“The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind. Bailey was the son she lived with, her only boy. He was sitting on the edge of his chair at the table, bent over the orange sports section of the journal. ‘Now look here, Bailey,’ she said, ‘see here, read this,’ and she stood with one hand on her thin hip and the other rattling the newspaper at his bald head. ‘Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read there what it says he did to those people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did.”
So begins Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” It’s a fine short story which I’m about to spoil. I encourage you to read it before continuing.1
In this short paragraph, O’Connor arms her reader with all they need to understand the characters in this story.
The Grandmother
“The grandmother,” whose name we never learn, lays out clear and straight what she wants in the first sentence. Motivation is what moves story forward and characterizes. We learn quickly of her southern lineage (“connections in east Tennessee”) and also the dignified way by which she refers to them—not kin, not family, but connections, suggests a certain austerity, perhaps imagined.
In choosing the word “seizing” to describe the grandmother’s resistance, O’Connor shows us she’s not the type of woman to go down easily, obediently. Throughout the story, we’ll see this implication fulfilled.
We also see an archetypical worrywart, a maternal figure who exerts her anxieties on those in her life as a way to maintain control over the situation. She’s obsessed with “The Misfit,” who—the paper has informed her—has just escaped from prison. The chances of them running into an escapee on a road trip to the same state are infinitesimal. We immediately see an anxious catastrophizer.
Speaking of catastrophe, she’s melodramatic. “I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did,” she threatens her son. What an insane thing to threaten your son with—Bailey, taking your kids on vacation to Florida will remain forever on your conscience, because there’s an outlaw on the loose in the state.
This anxiety and need for control will ultimately be the grandmother’s undoing; she sneaks her cat along on the road trip, and when the cat gets startled, it will cause the car to crash.
Bailey
This story is really just the grandmother’s show, though the other characters have important parts to play. Bailey, “her only boy”—we can hear the grandmother repeating this like a prayer and we know instantly the boy is doted upon and adored, that ultimately he will get his way and they will go to Florida.
We know, too, that he’s a momma’s boy—boy. O’Connor shows us that he is bald, a grown man, and of course by calling the main character“the grandmother” we immediately know Bailey has kids, is old enough not to be entertaining his mother’s ludicrous fantasies of death and reckoning.
The Misfit
Okay, so, if you didn’t read the story yet, I’ve spoiled it for you well and good now: the Misfit does show up. But how unlikely, right? I mean, what are the chances??
We know, though, from the first paragraph that this man is dangerous, an escaped felon—one so dangerous his escape is making national news. We don’t ever learn what he did “to those people,” but if the grandmother—so dead-set on not going to Florida—won’t even say them aloud as part of her argument for not going, we know it’s gotta be pretty damn bad.
O’Connor’s choice here to keep The Misfit’s true name unrevealed—surely that’s mentioned in the newspaper—adds to his mystique. He becomes a folkloric figure, both for us as the readers and for the characters inhabiting the story.
We can anticipate the terror the grandmother must feel, and throughout the story feels ever more intensely, as she comes to the moment of her doom.
You can buy a copy in my bookshop and if you do, I get a cut. Thanks! You can also find it in your library, or borrow my copy if you know how to do that.