“The Lame Shall Enter First”
by Flannery O’Connor
Everything That Rises Must Converge is a collection of nine short stories that Flannery O’Connor wrote before she died in 1964 and was released posthumously a year later. In some way each story deals with themes of race, religion, and morality amongst tragically flawed characters inside of combustible settings. “The Lame Shall Enter First” is a short story (alongside two others in the collection) that ends with a character being killed. It is also a story that best exemplifies the way in which O’Connor forces an uneasiness on the reader: we know that everything is going to end very badly early on, while one of the main characters—the father—is absolutely clueless as to all the negative warning signs.
The story follows a father, Sheppard, and his son Norton. Sheppard’s official title is City Recreational Director, but on Saturdays he works pro bono as a counselor at a reformatory. His wife recently passed away.
At the reformatory he meets a club-footed teenage black boy named Rufus Johnson. Sheppard is taken back by Rufus’ intelligence and personal history, which includes physical abuse at the hands of his grandfather. And so Sheppard—a man who not only has not gotten over the death of his wife, but who also has a young son who has never experienced any of the hardships that Rufus has been through (“Do you have any idea what it means to share?” he asks his only son)—not only gives Rufus a key to their house to come and go as he pleases, but also tries at every turn to lavish praise and education on Rufus over Norton.
However, it turns out that Rufus is an extremely bad kid. While he and Norton are home alone he bosses Norton around with relish, and eventually goes through Norton’s mother’s things (clothes, a comb, a brush) even as Norton yells at him not to. From here, the story becomes a bit predictable in terms of how it logically unfolds (Sheppard continues to want to help Rufus while pushing Norton away, Rufus refuses the special shoe Sheppard wants to buy for him, Rufus continues to get in trouble with the police but Sheppard always vouches for him) but O’Connor was a master architect of constructing stories that seemed to follow a certain blueprint, only to have scenes of tragic gravity arise unexpectedly as if to make you forget to look for a whiff of foreshadowing.
For example, the way that O’Connor writes into the story that Norton has a telescope in the attic of the home. So that when Sheppard takes Rufus upstairs and shows him the instrument and uses it as a means to try to convey to Rufus that we’re living in the space age now and that anything is possible; that this instrument—the telescope—is a physical manifestation of man’s triumph over his existence and that you, Rufus, should see this as a metaphor for how to overcome your own situation because, well, you are so smart and can do anything… This, combined with Rufus’ caustic appeasement of Norton’s naïveté towards space, heaven, and his mother’s death—
“When I’m dead will I go to hell or where she is?” Norton asked.
“Right now you’d go where she is,” Johnson said, “but if you live long enough, you’ll go to hell.”
—lead to Norton’s tragic decision at the end of the story, which heartbreakingly coincides almost exactly with Sheppard’s moment of clarity in which he finally realizes his unconditional love for his son.
“The Lame Shall Enter First” is most certainly not an uplifting story. But as a vehicle in which to explore religion, race, and the desire to selfishly help others in the supposed name of unselfishness, it is an astonishingly lucid portrait. To some, this may not be a good thing but as far as short fiction writing goes you would be hard-pressed to find fault in this exploration.
