Thanks to those of you who passed on The lovely piece by Lawrence Downes in the NYTimes today on his travels to south Georgia:
Andalusia was a working dairy farm run by Flannery’s mother, Regina, who as a prominent widow businesswoman was something of a novelty in town. No one has lived there since O’Connor died in 1964 and Regina moved back into downtown Milledgeville.
Strip malls have long since filled the gap between town and farm, and you now find Andalusia by driving past a Wal-Mart, a Chik-fil-A and a Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse, where a man shot his wife and killed himself a few days before I arrived. You pass a billboard for Sister Nina, a fortune teller who reads palms in a home office cluttered with votive candles and pictures of Catholic saints. (To judge from one consultation, she is capable of divining that a visitor is a bearer of dark sorrows, but not exactly skilled at pinpointing what those sorrows might be.)
Across the highway from an America’s Best Value Inn, a tiny sign marks the dirt road to Andalusia. I turned left, went through an open gate and there it was, a two-story white frame house with a columns and brick steps leading up to a wide screened porch. Through the screens I could see a long, tidy row of white rocking chairs.
I drove around back, between the magnolia and pecan trees, parked on the grass and walked back to the house past a wooden water tower and an ancient garage, splintered and falling in on itself.
I was met at the door by Craig R. Amason, the executive director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation, the nonprofit organization set up to sustain her memory and preserve her home. When the affable Mr. Amason, the foundation’s sole employee, is not showing pilgrims around, he is raising money to fix up the place, a project that is a few million dollars short of its goal. The foundation urgently wants to restore the house and outbuildings to postcard-perfection, to insure its survival. Last year the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation placed Andalusia on its list of most endangered places in the state.
For now, the 21-acre property is in a captivating state of decay.
There is no slow buildup on this tour; the final destination is the first doorway on your left: O’Connor’s bedroom and study, converted from a sitting room because she couldn’t climb the stairs. Mr. Amason stood back, politely granting me silence as I gathered my thoughts and drank in every detail.
This is where O’Connor wrote, for three hours every day. Her bed had a faded blue-and-white coverlet. The blue drapes, in a 1950’s pattern, were dingy, and the paint was flaking off the walls. There was a portable typewriter, a hi-fi with classical LPs, a few bookcases. Leaning against an armoire were the aluminum crutches that O’Connor used, with her rashy swollen legs and crumbling bones, to get from bedroom to kitchen to porch.
There are few opportunities for so intimate and unguarded a glimpse into the private life of a great American writer. Mr. Amason told me that visitors sometimes wept on the bedroom threshold.
Exactly. What I wrote in 2004:
As you look into Flannery’s room from the hall, you see her narrow single bed with its iron head and footboards first. The typewriter (hers), sitting on a small table nearby, and her crutches (he assured me they were hers) leaning against a bookcase. I can’t describe the rest of the room, because I was so absorbed in memorizing and breathing in that small space: her bed, her typewriter and her crutches, the spot, the very spot where she suffered, prayed and gave back to God – and the rest of us – by the act of creation. Oh laugh if you will, but it was a holy place.
A piece I wrote Way Back When, after my first visit, long before Andalusia was open:
You could be forgiven if you begin to suspect at some point during your search for Flannery O’Connor’s grave that, at an incautious moment, you have somehow slipped right into the middle of a Flannery O’Connor story.
After all, so far in this small town of Milledgeville, Georgia, about 35 miles east of Macon, you have passed a youth prison and a state mental hospital, homes to hundreds of troubled, unusual characters. You are surrounded by the plain fact of the south, from the ghostly, castle-like remains of the first state capital to the sight of an African-American UPS man emerging from the “Strictly Southern Heritage Gallery and Gift Shop,” a downtown business packed with Confederate memorabilia, including flags and bikinis made from flags. The store, a sign notes, is closed “Sundays and Southern holidays.”
And when you finally reach it — kindly hauled in the caretaker’s rundown pickup truck on the suffocating summer day from one end of the cemetery, where you thought she might be, to the other end, where she is — you stand there, next to a stranger. “They still don’t want to claim her, do they,” he comments wryly, reflecting on the complete lack of any directions to the grave of one of the 20th century’s most revered and intensely discussed writers, laid ot rest here 35 years ago last August. You nod in agreement and wonder who placed the broken plastic olive-colored Madonna above the name on the flat marble slab. And if you are finally conscious now of your place in the O’Connor universe, you will know to brace yourself; for any moment, grace may strike — and, no question, it will hurt.
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