Then I wrote a play called Counter Terrorism with Ann, a homeless woman who speaks her brash truth whenever she opens her mouth. However, I kept trying to find the voice or persona that produced that poem.įor years, it was elusive. I liked the reaction but concentrated on more acceptable poetry. 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 was sorry to see her leave, but the story stayed. My student said she wouldn’t remain in an academic setting that treated the n-word as a commonplace. One could argue that O’Connor exposes the grandmother’s bigotry and by association the South’s. If I could paint, I’d paint that picture,” she said. “Little niggers in the country don’t have things like we do. “He probably didn’t have any,” the grandmother explained. “He didn’t have any britches on,” June Star said. “Wouldn’t that make a picture now?” she asked and they all turned and looked at the little Negro out of the back window. “Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!” she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. 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. These works expose the human condition, the dilemmas of conscience and troubles of the soul that I need students to understand. I have not removed it nor O’Connor from my course list. 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 can distance from an artist’s despicable character flaws yet love their work. Yet I love her work, which has mentored me mightily.

Flannery O’Connor is under attack, rightfully so, for her privately held racism and bigotry.

Virgin Soul by Judy Juanita