“A Good Man Is Hard To Find”
by Flannery O’Connor
[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]
Before I listened to the Slate Audio Book Club’s critique of “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” a few weeks back, the only thing I knew about Flannery O’Connor was that Jacob was reading All That Rises Must Converge while John Locke was being thrown out the window by his father in the two-part finale of the last season of Lost. Truth be told, I just assumed that, with a name like Flannery O’Connor, that O’Connor was, like James Joyce, an Irish writer. Instead, O’Connor was a woman who lived in the Deep South who wrote two novels and thirty two short stories that primarily revolved around grotesque characters that projected O’Connor’s own battles with her faith, and asked the reader to deal with situations that were fraught with moral and ethical imbalances. Basically, I could not have been more wrong in my assumption of who the writer was.
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is the first short story of the collection that bears its eponymous name. It is about a family that goes on a road trip from their home in Georgia to Florida for a vacation. The family consists of the grandmother (whose name is never mentioned), her son Bailey and his wife (who is also not named), and their kids–John Wesley, June Star, and a newborn baby (again, not named). The grandmother shows Bailey a story in the paper about a killer named The Misfit who has escaped from a federal prison in Florida; this, combined with the fact that she grew up in east Tennessee, the grandmother tries to convince the family to go there instead of Florida but her lobbying falls on deaf ears and the family departs south. Along the way they stop at The Tower for lunch and the grandmother winds up talking to the proprietor, Red Sammy, and they both lament about how nowadays there are no good men around (Red Sammy tells the story of how he was recently ripped off by some young men that he thought he could trust).
When the family is back on the road the grandmother asks Bailey if he would pull off course for a quick spell so that she could look at an old plantation house that she loved to see when she was younger. She is able to get the kids to go for it as well by saying that the house has all sorts of treasures stored away inside of it. On their way to this house they get into an accident and are ultimately found by The Misfit and his two accomplices. The two other men first kill Bailey and John Wesley, then the mother, June Star, and the baby by walking them into a nearby forest and shooting them. The grandmother and The Misfit talk for a little while before he kills her.
That is the nutshell version of the story but it is so much more complex, especially with regards to the grandmother. For one thing, it is very subtly implied that she may have been senile and that she is ultimately the reason why they were all killed. The obvious example of this is that in the aftermath of the accident she realizes that the plantation house that she had Bailey drive around and look for was actually in Tennessee and nowhere near where they were. But during the first reading of the story you could chalk that up to the shock of the crash itself–maybe she is still coming around and this is just the first thing comes across her mind as she attempts re-align herself. But tucked away and subtly dropped in on the second page of the story are the following lines between the grandmother and the kids:
‘She wouldn’t stay at home to be queen for a day,’ June Star said without raising her 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 that her hair was naturally curly.“
The fact that June Star tells the grandmother that her hair is naturally curly has a weight to it that is really easy to overlook on first read. The same goes for how June Star says the grandmother “wouldn’t stay home for a million bucks” and how she’d be “afraid she’d miss something” if she was not with the family. O’Connor very subtly renders the grandmother as someone who is both bossy and forgetful, an extremely dangerous combination that foreshadows the fate of the family.
Another facet of the grandmother is her antiquated worldview, the stereotypical Deep South outlook. Because the grandmother is really the only member of the family who speaks throughout the story, she is the only person with whom we are allowed any insight into. So that when she is confronted by The Misfit all of her thoughts and reasonings are so vapid and pointless that everything leading up to her murder is tragic and frightening.
The Misfit and his two accomplices, Hiram and Bobby Lee, are nearby and see the accident occur when the family is on its way to the plantation house (the one that doesn’t exist where they are at). The grandmother recognizes The Misfit from his picture in the paper. His two accomplices take Bailey and John Wesley into the woods and kill them, followed by inducing the same fate on the mother, June Star, and the baby. During this whole time the grandmother and The Misfit talk and she pleas to him that he is good man and that he shouldn’t be doing this (“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood. I know you must come from nice people!”) and that he should find Jesus. The Misfit calmly and coldly replies to everything she has to say, and some of his replies are simply chilling and haunting. For example: when the grandmother tells him that she will give him all the money she has, he says,
“Lady, there never was a body that gave the undertaker a tip.”
When she implores him to pray to Jesus and spare her life, he gives her this speech [the misspellings are verbatim],
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow 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 down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness.”
By this point in the story, The Misfit is wearing Bailey’s shirt–it being removed from him before he was killed. As the two continue to talk about Jesus raising the dead, the grandmother suddenly says, “Why you’re one of my babies. You’re one of my own children!” and reaches out and touches his shoulder. The Misfit springs back (“as if bitten by a snake”) at her touch and shoots her three times. This is where I think the grandmother’s senility comes full circle as I interpreted this scene as being that she thought she was looking at Bailey–completely forgetting who was wearing the shirt.
The story ends with the following exchange between the three criminals:
“‘She was a talker, wasn’t she?’ Bobby Lee said, sliding down the ditch with a yodel.
‘She would of been a good woman,’ The Misfit said, ‘if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.’
‘Some fun!’ Bobby Lee said.
‘Shut up, Bobby Lee,’ The Misfit said. ‘It’s no real pleasure in life.’”
“A Good Man Is Hard To Find” is the short story that put Flannery O’Connor on the literary map. It is dark, it is tragic, and, like a lot of her other works, revolves around the struggle to uphold faith in a chaotic world in which causeless murder occurs, and remorseless con men prey on people. This should be required reading at the high school level if for no other reason than to illustrate that a deeply complex and chilling story can be written in under twenty five pages.
