Flannery Read Online Free PDF Page B

collars, swinging censers and reciting brief Latin responses at the Italianate marble high altar of the cathedral, or singing, as boy sopranos, at midnight mass.
    In such a regulated and meticulously organized world within a world, O’Connor found herself a misfit from the start. In an autobiographical sketch for a Magazine Writing course at Iowa, she remembered herself as “a pidgeo-ntoed, only-child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex” that did little to reassure her parents of their good fortune. Showing her irascibility at St. Vincent’s, she bragged of substituting “St. Cecilia” for “Rover” in third-grade composition exercises such as “Throw the ball to Rover.” A thinly disguised only child named “Mary Flemming” in a student story of O’Connor’s wears orthopedic “Tarso-Supernator-ProperBuilt shoes” and needs to “take toe exercises every night and remember to walk on the outsides of her feet.”
    This bravado that O’Connor adopts on the page when telling tales of her childhood was not always the tone of the earliest memories of her classmates. Rather, Mary Flannery was usually pegged as quiet, painfully shy, self-reliant but remote, the introvert on the sidelines whose cousin remembers her wearing “some sort of corrective shoes, she had a distinctive kind of loping walk.” On rare occasions when she went with other little girls to Broughton Street, the main shopping strip downtown, she clutched her pocketbook tightly in her hand. “If I took off with some of the other children to go through Colonial Cemetery, she’d stand on the side and watch,” a girlfriend remembers of their shortcuts. “She would not go through the cemetery, no way.” She was never seen at the playground two blocks from her home, though she did walk the eight or nine blocks to the movie theater, with a friend, and roller-skated around the block.
    The six-year-old girl was much more likely to be found upstairs, secluded, in her small, pine-floored corner bedroom, with one east window facing Katie Semmes’s home, and two rear windows looking down into the family’s walled backyard and the Charlton Lane service alley behind. In this hideaway, sparsely furnished with two single, matching, unpainted, pine beds — camp cots of a Sears, Roebuck catalog style — a little green doll’s bed, and a narrow closet full of clothes, many sewn for her by her mother, she kept the precious crayons and paper she preferred as gifts to candy and sweets. Removed from all the comings and goings downstairs, she spent most of her free time making drawings, usually of birds. As she later wrote of her sketches to her friend Betty Hester, “I suppose my father toted around some of my early productions. I drew — mostly chickens, beginning at the tail, the same chicken over and over, beginning at the tail.”
    Sometime during 1931, she picked up a pencil and blue crayon and traced a jumble of capital letters from the alphabet she had been learning onto the thickly lined, pulpy page of a school tablet — an E, a backward D, other shaky letters at odd angles, while a steadier adult hand modeled letters on the same page. Next to the scattered alphabet, she attempted the unfinished form of a face with large, round eyes and dark, pronounced pupils. When she turned the page over, she completed, much more surely, an instantly recognizable turkey with featherless crown and wattle, its feet planted on the ground, and a smiling child in a tall, square hat gleefully flying overhead. Cut in the shape of a two-inch square, just the right size for her father’s wallet, this joyful depiction of whimsical role reversal — grounded bird, soaring child — survives as her earliest cartoon.
    Taught that first year by Sister Mary Consuela, O’Connor earned decent grades. She did well in Reading, 93, but her overall average, 88, was brought down by her worst grade, 81, in Arithmetic, lowered even further to a 70