town, and Milledgeville has fortunately seen its share during its 200+ years. In her own characteristically sardonic way, Flannery herself said that she “attracted the lunatic fringe.” I am fortunate to be in such close proximity to these figures, and some may put even me in the Misfit ranks, though I’d like to point out that I tend to treat little old ladies—even cantankerous ones like the Grandmother from “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”—better than Flannery’s Misfit did.

Since 1879 and the opening of Georgia Military College (then Middle Georgia Military and Agricultural College), Milledgeville has rung in each Autumn by welcoming a new crop of students to its places of higher learning. Flannery, of course, was one of these students, coming onto the campus of Georgia State College for Women for the first time as a student at the Peabody School as a teenager and staying through the completion of a Bachelor’s degree. I think it’s fitting that, each year, our “normal” way of life resumes in this town by welcoming in hundreds of new students—complete strangers—who are still themselves figuring out who they are; they’re Misfits too, after their fashion. A mess of Misfits, at that: better than 1400, according to an unofficial accounting. Those first few weeks away from home are a wonderfully transformative time. As a teacher I invariably share in their enthusiasm. It’s Spring in the dog days of Summer: life returns to the historic district, and the town is alive once more with bright-eyed, eager young people and those who will educate them. The newcomers will learn the ropes of the town: the best places to eat, the best local music acts, the best spots to rest a while. The lucky ones, of course, end up becoming locals themselves eventually.

1400 complete strangers’ coming into one’s own backyard is an O’Connor sort of normal, very fit for someone who, in spite of her illness, welcomed all manner of visitors to her home. We’re proud to carry on that tradition. Indeed, the Flannery and Fashion exhibit on display right now has pictures of Katharine Anne Porter and other travelers to Andalusia. In that spirit, we here at Andalusia invite all the newcomers to our little slice of Milledgeville. Our front porch makes for a wonderful reading room, and the hiking trails and other outdoor activities can be a welcome respite from the rigors of academics. Get acquainted with not only Milledgeville’s most famous resident, but also her (and our) way of life.

-- Daniel Wilkinson, a Freshman himself in the above photo, is an Instructor of English at Georgia College and a Visitor Services Bon Vivant at Andalusia Farm. When not maintaining the Brown-Stetson-Sanford House for Georgia's Old Capital Museum, he can be found at the nearest trivia contest or rehearsing with the First United Methodist Church Choir and the Milledgeville Players. When not with the choirs and tourists, Daniel enjoys Southern literature, handwritten letters, good barbecue, and the Oxford comma.