Poles and peafowls

I didn't totally "get" Flannery O'Connor until I read The Displaced Person. It's a longish short story, more of a novella really, that comes at the end of the collection published under the title A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories. O'Connor is firing on all cylinders in this story featuring her favorite theme: the strange and unpredictable nature of divine grace. Also showing up here is the incongruity of being Roman Catholic in the "Christ-haunted" Bible Belt South, another favorite theme born out of personal experience. She wrote about what she knew. The center of this particular fable is the stand-off between a shrewd widowed landowner, Mrs. McIntyre, and an old Catholic priest, who's prevailed on Mrs. McIntyre to take in a family of Polish emigrés to work her farm. O'Connor had a wicked sense of humor and a gift for writing dialogue that's sheer pleasure to read. This last is arguably the hardest thing for a fiction writer to master.

"But Mr. Guizac is a Pole, he's not a German," Mrs. McIntyre said.

"It ain't a great deal of difference in them two kinds," Mr. Shortley had explained.*

In the later years of her short life O'Connor raised peacocks at the family farm in Georgia. This contentious species shows up in The Displaced Person as a totem-like object of fascination for the old priest.

The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. "Christ will come like that!" he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood there, gaping.

Mrs. McIntyre's face assumed a set puritanical expression and she reddened. Christ in the conversation embarrassed her the way sex had her mother. "It is not my responsibility that Mr. Guizac has nowhere to go," she said. "I don't find myself responsible for all the extra people in the world."

The old man didn't seem to hear her. His attention was fixed on the cock who was taking minute steps backward, his head against the spread tail. "The Transfiguration," he murmured.

She had no idea what he was talking about. "Mr. Guizac didn't have to come here in the first place," she said, giving him a hard look.

The cock lowered his tail and began to pick grass.

"He didn't have to come in the first place," she repeated, emphasizing each word.

The old man smiled absently, "He came to redeem us," he said and blandly reached for her hand and shook it and said he must go.*

I don't want to spoil the pleasure of experiencing this story for yourself, but I'll just say that in the end Mr. Guizac, the displaced person, turns out to be an odd sort of Christ-figure and agent of grace. Or is he an agent of judgment? You'll have to decide. In an age of safe Christianity with the rough edges smoothed over, Flannery O'Connor's vision of grace and faith might be too shocking for polite company. I'm pretty sure she'd be ok with that.


*Excerpts from "The Displaced Person" as published in A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955)