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him on the inside too.” In “The Artificial Nigger,” Mr. Head’s ten-year-old nephew Nelson has a “face very much the same shape as the old man’s.” Calhoun is horrified in “The Partridge Festival” when his aunt Bessie reminds him, “You look very like Father.”
    The affinity between Ed O’Connor and his daughter was certainly “on the inside too.” His pride in her could amount to infatuation. From 1927 until 1931, he included a separate listing for “Miss Mary Flannery O’Connor” in the
Savannah City Directory,
an unusual, whimsical gesture for a preschool child. Another fond touch shows up in a 1936 diocesan bulletin, “Roll of the Female Orphanage Society,” crediting Mary Flannery O’Connor as a contributor rather than her parents. A coconspirator in her world of childhood fantasy, wishing sometimes to be a writer himself, he slipped her notes signed “King of Siam.” In their games, she dubbed herself “Lord Flannery O’Connor.” She would hide little poems or drawings under his breakfast plate, or tuck them into his napkin for him to discover when he sat down at the kitchen table. He liked to fold up these tokens of affection, stick them in his wallet, and show them off to friends during the day.
    Her relationship with her mother was just as intimate, though more fraught. Regina told a friend of having to spank her six-year-old daughter to make her wear hose and a dress for her first piano recital. A cartoon that O’Connor drew when she was nine years old shows a child walking with her father and mother. In a balloon coming from the mother’s mouth are the words: “Hold your head up, Mary Flannery, and you are just as bad, Ed.” To which the girl, dragging along, snidely replies, “I was readin where someone died of holding up their head.” As a family friend summed up the difference in attitude of the parents, “Ed would not have put the kind of pressure on her that Regina did. He liked her just as she was.” Regina’s devotion to her daughter often took the form of trying, unsuccessfully, to mold her into the perfect Southern-style little girl.
    Yet there is no evidence that O’Connor’s childhood was troubled. As far as pressuring went, she was quite capable of digging in her heels. Her self-confidence was clear in her bold act of calling her parents by their first names — they were “Regina” and “Ed” to her from early on. They were also her first audience. When the O’Connors went out for the evening, their little daughter, in the care of the babysitter, would write letters, or make drawings, to surprise them. One of these was done on a piece of white cardboard bent in half, with a red silk cord threaded through two holes at the fold. On one side, she traced her mother’s initials “R.C.O’C.,” pasting a cutout drawing, childishly hand-colored, of a pretty little girl on a bridge, watching ducks swimming in the stream below. On the flip side, for her father, “E.F.O’C.,” she glued an illustration of an old clockmaker, peering intently through wire-rim glasses, tinkering at his worktable.
    A N EVENTFUL YEAR in Mary Flannery’s life was 1931. Not only had she been filmed by Pathe News, but she took her first steps into an ever-so-slightly larger world by entering the first grade at St. Vincent’s Grammar School for Girls. This parochial school was housed in the Gerard mansion, an early-nineteenth-century, three-story converted private home, with an iron lattice balcony across its second floor, and a low iron picket fence. Though St. Vincent’s was located a mere forty yards from the O’Connors’ door, each morning the child would make the brief walk to the front gate holding her mother’s hand, taking part in a ritual in which, as one student recalls, “All the mothers walked the little girls to school.”
    Outside the stone walls of the elegant box-shaped school, with its eaves and pillared portico, Savannah, like much of America, was coping with