Christine McCulloch, Glimpsing Andalusia in the O'Connor-Hester Letters; Southern Spaces

O'Connor's kept counsel, while suggesting a polite reserve in mixed company, is unleashed in her private correspondence — particularly when it comes to "the help." Regina employed at least two African American farmhands in addition to a housemaid, each of whom appear with some frequency in O'Connor's letters to Hester. She writes:

Later, O'Connnor snidely remarks: "So I don't know anymore — except that they are not ready to march on Washington" (28 Sept 1963). In these unguarded admissions, O'Connor's oft-indicted racism comes to the fore — itself, another consequence of "typical life in the dear old dirty Southland" (1 Sept 1963). As Susan Edmunds observes: "O'Connor's pointedly Christian responses to the civil rights movement are hard to reconcile with the running commentary in her letters concerning the African Americans who worked on her mother's farm. In these comic tales written to amuse her white correspondents, O'Connor shows no respect for privacy, cutting powers of judgment, and little evidence of charity."16 Although Edmunds' essay challenges those critics who "have taken Flannery O'Connor's fiction to task for its failure to endorse the historical struggle for integration and equality," she concedes that the author's integrationist stance is "imperfectly exemplified" in her "late stories and other writings of the period."17 Willie "Shot" Manson and Robert "Jack" Hill doubtless served as templates for O'Connor's uncomfortably interchangeable, grossly caricatured black characters — from Astor and Sulk in "The Displaced Person" to Randall and Morgan in "The Enduring Chill."

Nancy Marshall, Jack and Louise Hill's house, Andalusia,
Winter 2008.

The voyeur who enters the space of the O'Connor-Hester correspondence, uninvited, is thus confronted with the disconcerting questions that have plagued biographical criticism: "What are the ethics governing this encounter?" "What information is relevant?" "How do these letters bear upon the writer's work" and, in turn, "how does the writer's work bear upon her lived experience?" As Marshall Bruce Gentry says of Jean W. Cash's 2002 biography, Flannery O’Connor: A Life, let the conversation about the "links between Flannery's life and O'Connor's art" continue.18 It is my hope, in this essay, to have given Andalusia a renewed place at the center of that conversation.