{"id":92781,"date":"2015-12-10T16:33:27","date_gmt":"2015-12-10T21:33:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92781"},"modified":"2015-12-11T20:59:04","modified_gmt":"2015-12-12T01:59:04","slug":"the-displaced-person","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/12\/10\/the-displaced-person\/","title":{"rendered":"The Displaced Person"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reading Flannery O\u2019Connor in the age of Islamophobia.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Illustration: June Glasson, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux<\/p><\/div>\n

At a little more than fifty pages, \u201cThe Displaced Person<\/a>\u201d is one of Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s least anthologized stories\u2014and if you share her beliefs about what she called \u201ctopical\u201d stories, it\u2019s also one of the most problematic. O\u2019Connor was wary of stories that focused squarely and perhaps sentimentally on social issues. Her own \u201cEverything that Rises Must Converge,\u201d featuring a bigoted white woman riding a newly integrated bus, was, she feared, just such a story\u2014though in a letter to a friend she confided that she \u201cgot away with it \u2026 because I say a plague on everybody\u2019s house as far as the race business goes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the very same letter, O\u2019Connor writes that \u201cthe topical is poison,\u201d lambasting Eudora Welty\u2019s famous story \u201cWhere Is the Voice Coming From,\u201d written from the point of view of the man who assassinated the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. \u201cIt\u2019s the kind of story that the more you think about it the less satisfactory it gets,\u201d O\u2019Connor wrote. \u201cWhat I hate most is its being in the New Yorker<\/em> and all of the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like many in the South, O\u2019Connor abhorred racism but was slow to embrace integration, feeling that to rush things would lead to more violence. This stance may have been part and parcel of her attitude toward topical writing. To be topical, she thought, was to risk arguing for social changes that couldn\u2019t be brought about by mere idealism, but by the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of transforming hearts.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And yet \u201cThe Displaced Person\u201d is undeniably topical, right down to its title\u2014and its topic makes it peculiarly resonant at present, when governors are vowing to refuse Syrian refugees and Donald Trump has outlined an arrantly bigoted plan to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between 1948 and 1952, permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand European refugees into the United States. President Truman signed the bill with \u201cvery great reluctance\u201d for what he saw as its discriminatory policy toward Jews and Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be eligible, one must have entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before December 22, 1945, which, according to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of the remaining Jewish people displaced by the war. Similarly excluded were the many Catholics who\u2019d fled their largely Communist countries after the December 22 deadline.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe bad points of the bill are numerous,\u201d Truman wrote. \u201cTogether they form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with the American sense of justice.\u201d He called the decision to enforce the December 1945 deadline \u201cinexplicable, except upon the abhorrent ground of intolerance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite the bill\u2019s restrictions and limits, the public was deeply concerned, as some Americans are now, with the possibility that \u201csubversives\u201d might infiltrate the country under the Act\u2014and that the huge influx of refugees would take jobs from American workers.<\/p>\n

According to Brad Gooch\u2019s biography Flannery<\/a><\/em>, the Matysiaks, a Polish family of four who would become the basis for O\u2019Connor\u2019s story, arrived in rural Georgia in 1951, having been eligible for immigration under the Act. They settled in the tiny town of Gray, Georgia, and they met Regina O\u2019Connor, Flannery\u2019s mother, at Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville, the only Catholic Church for miles. By the fall of 1953 they\u2019d moved into a three-room shack at Andalusia, the O\u2019Connor homestead. Their new home had a stove, but no indoor plumbing, and its curtains were made from feed sacks\u2014not much different from the houses James Agee and Walker Evans had documented nearly twenty years earlier in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Matysiaks were not a complete anomaly. The pastor of Sacred Heart, Father John Toomey, had worked through the Catholic Resettlement Commission, an international organization created by Pope Pius XII, to help other refugee families settle in the area. But O\u2019Connor, who didn\u2019t like to travel much because of her lupus, drew her inspiration from those who were closest to her\u2014and so the Matysiaks, having settled almost literally in her backyard, captured her imagination.<\/p>\n

The first image in \u201cThe Displaced Person\u201d is news-reel footage of \u201ca small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing\u201d: victims, the reader should intuit, of the Holocaust. The image is stunning, and the story\u2019s protagonist, Mrs. Shortley, reacts to it with a deep fear, setting the tone for the rest of the story. Whatever evil had caused the death of all those people, she thinks, has infected these refugees, and is now in danger of infecting America:<\/p>\n

\n

Watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others? The width and breadth of this question nearly shook her. Her stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake in the heart of the mountain and automatically she moved down from her elevation and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she meant to find out at once what they were capable of.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The word Holocaust<\/em> is never used in the story\u2014nor are Jew<\/em> and Hitler<\/em>. In the absence of specificity, the mass murder feels somehow even more mysterious, senseless, and unspeakable. But it also puts the reader more firmly in Mrs. Shortley\u2019s perspective: completely lacking any context that would move her to see this heap of bodies as victims, as human, as people like her.<\/p>\n

Mrs. Shortley\u2019s husband is the caretaker and general handyman on a farm owned by the widow Mrs. McIntyre. The Shortleys oversee Astor and Sulk, two black men who have been hired hands for some time. Mrs. Shortley treats them like wayward children\u2014in her eyes, they should be handled in a way that\u2019s consistent with \u201ctheir limitations.\u201d<\/p>\n

But trouble begins when Mrs. Shortley dies of a stroke and a refugee named Mr. Guizac, known throughout the story as only the Displaced Person, threatens to upset the social order. With Mr. Shortley gone attending to the funeral arrangements, Mrs. McIntyre hires the Displaced Person to assume authority over Astor and Sulk; they complain bitterly that he\u2019s working them too hard. The rest of the story focuses on Mrs. McIntyre and her struggle to get rid of the Guizacs. \u201cI will not have my niggers upset,\u201d Mrs. McIntyre says, confronting the Displaced Person. \u201cI cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story is full of such barbs, suggesting that the perceived racial pecking order ultimately overrules any notions of Christian charity. \u201cI am not responsible for the world\u2019s misery,\u201d Mrs. McIntyre thinks to herself as she scolds Guizac.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Displaced Person\u201d brims with overt criticism of Christian racists\u2014but there seems to have been an even deeper personal and spiritual need for O\u2019Connor to write about the Matysiaks. In December 1953, just a few months after the displaced family arrived, O\u2019Connor received a Christmas gift from Catholic Worker <\/em>magazine, the publication arm of the movement founded by the Catholic activist Dorothy Day. The gift was a prayer card printed with \u201cA Prayer to Saint Raphael\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

O Raphael, lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us! Raphael,\u00a0Angel\u00a0of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand towards those we are looking for!\u00a0<\/p>\n

. . . Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of earth, we feel the need of calling to you and of pleading for the protection of your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the Province of Joy, all ignorant of the concerns of our country.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

According to Gooch\u2019s biography, the prayer became a favorite of O\u2019Connor\u2019s, eventually working its way so deep into her imagination that it inspired some of the rhetoric and imagery in the final section of \u201cThe Displaced Person.\u201d Mr. Shortley, feeling that his job might be at risk, begins complaining to Mrs. McIntyre, asking her why the Displaced Person should be afforded better treatment than someone who had \u201cfought and bled and died in the service of his native land.\u201d<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor is so often remembered as a misanthropic homebody\u2014but she was comforted by the idea of a God that gave preferential treatment to the most vulnerable among us. The very concept of displacement\u00ad\u2014to be without a community to care for you\u2014rises to the surface in this story, and, as in much of O\u2019Connor\u2019s work, ostensibly Christian characters lose the courage of their convictions.<\/p>\n

When a priest tries to calm Mrs. McIntyre down, to help her see the lack of charity in her thinking, he evokes a version of John 3:16: \u201cWhen God sent his Only Begotten Son \u2026 \u201d McIntyre interrupts with words that shake the foundations of the story:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cFather Flynn!\u201d she said in a voice that made him jump.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to talk to you about something serious!\u201d<\/p>\n

The skin under the old man\u2019s right eye flinched.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs far as I\u2019m concerned,\u201d she said and glared fiercely, \u201cChrist was just another D.P.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Reading O\u2019Connor\u2019s work with broader notions of displacement in mind, you begin to see it in nearly every story, and even in her personal life. The traveling Bible salesman in \u201cA Good Country People,\u201d the one-armed con man in \u201cThe Life You Save May Be Your Own,\u201d the senile and disoriented Civil War vet in \u201cA Late Encounter with the Enemy\u201d\u2014and especially the misfit and grandmother from O\u2019Connor\u2019s most famous story, \u201cA Good Man Is Hard to Find,\u201d the former an escaped convict who cannot recollect \u201call he done to deserve the punishment he got\u201d and the latter a \u201cgood Christian woman\u201d who reflects sentimentally on the old order of the South, an order that is now, in one of O\u2019Connor\u2019s most hilarious jokes, \u201cGone with the Wind.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of these characters are displaced, if not literally, then figuratively. They\u2019re either morally rudderless, existentially lost, or both; they cannot accept that the world has changed and passed them by. These displaced persons are dark agents of change. Their pitifulness causes them, and the reader, to confront the radical command to love our neighbor as ourselves, to be like the Good Samaritan who sets aside deeply engrained bigotry to minister to the needy.<\/p>\n

But the Guizacs\u2019 displacement is different. Mr. Guizac and his family are unique in O\u2019Connor\u2019s fiction in that they are the only<\/em> Catholics, and they\u2019re the most blameless of any of O\u2019Connor\u2019s displaced characters. They are in need of refuge and willing to work hard to earn their keep. The judgment they confront is the result of what the theologian Kelly Johnson calls \u201cthe fear of beggars,\u201d a distrust and anger that stems from\u00a0all\u00a0that the indigent make us contemplate in ourselves: our deficiencies, our brokenness. These encounters end, at best, in neglect, but they can also lead to violence.<\/p>\n

As she grew older, O\u2019Connor became more and more displaced herself. While her friends and contemporaries were winning grants and traveling abroad, she was marooned in Georgia. Her only romantic relationship\u2014at least the only one we know about\u2014was with Erik Langkjaer, a Norwegian traveling book salesman, likely the inspiration for Manley Pointer in \u201cGood Country People.\u201d He visited her at Andalusia whenever he was in the area, bringing with him news of the outside world. He had lived in New York and had an aunt closely connected to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker<\/em>, which is how O\u2019Connor came to subscribe\u00a0to their magazine. In a letter recounting one of her visits with Langkjaer, O\u2019Connor writes, \u201cThe only conclusion we came to about [ministering to the poor] was that Charity is not understandable … Strange people turn up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Indeed, Christian charity is a constant challenge.\u00a0Its necessity arises not\u00a0from any soggy sense of guilt or social responsibility but from Jesus\u2019s description of the final judgment, found in the twenty-fifth\u00a0chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Only those who fed the hungry, gave water to the thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, cared for the ill, and visited the imprisoned will be gain eternal life.\u00a0And yet an overwhelming number of Americans, if polls are still to be believed, consider themselves Christian and believe America to be\u00a0a Christian nation, one where the nativity scene is as recognizable as the Stars and Stripes: a tableau intended to remind even nonbelievers of the virtue of giving shelter to the weary traveler.<\/p>\n

Many of our self-styled Christian leaders would do well to seek out \u201cThe Displaced Person,\u201d which, like O\u2019Connor\u2019s best work, carries a dark moral force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality. In its dogged focus on the obligation of Christians to help the oppressed, the story shrugs off its topical elements; O\u2019Connor dwells not on the abominations of the Third Reich but on the long shadow cast by this kind of evil. In this way, Mrs. Shortley was, in a sense, correct when she looked upon that pile of bodies in the news reel\u2014violence is a contagion, as the late Ren\u00e9 Girard theorized, begetting more violence, which begets more violence, and on and on and on.<\/p>\n

Dave Griffith is the author of\u00a0<\/em>A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America. He lives in Northern Michigan, where he directs the creative-writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Flannery O\u2019Connor in the age of Islamophobia. At a little more than fifty pages, \u201cThe Displaced Person\u201d is one of Flannery O\u2019Connor\u2019s least anthologized stories\u2014and if you share her beliefs about what she called \u201ctopical\u201d stories, it\u2019s also one of the most problematic. O\u2019Connor was wary of stories that focused squarely and perhaps sentimentally […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":816,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[20521,6215,20291,8618,19381,3339,1888,221,4948,8671,7845,17375,20518,20520,13874,2021,20519],"class_list":["post-92781","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-brad-gooch","tag-catholicism","tag-charity","tag-christianity","tag-donald-trump","tag-eudora-welty","tag-flannery-oconnor","tag-georgia","tag-harry-truman","tag-short-fiction","tag-short-stories","tag-the-american-south","tag-the-displaced-person","tag-the-displaced-persons-act","tag-the-holocaust","tag-world-war-ii","tag-xenophobia"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading Flannery O\u2019Connor in the Age of Islamophobia<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" 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