A little over a decade ago, I spent a week in Milledgeville, Georgia, for a research project in the Special Collections of Georgia College & State University (GCSU), the home of Flannery O’Connor’s personal library. I stayed at the rectory of Sacred Heart Parish; when O’Connor was a college student in the early 1940s, her Newman Club met in the parish rectory, and I was humbled and honored to be in that space. Moreover, it was edifying to celebrate Mass daily in the same church O’Connor and her mother, Regina, attended almost every morning during the last fourteen years of the former’s life—the same church where both women’s funeral liturgies were celebrated, Flannery’s in 1964 and Regina’s in 1995. O’Connor’s father, Edward, died when she was fifteen years old and was buried at Sacred Heart in 1941.
It was a Saturday morning and I was getting ready for a run when Ms. Louise Florencourt, one of O’Connor’s last living relatives, pulled up in her little black SUV and called through the open window, “Fr. Damian, I need your help!” Ms. Louise seemed fairly distressed, so I walked over to see what was the matter. She said, “Oh, Fr. Damian, I am looking for something, but I can’t seem to find it anywhere, and I don’t know who can help me. I just don’t know what to do!” After I said I’d be happy to help, she assured me, “It won’t take long and hopefully we can find what I’m looking for.” With that, I hopped in and she drove us about three miles out of town.
I had no idea where we were going or what we were looking for, but we pulled up to a climate-controlled storage unit behind a fast-food restaurant called Cook Out, parked, and got out. The unit was packed wall-to-wall with the Flannery O’Connor archive, with no room to walk. I thought I was dreaming. Ms. Louise would say, “Now, Fr. Damian, look over there. Maybe it’s in that box.” I’d open a box and find first edition copies of O’Connor’s novels and short story collections. “No, that’s not it,” she would say. “How about over there?” I was looking at paintings Flannery had done and which I had read about, and wondered, Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? “No, that’s not it either. Hmmm, maybe in that box?” I climbed to the corner to a tall, unmarked cardboard box. “Take off the lid, maybe it’s in there,” Ms. Louise said. It held an array of beautiful dresses on hangers, spread across a large rod running down the center of the crate. “Oh, those are the dresses Regina made for Flannery,” she said. “But that’s not it.” We looked around a little while longer and she’d chirp a few more times, “How about over there?” to which I would describe some artifact and she’d answer, “No, that’s not it,” until she finally confessed, “We may never find it, but thank you for coming with me to look.” And with that we turned out the lights, pulled down the door and locked it, and she drove us back to town.
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention”
I’ll never forget that experience, and I’ve shared it with a few close friends before but never felt the need or even the permission to write about it until now. You see, Ms. Louise saw herself as the guardian of all things Flannery, and she was. Literally. One of the first women to graduate from Harvard Law, Ms. Louise served for many years as the co-executor of O’Connor’s literary estate. She took her role of protecting O’Connor’s name, reputation, and art most seriously, often to the disappointment and frustration of O’Connor scholars. For a long time, she and the former president of GCSU were like enemies, but a new college president and the COVID pandemic brought about some healing. Like Flannery and Regina, Ms. Louise was a daily Mass-goer; when the pandemic struck, she felt very isolated in the big Cline house, especially since she couldn’t go to daily Mass. The new president sent someone from the university’s IT department to help Ms. Louise livestream daily Mass from Sacred Heart and connect with her friends on Zoom using GCSU’s WiFi. Before Ms. Louise died in 2023, she willed the family home—in which Flannery lived during high school and college—to the university.
I was back in Georgia recently to celebrate Flannery’s one-hundredth birthday on March 25. (Many have noted the theological significance of O’Connor being born on the feast of the Annunciation.) There were wonderful events hosted at her childhood home in Savannah and on the farm she called “Andalusia” where she lived in Milledgeville. But the highlight was that for the first time ever, those paintings I saw over a decade ago in a poorly lit storage unit behind the Cook Out were on full display together with a collection of cartoonish paintings on smaller wood tiles O’Connor likely made during her high school years. They were recently discovered in the attic of the Cline home, along with a stuffed devil doll O’Connor had made with a fox face, plaid shirt, white pants, black boots, and vampire cape; it stands behind glass in a nice shadow box.
All this never-before-displayed artwork—the canvas board paintings, the woodblock paintings, and the devil doll—made its public debut on the evening of the centennial of O’Connor’s birth in the Magnolia Ballroom on GCSU’s campus in an exhibit called Flannery at 100: The Visual Artist. Because I was flying out that evening, I asked for a sneak preview of the exhibit that morning and was graciously obliged.
The exhibit was everything I had hoped for and more. And the presence and reporting of The New York Times, the BBC, The New Yorker, and The Georgia Bulletin (the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Atlanta) made Milledgeville feel like the center of the universe. When I first encountered the canvas board paintings in the storage unit, I remembered a few landscapes and maybe some flowers, but here they were displayed with proper lighting and little descriptive labels as in an art museum.
The exhibit begins with a painting of a barn—a barn which still sits a few hundred yards behind the house at Andalusia, a barn which most scholars think inspired the final scene of “Good Country People.” There are paintings of two women and one girl, thought to be O’Connor’s neighbors and likely her mother, Regina. Interestingly, the neighbors are less cartoonish than the painting of her mother. There are a few still life paintings, mostly impressionistic in style, and even one of a group of students in an art class, which may be where O’Connor painted it. My favorite pieces are those of the birds and the churches. The three paintings of the birds (“Three Chickens in the Grass,” “White Headed Chickens,” and “A Group of Pheasant and Quail”) are the most stylistically refined of all her paintings and perhaps the most revealing. Flannery loved birds, and she called Andalusia a “bird sanctuary.” Her love is on display in the color and movement of these images, as well as the seriousness with which the birds are looking back at you, the viewer. The two paintings of the churches don’t resemble the churches most familiar to O’Connor—the Cathedral of John the Baptist in Savannah and Sacred Heart in Milledgeville—but made me think of van Gogh and Picasso.
Some people have been surprised to learn Flannery O’Connor was a painter, as she is best known for her literary art, but O’Connor believed in artistic cross-training. She wrote, “Any discipline can help your writing: logic, mathematics, and of course particularly drawing. Anything that helps you to see, anything that makes you look. The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that doesn’t require his attention” (Mystery and Manners, 84). In 1959, a reporter noted, “Her dark eyes are sharply observant—her paintings of churches and farm scenes, which line the dining room of the farmhouse, testify to how much and how well she sees.”
The smaller, cartoon-like paintings on woodblocks are older than the canvas board paintings but are of equal interest. They are brightly colored, comical, and a bit disfigured, serving as a prefigurement to many of the characters in O’Connor’s fiction. Amy Alznauer, author of the award-winning Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor, gave a wonderful lecture on these pieces at the Catholic Imagination Conference at the University of Notre Dame in November, and it was a real joy to finally see them in person.
The masterpiece of the collection is the only painting I was not permitted to photograph: Flannery’s self-portrait. This painting is not new, and many have seen copies of it, but to see the original in good light at the center of a large otherwise empty stage was breathtaking. Many have noted O’Connor’s straw hat looks like a halo around her solemn face, while her eyes and the eyes of the pheasant held in her left hand stare right through you. The self-portrait made me think of Flannery’s deep desire to be configured to the Byzantine Christ featured in “Parker’s Back.”
Flannery at 100: The Visual Artist is now on display at the Andalusia Interpretive Center in Milledgeville. In addition to the canvas board paintings, the woodblock paintings, and the devil doll, you can also see some of the dresses Regina made for Flannery. Then you can walk up the long drive and take a tour of the farmhouse where Flannery O’Connor spent the last fourteen years of her life as a highly disciplined narrative artist and a most devout Catholic. Her bedroom remains pretty much as she left it, crutches and all, and it’s holy ground.