Southern Gothic
He looks perplexed.
“What’s that?” he asks.
I explain: “Southern Gothic, you know…”
He grabs his i-phone and looks it up.
“Huh?” he says, “all I get are some gospel songs.”
I channel my commanding 5-year-old voice and repeat, “SOUTHERN GOTHIC! Dumb- Dumb!!!”
“Oh, he says, is this like that other thing you were talking about?”
“What other thing?”
“The zombie thing. . .” “You mean like the Zombie Apocalypse?”
(DYK: One in 10 Americans (14%) have a Zombie plan ready if the undead ever rove the Earth in search of human flesh, according to a YouGov survey.)
“Yeah, that one.”
“No, it’s not like that. What do you think one of your favorite authors,” I point to his signed first editions behind glass bookcase, “Cormac McCarthy writes about? Like Child of God stuff!!”
I spell out Gothic, more like I spit it out.
“Oh,” he says, and looks up Southern G-O-T-H-I-C.
Then he tells me, “I like that idea.” And “What’s her name?”
He has no idea what I will write.
He doesn’t dare call ME a ‘dumb-dumb’ because he knows I can’t take it. I was never accused of being “too smart for my own good.”
Another thing I learned at the time about Flannery O’Conner, she said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
That stuck with me.
So here are my ragtag thoughts about Southern Gothic: At some point in my reading of fiction, it occurred to me that the books that knocked me out the most were all from southern writers. (Mark Twain, Carson McCullers, Tony Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, John Berendt, Karen Russell, and Flannery O’Conner – just to name a few.) No one knocked me out and at the same time mystified me more than Flannery O’Conner.
Take her story A Good Man is Hard to Find. When I was in college, I heard the intellectual crowd murmuring about Flannery O’ Conner. I decided to find out what was so important, so I read A Good Man Is Hard to Find and had two distinct reactions: One, I had no idea why anyone would write such a horrifying story; and two, for some reason I couldn’t put it down. Another thing I learned at the time about Flannery O’Conner, she said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.” That stuck with me.
Recently I re-read A Good Man is Hard to Find. I also learned a little more about Flannery O’Conner, especially that she had a recurrent dream: “I am five years old and a peacock.”
I looked up some notes I wrote after I re-read it:
Only in the rural south of the early 20th century can one find a really strong sense of what the Holy Ghost really is because the American South is haunted by ghosts. Flannery’s characters are frequently referred to as “freaks.” Why freaks? Because for one reason or another, they have lost their connection to God and therefore are Hollow Ghosts, so without the permeation of God’s grace, they are left free to murder, wound, torture and so on. In her bones Flannery was infused with her Catholic sense of God who is comprised of God the Father, God the Son, and the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost permeates the sultry atmosphere of the South after the Civil War.
At the end of A Good Man Is Hard to Find, the Misfit explains himself:
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead.” The misfit continued, “He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what he said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can – by killing somebody or burning his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,”
he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
And so does the Grandmother:
“Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!”
The Misfit is a Hollow Ghost. The Grandmother is too, but she sees the Misfit’s original goodness – before he became a fallen angel, or the Devil’s Own Baby!
That’s my explanation!