A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
AND OTHER STORIES
by Flannery O'Connor All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work
should be mailed to: Copyrights and Permissions Department, Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, Orlando, Florida 32887.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
O'Connor, Flannery.
A good man is hard to find and other stories.
(A Harvest/HBJ book)
CONTENTS: A good man is hard to find. -- The river. -- The life you save may be your own. -- A stroke of good fortune, [etc.]
I. Title.
[PZ4.0183G09] [PS3565-C57] 813'.5'4 77-3306
ISBN 0-15-636465-4
Printed in the United States of America
FOR SALLY AND ROBERT FITZGERALD CONTENTS
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
THE RIVER
THE LIFE YOU SAVE MAY BE YOUR OWN
A STROKE OF GOOD FORTUNE
A TEMPLE OF THE HOLY GHOST
THE ARTIFICIAL NIGGER
A CIRCLE IN THE FIRE
A LATE ENCOUNTER WITH THE ENEMY
GOOD COUNTRY PEOPLE
THE DISPLACED PERSON --------------------------
A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND
--------------------------
THE GRANDMOTHER didn't want to go to Florida. She wanted to
visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at
every chance to change Bailey's mind. Bailey was the son she lived with,
her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent
over the orange sports section of the _Journal_. "Now look here, Bailey,"
she said, "see here, read this," and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. "Here this fellow
that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed
toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just
you read it. I wouldn't take my children in any direction with a criminal
like that aloose in it. I couldn't answer to my conscience if I did."
Bailey didn't look up from his reading so she wheeled around then
and faced the children's mother, a young woman in slacks, whose face
was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green
head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit's ears. She was
sitting on the sofa, feeding the baby his apricots out of a jar. "The
children have been to Florida before," the old lady said. "You all ought to
take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts
of the world and be broad. They never have been to east Tennessee."
The children's mother didn't seem to hear her but the eight-year-old
boy, John Wesley, a stocky child with glasses, said, "If you don't want to
go to Florida, why dontcha stay at home?" He and the little girl, June Star,
were reading the funny papers on the floor.
"She wouldn't stay at home to be queen for a day," June Star said
without raising her yellow head.
"Yes and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.
"I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.
"She wouldn't stay at home for a million bucks," June Star said.
"Afraid she'd miss something. She has to go everywhere we go."
"All right, Miss," the grandmother said. "Just remember that the next
time you want me to curl your hair."
June Star said her hair was naturally curly.
The next morning the grandmother was the first one in the car, ready
to go. She had her big black valise that looked like the head of a
hippopotamus in one corner, and underneath it she was hiding a basket
with Pitty Sing, the cat, in it. She didn't intend for the cat to be left alone
in the house for three days because he would miss her too much and she
was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally
asphyxiate himself. Her son, Bailey, didn't like to arrive at a motel with a
cat.
She sat in the middle of the back seat with John Wesley and June Star
on either side of her. Bailey and the children's mother and the baby sat in
front and they left Atlanta at eight forty-five with the mileage on the car
at 55890. The grandmother wrote this down because she thought it would
be interesting to say how many miles they had been when they got back. It took them twenty minutes to reach the outskirts of the city.
The old lady settled herself comfortably, removing her white cotton
gloves and putting them up with her purse on the shelf in front of the
back window. The children's mother still had on slacks and still had her
head tied up in a green kerchief, but the grandmother had on a navy blue
straw sailor hat with a bunch of white violets on the brim and a navy blue
dress with a small white dot in the print. Her collars and cuffs were white
organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple
spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone
seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.
She said she thought it was going to be a good day for driving, neither
too hot nor too cold, and she cautioned Bailey that the speed limit was
fifty-five miles an hour and that the patrolmen hid themselves behind
billboards and small clumps of trees and sped out after you before you
had a chance to slow down. She pointed out interesting details of the
scenery: Stone Mountain; the blue granite that in some places came up to
both sides of the highway; the brilliant red clay banks slightly streaked
with purple; and the various crops that made rows of green lace-work on
the ground. The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of
them sparkled. The children were reading comic magazines and their mother had gone back to sleep.
"Let's go through Georgia fast so we won't have to look at it much,"
John Wesley said.
"If I were a little boy," said the grandmother, "I wouldn't talk about
my native state that way. Tennessee has the mountains and Georgia has
the hills."
"Tennessee is just a hillbilly dumping ground," John Wesley said,
"and Georgia is a lousy state too."
"You said it," June Star said.
"In my time," said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers,
"children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and
everything else. People did right then. Oh look at the cute little
pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of
a shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" she asked and they all
turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. He waved.
"He didn't have any britches on," June Star said.
"He probably didn't have any," the grandmother explained. "Little
niggers in the country don't have things like we do. If I could paint, I'd
paint that picture," she said.
The children exchanged comic books. The grandmother offered to hold the baby and the children's mother
passed him over the front seat to her. She set him on her knee and
bounced him and told him about the things they were passing. She rolled
her eyes and screwed up her mouth and stuck her leathery thin face into
his smooth bland one. Occasionally he gave her a faraway smile. They
passed a large cotton field with five or six graves fenced in the middle of
it, like a small island. "Look at the graveyard!" the grandmother said,
pointing it out. "That was the old family burying ground. That belonged
to the plantation."
"Where's the plantation?" John Wesley asked.
"Gone With the Wind," said the grandmother. "Ha. Ha."
When the children finished all the comic books they had brought, they
opened the lunch and ate it. The grandmother ate a peanut butter
sandwich and an olive and would not let the children throw the box and
the paper napkins out the window. When there was nothing else to do
they played a game by choosing a cloud and making the other two guess
what shape it suggested. John Wesley took one the shape of a cow and
June Star guessed a cow and John Wesley said, no, an automobile, and
June Star said he didn't play fair, and they began to slap each other over
the grandmother. The grandmother said she would tell them a story if they would keep
quiet. When she told a story, she rolled her eyes and waved her head and
was very dramatic. She said once when she was a maiden lady she had
been courted by a Mr. Edgar Atkins Teagarden from Jasper, Georgia. She
said he was a very good-looking man and a gentleman and that he
brought her a watermelon every Saturday afternoon with his initials cut in
it, E. A. T. Well, one Saturday, she said, Mr. Teagarden brought the
watermelon and there was nobody at home and he left it on the front
porch and returned in his buggy to Jasper, but she never got the
watermelon, she said, because a nigger boy ate it when he saw the initials,
E. A. T.! This story tickled John Wesley's funny bone and he giggled and
giggled but June Star didn't think it was any good. She said she wouldn't
marry a man that just brought her a watermelon on Saturday. The
grandmother said she would have done well to marry Mr. Teagarden
because he was a gentleman and had bought Coca-Cola stock when it first
came out and that he had died only a few years ago, a very wealthy man.
They stopped at The Tower for barbecued sandwiches. The Tower
was a part stucco and part wood filling station and dance hall set in a
clearing outside of Timothy. A fat man named Red Sammy Butts ran it
and there were signs stuck here and there on the building and for miles up and down the highway saying, TRY RED SAMMY'S FAMOUS
BARBECUE. NONE LIKE FAMOUS RED SAMMY'S! RED SAM!
THE FAT BOY WITH THE HAPPY LAUGH. A VETERAN! RED
SAMMY'S YOUR MAN!
Red Sammy was lying on the bare ground outside The Tower with his
head under a truck while a gray monkey about a foot high, chained to a
small chinaberry tree, chattered nearby. The monkey sprang back into the
tree and got on the highest limb as soon as he saw the children jump out
of the car and run toward him.
Inside, The Tower