{"id":232301,"date":"2021-04-21T07:48:41","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T07:48:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=232301"},"modified":"2021-04-22T08:59:47","modified_gmt":"2021-04-22T08:59:47","slug":"flannery-oconnors-white-trash","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=232301","title":{"rendered":"Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s White Trash"},"content":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh \u2013 The Unz Review Apr 19, 2021<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Though Flannery O\u2019Connor didn\u2019t live long, she left us some of the best stories ever written. It\u2019s impossible to overpraise \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d \u201cThe Life You Save May Be Your Own,\u201d \u201cThe Displaced Person,\u201d \u201cThe Artificial Nigger,\u201d \u201cGood Country People,\u201d \u201cEverything That Rises Must Converge\u201d and \u201cRevelation.\u201d<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor\u2019s liberal usage of the word \u201cnigger\u201d has always made many people uncomfortable, however, and considering today\u2019s politically correct climate, she\u2019s likely to have been canceled from most college syllabi.<\/h4>\n

Most damningly, there are passages from O\u2019Connor\u2019s correspondences that even her staunchest defenders can\u2019t whitewash. On May 3rd<\/sup>, 1964, just three months before her death from lupus, O\u2019Connor wrote to Maryat Lee, \u201cYou know, I\u2019m an integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste anyway. I don\u2019t like<\/em> negroes. They all give me a pain and the more of them I see, the less and less I like them. Particularly the new kind.\u201d<\/h4>\n

So O\u2019Connor allowed or forced herself to think one way, but felt otherwise. On May 21st<\/sup>, O\u2019Connor elaborated to Lee, \u201cAbout the Negroes, the kind I don\u2019t like is the philosophizing prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too [\u2026] If Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Negroes shouldn\u2019t philosophize, prophesize or pontificate, you see. It\u2019s a white thang.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor\u2019s disdain and condescension towards blacks don\u2019t show up in her fiction, however. Integrationist by principle, she\u2019s not a racist against blacks in her art.<\/h4>\n

In O\u2019Connor\u2019s stories, blacks are generally dignified and likable, unlike her idiotic, freakish or criminal white trash. When O\u2019Connor\u2019s blacks transgress, it\u2019s rather harmlessly, like stealing a turkey. They\u2019re not smug idiots, confidence tricksters or murderers, like her white trash.<\/h4>\n

Unlike the one-armed white trash in \u201cThe Life You Save May Be Your Own,\u201d O\u2019Connor\u2019s blacks don\u2019t steal your car and abandon your deaf daughter at a roadside diner, miles from home. Unlike the three coolly depraved white trash in \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d they don\u2019t shoot your grandchildren, including a baby, before finishing you off.<\/h4>\n

In \u201cThe Artificial Nigger,\u201d a brainless rural white trash, ironically named Mr. Head, takes his grandson to Atlanta, to teach him an important lesson, \u201cMr. Head meant him to see everything there is to see in a city so that he would be content to stay at home for the rest of his life.\u201d<\/h4>\n

To Mr. Head\u2019s dismay, the boy, Nelson, was doggedly proud to have been born in Atlanta. An orphan, Nelson had spent his first six months there.<\/h4>\n

Even on the train there, Mr. Head behaved moronically. Rudely waking other passengers, he read aloud everything on his ticket. Later, Mr. Head declared the name of each passing building, forcing Nelson to hiss, \u201cHush up!\u201d The boy had more innate dignity than his grandpa.<\/h4>\n

At home, Mr. Head had stressed to Nelson that Atlanta was \u201cfull of niggers,\u201d and since the boy had never encountered one, he was totally unprepared for this nightmare. Now on the train, three blacks appeared.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor, \u201cA huge coffee-colored man was coming slowly forward. He had on a light suit and a yellow satin tie with a ruby pin in it. One of his hands which rode majestically under his buttoned coat, and in the other he held the head of a black walking stick that he picked up and set down with a deliberate outward motion each time he took a step. He was proceeding very slowly, his large brown eyes gazing over the heads of the passengers. He had a small white mustache and white crinkly hair. Behind him there were two young women, both coffee-colored, one in a yellow dress and one in a green. Their progress was kept at the rate of his and they chatted in low throaty voices as they followed him.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Much classier than Mr. Head and Nelson, the blacks were headed for the dining car. Later, Mr. Head also took his grandson there, but only to look. They couldn\u2019t afford it.<\/h4>\n

Shooed away after they had tried to poke into the kitchen, Mr. Head cracked a loud joke about cockroaches that got everyone laughing. Triumphant, they returned to their seats.<\/h4>\n

For lunch, Mr. Head had brought a paper bag with some biscuits and a can of sardine, but in their excitement to get off the train, they forgot all about it, so went hungry for the rest of the day.<\/h4>\n

Tossed into the swirling city, both of them were overwhelmed, but grandpa had a strategy, \u201cMr. Head was determined not to go into any city store because on his first trip here, he had got lost in a large one and had found his way out only after many people had insulted him.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Walking along, they browsed stores and even inspected the sewer, for Nelson\u2019s much needed edification. Soon enough, though, they were lost. The houses had become much shabbier, and there were blacks everywhere.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor, \u201cThere were colored men in their undershirts standing in the doors and colored women rocking on the sagging porches. Colored children played in the gutters and stopped what they were doing to look at them. Before long they began to pass rows of stores with colored customers in them but they didn\u2019t pause at the entrances of these. Black eyes in black faces were watching them from every direction.\u201d<\/h4>\n

In this \u201cnigger heaven,\u201d Mr. Head was too intimidated to ask for directions, so it was left to the boy to approach a woman.<\/h4>\n

During their brief exchange, the motherless boy was overtaken by a painful, deeply smothered yearning, \u201cHe suddenly wanted her to reach down and pick him up and draw him against her and then he wanted to feel her breath on his face. He wanted to look down and down into her eyes while she held him tighter and tighter. He had never had such a feeling before.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Unaware of this turbulence, the sweet woman merely responded, \u201cYou can go a block down yonder and catch you a car take you to the railroad station, Sugarpie.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Since Mr. Head had never taken a streetcar, they didn\u2019t board one, but merely follow the tracks. When you\u2019re so ignorant yet proud, everything is impossible. Too exhausted and hungry to go on, Nelson had to sit down on the sidewalk, and when he dozed off, Mr. Head had an inspiration.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor, \u201cHe looked at the sprawled figure for several minutes; presently he stood up. He justified what he was going to do on the grounds that it is sometimes necessary to teach a child a lesson he won\u2019t forget, particularly when the child is always reasserting his position with some new impudence. He walked without a sound to the corner about twenty feet away and sat down on a covered garbage can in the alley where he could look out and watch Nelson wake up alone.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Nelson\u2019s latest impudence was to ask that black lady for help. He needed to be taught a lesson for showing up his grandpa. White trash on a trash can, Mr. Head waited for Nelson\u2019s waking terror.<\/h4>\n

The boy slept on. Impatient, Mr. Head finally kicked the trash can to jolt Nelson awake.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor, \u201cNelson shot up onto his feet with a shout. He looked where his grandfather should have been and stared. He seemed to whirl several times and then, picking up his feet and throwing his head back, he dashed down the street like a wild maddened pony.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Chasing after, Mr. Head lost sight of Nelson. After the third intersection, he came upon this scene, \u201cNelson was sitting with both legs spread out and by his side lay an elderly woman, screaming. Groceries were scattered about the sidewalk. A crowd of women had already gathered to see justice done and Mr. Head distinctly heard the old woman on the pavement shout, \u2018You\u2019ve broken my ankle and your daddy\u2019ll pay for it! Every nickel! Police! Police!\u2019 Several of the women were plucking at Nelson\u2019s shoulder but the boy seemed too dazed to get up.\u201d<\/h4>\n

Instead of running to his grandson, Mr. Head hid behind a \u201ctrash box\u201d to \u201cget his bearings.\u201d Again, the trash motif. Finally, he approached Nelson, \u201cbut only at a creeping pace.\u201d<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor, \u201cThe women were milling around Nelson as if they might suddenly all dive on him at once and tear him to pieces, and the old woman continued to scream that her ankle was broken and to call for an officer. Mr. Head came on so slowly that he could have been taking a backward step after each forward one, but when he was about ten feet away, Nelson saw him and sprang. The child caught him around the hips and clung panting against him.\u201d<\/h4>\n

With the enraged women\u2019s attention turned on him, Mr. Head did something so horrible, it\u2019d sear and shame him forever.<\/h4>\n

O\u2019Connor:<\/h4>\n

Mr. Head sensed the approach of the policeman from behind. He stared straight ahead at the women who were massed in their fury like a solid wall to block his escape, \u201cThis is not my boy,\u201d he said. \u201cI never seen him before.\u201d<\/h4>\n

He felt Nelson\u2019s fingers fall out of his flesh.<\/h4>\n

The women dropped back, staring at him with horror, as if they were so repulsed by a man who would deny his own image and likeness that they could not bear to lay hands on him. Mr. Head walked on, through a space they silently cleared, and left Nelson behind. Ahead of him he saw nothing but a hollow tunnel that had once been the street.<\/h4>\n

Throughout this story, Mr. Head had strangely competed against Nelson, such was his smallness, but with this cowardly act, he became less-than-nothing, but what do you expect from an O\u2019Connor\u2019s white trash? They\u2019re simply the worst.<\/h4>\n

In another story, \u201cRevelation,\u201d O\u2019Connor reemphasizes this point:<\/h4>\n

Sometimes at night when she couldn\u2019t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if she couldn\u2019t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made her, \u2018There\u2019s only two places available for you. You can either be a nigger or white-trash,\u2019 what would she have said? \u2018Please, Jesus, please,\u2019 she would have said, \u2018just let me wait until there\u2019s another place available,\u2019 and he would have said, \u2018No, you have to go right now and I have only those two places so make up your mind.\u2019 She would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it would have been no use and finally she would have said, \u2018All right, make me a nigger then\u2014but that don\u2019t mean a trashy one.\u2019 And he would have made her a neat clean respectable Negro woman, herself but black.<\/h4>\n

Born and raised in Georgia, O\u2019Connor went to Iowa for grad school, then spent a couple of years in New York and Connecticut, before returning to Georgia, where she spent her last 13 years.<\/h4>\n

It was in the North, then, that O\u2019Connor came into being as a writer, and most of her earliest champions, Paul Engle, Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Lowell, etc., were Northerners, as was her publisher, Robert Giroux. Though rooted in the South, O\u2019Connor was also orientated towards the North, with its mores, taste and, yes, attitudes towards race.<\/h4>\n

From that angle, the South has been little more than a stinking mudhole of white trash, so down the decades, we\u2019re served with Deliverance, Easy Riders, Honey Boo Boo and, yes, also Flannery O\u2019Connor. As great as she is, O\u2019Connor contributes to that relentless calumny.<\/h4>\n

In 2020, there was an article by Paul Elie in The New Yorker, \u201cHow Racist Was Flannery O\u2019Connor?\u201d<\/h4>\n

I\u2019d say pretty damn racist, against poor whites.<\/h4>\n

In 2021, the term \u201cwhite trash\u201d has been compacted to just \u201cwhites,\u201d so it\u2019s not just the South that is overrun with assorted Mr. Heads and Misfits, but pretty much the entire country, save for half of Manhattan, chunks of California and perhaps Seattle.<\/h4>\n

It is deplorable. That\u2019s why the US must be rigorously reeducated and deformed, if not destroyed, for the benefit of all trash, of any color.<\/h4>\n

First they came for the white trash, and no one said nothing\u2026<\/h4>\n

Linh Dinh\u2019s<\/em><\/strong> latest book is Postcards from the End of America<\/span><\/a>. He maintains a regularly updated photo blog<\/span><\/a>.<\/em><\/h4>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linh Dinh reflects on a writer who died in the 1960 but who would not be considered in today\u2019s politically correct culture. Let alone published and reviewed<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":146,"featured_media":232302,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Race"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/146"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=232301"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":232494,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232301\/revisions\/232494"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/232302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=232301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=232301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=232301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}