My name is Flannery O’Connor. I was an author until I was promoted Aug. 3, 1964. The topic of my death came up once over dinner with St. Peter and St. Paul. We were laughing, having a good time eating, recalling our trials and tribulations.
“Why lupus?” I asked, not the least bit concerned why my dying at 39.
They both looked at each other as if waiting for one of them to start. Peter usually jumped in at the drop of a cat, but he remained silent. Paul, him I knew so well, always called me by my given Catholic name, and I in return would call him ‘Saul’. Their faces broke out in grins.
“Mary…” Paul’s eyes sharp as a thumb tack leaned towards me. “You remember writing how the characters in your books had that divine revelation of the Holy—“ Peter interrupted, “And his mercies and grace. Some of them just before they died tragically?”
I nodded remembering some particular intricate plots with the characters lives as ordinary as a loaf of bread, their deaths quickly flew by my minds eye. Some of the people were conceded, bigoted, racists. And Christian. Most were typical examples of the Jim Crow attitude of the 50’s and 60’s.
In Greenleaf, as in all my stories, the forces of nature were symbolic of divinity. Mrs. May ran her farm, along with the tenant family, the Greenleaf’s, like the control freak that she was, and avoided not just union with God, but any intrusion in her well con-trolled life. She lived by “I’ll die when I get good and ready!” only to end up dying by a horn of a bull, symbolic of God, piercing her in the heart.
A smile always breaks out on my face at the observation by the misfit after he killed the prejudiced grandmother in A Good Man is Hard to Find, ‘She would have been a good woman…if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life’.
Revelation’s Mrs. Turpin’s gave thanks in her prayers she ‘wasn’t a nigger, white trash or ugly’ as she ministers good works to the poor. In the end, she realized she wasn’t any more worthy of God’s grace than everyone else.
“Well,” Peter continued, “it was considered that you were to die one of those ways, just like in your books.” He laughed, his face turning red. His right hand slapping the table, the left over his heart.
At first I felt helpless, as if I’d been insulted by a little child, then my smile grew remembering his own death supposedly by being crucified upside down. I tried not to make it too noticeable, but I was curious to see if the nail prints were visible.
Paul jumped in, “But the biggest irony was—“ he too had to pause to catch his breath, “you never lived to see your greatest work, Everything That Rises Must Converge, published.”
In the flesh I would have been surprised, this was news to me, but now…now that I was here, it didn’t matter. Not anymore. Looking back, what happened next could have been a perfect ending for one of my stories.
Looking between them both I said, “Ya know…” a smile crept across my face, “the same thing happened to you guys, too!” The words sunk in, Paul and Peter looked across at each other, I anticipated their reaction. First Peter smiled, Paul was hesitant… unsure, I wondered if maybe he was the kind of guy you had to crucify every minute of his past life…then he got it. We all broke out laughing.