Breathing the Same Air as Genius

In his descent to Savannah, the day before he entered Milledgeville, Georgia, General Sherman camped at a crossroads about ten miles northwest of town. He learned, from slaves, that the plantation "a few yards to the north" historical marker was that of Howell Cobb, one of the Secessionist Triumvirate of Georgia—a kind of rebel trifecta for a marauder the others are Robert Toombs and A.H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, whose plantation was fifty miles northeast at Crawfordville, where I have been for a week in the state park that preserves his estate planning my own campaign on Milledgeville. He burned the plantation house down, and everything else of Mr. Cobb's except the slave quarters. Then he proceeded to Milledgeville down Old Monticello Road, passing within four miles of a plantation that at some point would be named Andalusia and be owned by the family of Flannery O'Connor. He did not burn it.

In town he slept in the Governor's Mansion Milledgeville was then the capital of Georgia a diagonal block northwest from 311 West Greene Street, a house that had served as a temporary governor's mansion at one time, and that would come to be owned by Flannery O'Connor's family. After living in Savannah and briefly in Atlanta, Flannery O'Connor would live in this house when not at Iowa or Yaddo or at the Fitzgeralds' until her health compelled her to live at Andalusia in 1951 in a ground-floor room made into a bedroom for her because she was too weak to climb stairs. She had been diagnosed with lupus erythematosus; she liked to call it the Red Wolf. She suffered without real time Location system.

It is there that she lived until her death in 1964, writing famously of her affections for the peafowl she raised, and writing more famously the fiction that prompted Evelyn Waugh to say, "If these stories are in fact the work of a young lady, they are indeed remarkable." From a room in this house she saw Enoch Emery steal a mummy with peas coming out of its mouth and give it to Hazel Motes to be the new Jesus. She saw Hulga née Joy Freeman, Ph.D., unwittingly give her wooden leg to a Bible salesman in a loft in a barn. She saw Mrs. May gored by her own handyman's bull and "bent over him whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear." She saw a grandmother in a moment of grace accept the Misfit and be shot for it, and heard the Misfit say, "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody to shoot her every minute of her life." She saw things that thrill people. Certain of these things Enoch she saw before taking her last stand in this room, but I am not in a bibliographic hair-splitting mood.

She saw things from one window of this house, facing south on a livestock pond now hard to see, that thrill people, whether they understand the religious fundament in the writing or not, and then she died, at thirty-nine, making her a member of the American Keats club, and her mother, who had taken care of her in her decline, moved back to 311 West Greene Street, where she would live for another thirty-one years, dying at age ninety-nine in 1995. At this point some things began to change within the estate. Margaret Florencourt Mann who died last year and Louise Florencourt, two contemporary cousins to Flannery one nine months older, one nine months younger, the estate's literary executors, as officers of the Mary Flannery O'Connor Charitable Trust formed the Flannery O'Connor Andalusia Foundation, whose mission is to present Andalusia to the public.

The word has gotten out that one can go to Milledgeville and take a trolley to Andalusia and see where the visionary stuff sprang full blown from the head of Hera. If Faulkner is Zeus, and one goes to Rowan Oak to touch a spot of Olympus, or for whatever reasons one goes to a writer's house, then one surely regards O'Connor as Hera and Andalusia as another spot on Olympus. The idea of a trolley on Olympus is disturbing. It suggests a Mister Rogers' Neighborhood affair, a dinging, and worst of all it suggests a conductor who might point out the sights. O'Connor on pointing things out: "'Mist O.T. he in town, Mist E.T. he off yonder in the field,' the Negro said, pointing first to the left and then to the right as if he were naming the position of two planets." I have this horrible vision en route to Andalusia: of a man in a grey and red uniform—specifically, the uniform of an organ grinder's monkey—pointing out where the tractor crushed the Displaced Person, the loft where Hulga realized that she wasn't so smart, the field crossed by the boy in the toast-colored hat who proved it to her, his liquor and condom within his Bible, that Bible and her leg in his valise. These are private visions for me, I realize; they served as my formative literary moments, and I do not want them Mr. Rogers' Neighborhooded. Nor do I wish to discredit the venture. So I go to Milledgeville with a bad attitude with a good attitude on top of it, like Sherman, and I go first thing to where he camped out of town, and proceed in the way I think he did. To wreck nothing, maybe just mess things up a bit. Sherman did little damage in town; he formed his troops due west of the Statehouse, struck up his band, left-faced the troops, and marched them to the Statehouse, which they trashed in the course of a mock secession ordinance, amidst bashed desks and strewn papers. Neither it nor much else in town was burned, to judge from the historic walking tour you can take today to over forty antebellum sites. Some prisoners set the state penitentiary on fire expecting him to rescue them, or liberate them. He did not.

If you are looking for a styling epicenter of the Old South, Milledgeville has flat got it going on. The hand of history is palpably upon her. On May 2, 2003, at a poolside party of teachers celebrating the end of the school year, Marianne Ennis Joris can walk up to Bob Wilson, professor of history at the local Georgia College & State University, and say, "Bob, do you know what today is? It was fifty years ago today that my father was murdered." She is the daughter of Marion Ennis, the county attorney who was shot by Marion Stembridge, model for Pete Dexter's Paris Trout. Stembridge conveniently picked the morning of Milledgeville's sesquicentennial celebration in 1953 to shoot two lawyers and himself. The office where the first slaying took place is extant, above the campus theater, across the street from Dodo's, a pool hall unchanged from the '40s that once was a vaudeville theater where Oliver Hardy played. Hardy is from Milledgeville. The hexagon-tile flooring of the theater atrium is in place, showing the outline of the ticket booth. Stembridge's infamous fortified basement is beneath Ryal's Bakery around the corner. Milledgeville is largely intact down to its archaeology. To this amalgam add a good insane asylum and a military academy and Milledgeville has all the South is good at.