I showed up at Flannery O’Connor’s childhood home in the middle of a crashing thunderstorm on a July evening. I was there to read from my novel, A Good Hard Look. Flannery O’Connor is a character in said novel, but this was my first visit to her Savannah home. A Good Hard Look covers the final years of Flannery’s life, when she lived on her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, so as much as I’d always wanted to see where she grew up—the place where Flannery became Flannery—I’d had no excuse until now.
I arrived at the house early, and was rewarded with a private tour. Flannery’s childhood home is a stately townhouse on one of Savannah’s famous green squares. Her parents, Regina and Edward, could never have afforded the mortgage; the home was owned, and lent to them, by a wealthy relative. And it was the fineness of this home that struck me first; I was accustomed to the slightly ramshackle beauty of Andalusia, Flannery’s farm. The delicate moldings that lined the ceiling, the hand-stitched lace covering Regina and Edward’s bed, the church bells that thrummed through the house at regular intervals—all of these were unexpected notes to add to my mental archive of Flannery O’Connor.
My favorite moment in the tour occurred in the writer’s bedroom, where she slept from birth until the age of thirteen. The tour guide—a veritable encyclopedia of Flannery facts, and an aspiring novelist himself—paused in front of the mantel, which was adorned with framed photographs of Flannery and her parents. He tapped his finger against a picture of Flannery as a three-year-old. I thought I was being cued to say how adorable she was, and began to put the appropriate words together. But he cut me off.
“A little after this point,” he said, “something happened to change this little girl into the Flannery we recognize. Between the ages of four and six, she started to call her parents Edward and Regina. She began to speak to everyone as if she were an adult. She called her teachers by their first names, and that got her into some trouble at school. Her parents allowed it, though. They were ever after Edward and Regina to her.”
I love this anecdote, because the obvious assumption would be that something sinister had happened to Flannery during that period to alter her, or force her to grow up too quickly. But, as the tour guide assured me, and as I’d learned from my own research, that simply wasn’t the case. Flannery had, on the whole, a happy childhood. She simply did away with the trappings of childhood as soon as possible. She became herself earlier than most of us do. The vision of a fierce five-year Flannery pleases me, but it also rings true. The true Flannery could never be denied, not even by childish impulses.
Downstairs, I paused in front of a glass cabinet, and was confronted again with the Flannery I had written about for so many years. A fine example of her nascent literary criticism was scrawled across a book called The Fairy Babies. The words read: “Not a very good book.” I couldn’t access the novel to check it out myself, but I don’t doubt that the young Flannery was correct. I stood and smiled at the image until the tour guide cleared his throat behind me.
The house is not large; only two bedrooms, the stately living room and dining room are open to the public. I had been to Andalusia the day before, and had both endured and enjoyed that visit with shaking hands—after all, I had lived on that terrain for the seven years it took to write my novel, and that house meant a great deal to me. I was able to experience Flannery’s childhood home differently; I took everything in from a place of calm and appreciation. This was where the fierce female writer, who would effect my life and countless others, took her first strides, and I was honored to stand on her ground.
Photo by Nicola Dove
is the author of the novels and . She received an MFA from New York University; she teaches fiction writing for Brooklyn College’s MFA program, New York University’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies and for Gotham Writers’ Workshop. She lives in New York City with her husband and two children.
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