Flannery O’Connor would be 100 years old this March 25. For the O’Connor community of supporters—her trust, two museums, countless scholars and fans—her birthday centennial offers an opportunity to revisit the devout Catholic writer’s life and work. Both have been back in the public eye in the last decade due to nationally distributed feature and documentary films, controversial articles in national magazines and countless scholarly books and conferences.
One wonders: If the “red wolf” of lupus had not ended Flannery O’Connor’s life at age 39, what would the author be writing about in 2025? What might she think of what was being written about her?
I was fortunate to co-write and direct one of the film projects with the O’Connor scholar Mark Bosco, S.J., the documentary “Flannery” (2021) with voiceover by the multi-talented Mary Steenburgen, distributed by WNET’s American Masters. I also served as a co-executive producer for Ethan Hawke’s soulful biopic “Wildcat” (2024), starring his daughter and inspiration Maya Hawke as Flannery O’Connor (and a fabulous Laura Linney playing O’Connor’s mother Regina).
All this interest has helped to level out the rising seas of “cancel culture” around O’Connor after an article questioning the appearance of racism in her stories and letters was published in the New Yorker in 2020 (the George Floyd cover issue), resulting in O’Connor’s name being removed from a residence hall at Loyola University Maryland.
I suspect that O’Connor would be delighted to see how a packed audience came out recently on a Sunday afternoon in Savannah to listen to a panel set up by the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Museum to discuss “Flannery O’Connor: Faith, Race and Disability.” The panel was held at the historic Beach Institute, an African-American Cultural Center founded in 1865 as a school and educational association for “newly freed blacks” that continues to support art galleries and education around Black culture.
The respected O’Connor scholars Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Father Bosco were joined by writer/scholar, Gullah descendant and Savannah native Patricia Ann West to discuss these topics that continue to define much of the debate surrounding O’Connor studies.
O’Connor will be remembered first for her distinctive story crafting, her Catholic literary understanding of the pain of the cross and the memorable southern characters who run afoul of each other. Those characters often display racist or classist attitudes and nihilistic, religious characteristics: Who can forget the overbearing Grandmother and the murderous Misfit in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” or the arrogant, wooden-legged Hulga (Joy) Hopewell and the leg-stealing Bible salesman Manley Pointer in “Good Country People”? Or the resentful, college-educated Julian Chestny and his vain, simple-minded mother who gives a nickel to a Black child whose mother is wearing the same hat as Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”?
In every O’Connor story like this, outrageous moments of comedy also occur—Why did Joy change her name to Hulga?—and the audience is left to wonder about the divine lessons of what they just witnessed. The stories and the research around them continue to raise the questions: To what degree did O’Connor’s own encounters with racism and racial divides influence her work? How much do we still have to learn about her relationships with Black people and culture?
Professor West described how her O’Connor work developed after listening to a panel on race and O’Connor that did not include any scholars of color on it. Her research is focused on the Black workers who supported the O’Connor family at both their Savannah residence and Andalusia, the dairy farm in Milledgeville, Ga., where O’Connor spent her final years. West said that she took the “Sankofa” approach to researching O’Connor’s family heritage, the “Get on Back There and Fetch It” trajectory of inquiry for uncovering Black histories that were buried or untold, some of which she found on Ancestry.com instead of preserved inside traditional archives.
West identified Emma Jackson, a house servant and O’Connor’s nursemaid who lived in the basement of the Savannah house, and other unidentified workers who held the infant O’Connor in their arms in early family photographs. She referenced O’Connor farm workers who earned military awards in World War II, and—most shocking to me—West reported that Regina Cline O’Connor’s father was one of the founding board members of Georgia’s first Black college,the Colored Industrial School of Savannah, now Savannah State University, where West taught. Why was this news so surprising to me and the audience?
Regina, Flannery’s mother, has long held a notorious position in literary history as the main model for the racist mothers in O’Connor’s fiction. The widowed Regina solely oversaw Andalusia, the dairy farm that provided the income and housing for herself and her daughter. The fact that Regina’s father—Flannery’s grandfather—may have helped to start the first HBCU in Georgia raises a new perspective about the ideological stance around race within her mother’s family.
This discovery does not, of course, preclude the fact that Regina may have been as racist as some of her fictional depictions (although family friends in our PBS documentary challenge this assertion), but this little-known detail about her father adds more complexity to the stories of the O’Connor family and their relations with and respect for their domestic, farm and dairy workers—their Georgian neighbors.
There has long been controversy surrounding O’Connor’s letters and a debate over the sincerity of her politically incorrect (to say the least) statements to best friend, radical playwright and civil rights activist Maryat Lee (“I don’t like Negroes,” O’Connor once wrote. “They all give me a pain and the more of them I see the less and less I like them.”) Because of Lee’s respect for James Baldwin, her background in Harlem and her close friendship with O’Connor, I fall into the camp of believing that O’Connor was being painfully sarcastic in these letters to one of her closest friends. She deconstructively—and inappropriately—assumes a racist persona, intentionally echoing the oppressive voices around her (as in her fiction), but not, as others have argued, obviously revealing an O’Connor family inclination toward racism.
Regardless of where you fall in this debate about O’Connor’s white privilege and her self-awareness of it, you should read her writing, the abundant scholarship around her, and decide for yourself.
Returning to the question I proposed above: What might Flannery O’Connor be writing about the events of today? With apologies for my boldness—after years of studying her biography, her fiction, her letters and her love of the daily news, I have a few guesses.
On the matter of Pope Francis’s health, O’Connor would be praying for him every day. With regard to the 2025 Jubilee Year, O’Connor would be researching Old Testament history and writing letters about the sounding of the shofar to announce a modern-day forgiving of debts, a freeing of all slaves and returning of property and earth to its original owner—God. On the subject of American anti-immigrant sentiment, she would be directing readers to her 1955 novella, “The Displaced Person.”
As for the drastic reduction of USAID support for Catholic charities worldwide under the Trump administration, O’Connor would be pleading with us to write our senators, representatives and news outlets to make our opinion known. Responding to the D.E.I. and L.G.B.T. initiatives that have come under fire in recent months, she would perhaps recommend her first published story from 1946, “The Geranium.” Then she would refer you to her 1955 tale, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” and finally, she may ask that you finish up with her last story, written as she was dying in her hospital bed in 1965: “Revelation.”
I am personally delighted that researchers continue to share new discoveries, producers keep working to adapt her stories for the stage and screen, wonderful children’s books and songs are written, thoughtful museum exhibitions are happening, and a worldwide audience of literary and religious supporters continue to challenge and re-inform our understanding of Flannery O’Connor’s story-filled life in the south.
Happy centennial indeed, Ms. O’Connor!
