Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is a Southern Gothic story about a selfish grandmother whose manipulative actions lead her family to encounter “The Misfit,” an escaped murderer. After a car crash, the Misfit and his cohorts kill the family, culminating in the grandmother’s spiritual epiphany before her death.
A good man is hard to find
Flannery O’Connor
Gothic Digital Series @ UFSC
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A good man is hard to find
(The Avon Book of Modern Writing, 1953)
THE grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her
connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s
mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his
chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the Journal. “Now look here,
Bailey,” she said, “see here, read this,” and she stood with one hand on her thin hip
and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. “Here this fellow that calls
himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you
read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my
children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my
conscience if I did.”
Bailey didn’t look up from his reading so she wheeled around then and faced the
children’s mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as
a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the
top like rabbit’s ears. She was sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a
jar. “The children have been to Florida before,” the old lady said. “You all ought to take
them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and
be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee.”
The children’s mother didn’t seem to hear her but the eight-year-old boy, John
Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, “If you don’t want to go to Florida, why
dontcha stay at home?” He and the little girl, June Star, were reading the funny papers
on the floor.
“She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day,” June Star said without raising
her yellow head.
“Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?” the
grandmother asked.
“I’d smack his face,” John Wesley said.
“She wouldn’t stay at home for a million bucks,” June Star said. “Afraid she’d miss
something. She has to go everywhere we go.”
“All right, Miss,” the grandmother said. “Just remember that the next time you
want me to curl your hair.”
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready to go. She
had her big black valise that looked like the head of a hippopotamus in one corner,
and underneath it she was hiding a basket with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn’t
intend for the cat to be left alone in the house for three days because he would miss
her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and
accidentally asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn’t like to arrive at a motel with a
cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star on either
side of her. Bailey and the children’s mother and the baby sat in front and they left
Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car at 55890. The grandmother
wrote this down because she thought it would be interesting to say how many miles
they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the
outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton gloves and
putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the back window. The
children’s mother still had on slacks and still had her head tied up in a green kerchief,
but the grandmother had on a navy blue straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets
on the brim and a navy blue dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and
cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a
purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing
her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither too hot nor
too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was fifty-five miles an hour
and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind billboards and small clumps of trees
and sped out after you before you had a chance to slow down. She pointed out
interesting details of the scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some
places came up to both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly
streaked with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on
the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them
sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone
back to sleep.
“Let’s go through Georgia fast so we won’t have to look at it much,” John Wesley
said.
“If I were a little boy,” said the grandmother, “I wouldn’t talk about my native state
that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has the hills.”
“Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground,” John Wesley said, “and Georgia is a
lousy state too.”
“You said it,” June Star said.
“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were
more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People
did right then. Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro
child standing in the door of a shack. “Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” she asked
and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.
“He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said.
“He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “Little niggers in the
country don’t have things like we do. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said.
The children exchanged comic books.
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