Judy Juanita on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
/
(Guest post by Judy Juanita)
Flannery O’Connor is under attack, rightfully so, for her privately held racism and bigotry. Yet I love her work, which has mentored me mightily. I can distance from an artist’s despicable character flaws yet love their work. It happened with Death of a Salesman after news broke of Dustin Hoffman’s sexist treatment of a coworker during the play’s filming; a student asked me if I would stop teaching it. I have not removed it nor O’Connor from my course list. These works expose the human condition, the dilemmas of conscience and troubles of the soul that I need students to understand. An O’Connor passage from “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” famous before its current notoriety, led a black student to drop my lit class in the 1990s. The offending passage reads:
“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.
One could argue that O’Connor exposes the grandmother’s bigotry and by association the South’s. My student said she wouldn’t remain in an academic setting that treated the n-word as a commonplace. I was sorry to see her leave, but the story stayed. O’Connor delves into the world of the transgressive, something that I didn’t know I was doing until I wrote a controversial poem with the line “Woman, I just want your pussy.” It was a great hit on poetry circuits in NY/NJ where I lived in the 1970/80s. I liked the reaction but concentrated on more acceptable poetry. However, I kept trying to find the voice or persona that produced that poem.
For years, it was elusive. Then I wrote a play called Counter Terrorism with Ann, a homeless woman who speaks her brash truth whenever she opens her mouth. Here is a monologue from Ann:
“Max. That’s what I like about white people. They keep the same name over and over, generation after generation, it’s Max, Max, Max, Max, Max, Henry the first, Henry the second, Henry the eighth. They names is not confusing. They don’t care if the little baby look up at em all funny, Mabel? Why you giving me this tired name again? We do different. We go whichever way we get enslaved. Wha massa name? John? Das my name. We get with the French and we name ourselves Denise, Charmaine, Elouise. We get with the Irish and it’s Siobhan, Mickey. We went Swahili, evbody had Cumbuka, emboli-all them names sound like they got booger or booty up in em. Haki Madabootie. So now we got all these twenty somethings running around with Ay-rab names. Ahmed, Muhammad, Siddiqi. They just sounded different before Sept. 11: Khalid, Abdul, and Hasan. Now it sounds like your grandson is on the 22 Most Wanted List. And if you go to the Post Office and look at the faces, you don’t see Amad al-sheik Abdullah. You see Miz Jones’ nephew what been living with her since he got out of prison. Or Tommy Green who six feet eight and can’t play basketball. And white folks still naming babies Thomas and Jefferson and George. And here Ann test. Here my test. The Mexicans never enslaved us but show me a black baby name Jose.”
Using Black dialect and even using slave dialect within her monologue, Ann satirizes her fellow blacks in their rush to adopt names from Anglo-Saxon forebears. Because Ann is broke, ragged, and on the streets, she is estranged from other blacks, especially the working and middle-class. This estrangement might be what O’Connor and artists, as a rule, use repeatedly to explore their characters. It might be what keeps them sane enough to explain the perplexities of life.
***
[See also Judy’s essay “The N-Word,” which first appeared on The Weeklings and then in her collection De Facto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland.]
Judy Juanita is the author of Virgin Soul, a novel based on her youth and experience as a member of the Black Panther Party. BuzzFeed called Virgin Soul (Viking, 2013) one of “16 Books To Read If You Love San Francisco.” Her essay collection, DeFacto Feminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (EquiDistance, 2016), explores the gap between black and female empowerment; it was a distinguished finalist in Ohio State University’s Non/Fiction Collection Prize 2016. Her short stories appear in Oakland Noir, Crab Orchard Review, The Female Complaint, Imagination & Place: an anthology, Tartt Six and Tartt Seven. At SFSU, she joined fellow student protesters to revolutionize American higher education and create the nation’s first black studies department. In her play, “Life is a Carousel,” featured at Beyond Baroque in Venice, a black woman academic argues with the forgotten founder of Black Studies about the academy, Black Studies and the struggle. This play is in Juanita’s book Homage to the Black Arts Movement: A Handbook (EquiDistance, 2018).
Find out more here.