PEAFOWL

A lot of wildlife activity takes place in our backyard here in New Iberia, Louisiana during the day and more frequently at night — possums, coons, an armadillo, squirrels — and domesticated dogs and fat cats sometimes stroll through on a morning walk or an after-dark prowl. However, the other day when I had just emerged from illness, I was on the glass porch enjoying a rare sunshiny day and saw a huge bird with bright plumage sitting on the fence next door. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating as part of my recovery process. But no, it was a peacock or rather a peahen, and when I stepped outside, she, the peahen, flew down into my yard, then strutted through all the backyards lining the coulee —without showing her tail.

I began to read about this strange visitor and learned that she could be aggressive, so I had been wise in deciding not to try to chase the critter. A few moments later, a young girl appeared in my yard, and I went out to greet her. “Was that your bird that just flew by?” I asked. “No,” she replied, “but where did it go? Do you think it escaped from the Zoo of Acadiana?” She scurried off before I could explain that I thought the peafowl might be someone’s pet or give her a long description of the author Flannery O’Connor’s interest in, and rearing of, a yard of peafowl on her farm in Georgia. As O’Connor is one of my favorite authors, the young girl escaped a literary lecture I’m sure she wouldn’t have wanted to hear.

My godmother Dora who lived in Blacksburg, Virginia had a close friend named Elizabeth who married a Mr. Plank, and unbeknownst to Elizabeth, raised peacocks on his farm not far from Blacksburg. A town girl, Elizabeth knew very little about his farming operation, and I’m not sure where the peacocks were hiding when Mr. Plank brought her to the farm for the first time. Now, peacocks sing (?) a certain song that sounds like the scream of a person in serious trouble: “Help, help,” they sang out after Mr. Plank let them out on the lawn and departed for an errand in town. Elizabeth, hearing these blood-curdling screams, immediately dialed the Fire Department, then the police, and invited them out to investigate the high-pitched screams. By the time Mr. Plank returned from his errand in town, he found a crowd of firemen, policemen, frightened peafowl who were now “singing” without pause, and his bewildered wife who never established a friendship with the noisy creatures. And, I might add, she didn’t speak to Mr. Plank for several days because he had withheld knowledge about his “kept” birds.

The peafowl I saw didn’t scream or get in attack mode, but after I read about how these birds, if hungry, or mating, would sometimes attack humans, I was glad that she had continued her march through the backyards of my neighborhood. I did write the “snippet” below after she left the yard:

EMERGENCE

A peahen landed in the backyard,

air bubbling with the end of ice,

south winds blowing away mist.

The bejeweled creature, refusing to show her tail,

passed closed doors along the coulee

looking for a mate or food;

A brief glimpse of iridescent green, 

she stopped short of the neighbor's fence,

boards rotting from too much winter,

then lifted off before we knew 

whether it was spring arriving

or winter departing...

TRUCKIN' DOWN TO SAVANNAH

Resurrection fern shriveled on
oak limb

If you're foolish enough to look for resurrection fern in a mountain environment, you'll find it isn't an easy search. In fact, finding plants for a botanist to photograph to accompany poems about plants that appeal to this poet's sensibilities calls for travel further south than the Cumberland Plateau in Sewanee, Tennessee. So last Wednesday, we set out for the coastal country near Savannah, Georgia to search for ancient live oaks that were home to the epiphyte, resurrection fern.

This city, touted as one of the Top 10 Travel Destinations in America, was really not that far from Sewanee—six hours and fifteen minutes, according to travel maps online, but the maps didn't reckon with the mighty eighteen wheelers that crowded the interstates leading to one of the most beautiful cities in the U.S. When I began thinking about writing a blog featuring a city that inspired films like Midnight In the Garden of Evil—the architecture, history, and, yes, hauntings—I had in mind a romantic piece about a place of hospitality and charm.

However, the song of the open road soon soured as we began dodging trucks on the Interstate, especially on I-16, and the congestion leading from Macon, Georgia to Savannah involved many of these big tanks with "Safe and Courteous" written on their tail ends. Sometimes their doubling up in both lanes made me fearful for the safety of prisoners picking up trash on both sides of the highway—I wondered how many pounds of peeled off truck tires the sweating men had been hauling off daily. We hit several of these black rubber teeth as we sped along and later had to inflate all our car tires from rolling over the trucks' discards.

Trucks on I-16, GA

As we whizzed past, I snapped a few photographs of trucks moving hot and heavy, their red underpants flapping in a breeze they stirred up and mimicking trains by carrying train cars on their flatbeds—oversized tanks with launching ports of Salinas, California, Rushville, Indiana, Mobile, Alabama emblazoned on drivers' doors. The truck traffic near Atlanta was daunting, and ten miles out of Savannah, I lost any respect I might have had for the trucking industry when we stalled for one hour on Highway 16 before turning around and finding an outlet to Hwy. 80, which led into Savannah. We heard reports that earlier in the morning when a heavy fog had made highway travel dangerous, seven eighteen wheelers had crashed and caused a 27-car pile-up... and at 4 p.m., the highway still hadn't been cleared.

"Hhmph," I told my botanist friend, 'This vehicle makes wide turns' should be written on the sides of automobiles traveling down here instead of on the rear ends of eighteen wheelers—we're the ones who've had to make wide turns and retrace our route because of their 'safe and courteous driving.'"

The above was the beginning of a rant, which is what one of my former associates once dubbed a newspaper column I wrote for the Daily Iberian in New Iberia, Louisiana, but it isn't the first time I've made noises about Jimmy Hoffa's offspring—the mighty trucks that have replaced my favorite mode of travel—trains.

Yes, "the open highway" is a phrase of the past and has been replaced by "Where is the next exit?" but we did find the resurrection fern, curled up, in need of resurrection and many rains, in Forsyth Park, a green space that was created in Savannah in 1851. We took photographs of a fern clinging to a 300-year old oak in the private parking lot of the law school across from the park and were chased off by a security guard.

As usual, I was doomed to stand in the street before a "closed" sign on Flannery O'Connor's childhood home—her home will be #3 for authors' homes that are usually closed on the days of my visits—the other two being William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' home near Cross Creek, Florida.

Beach at Tybee Island, GA

I think we got lost enough times to view the 24 Squares that are a part of Savannah's charm before we set out for Tybee Island to find the open sea...behind a fence of sea oats! Low Country Georgia's cuisine equals Cajun fare in taste and rich diversity. Backyard fishermen often catch shrimp, crab, oysters, and flounder from backyard docks, and trawlers bring in catches of whiting, mahi mahi, grouper, red snapper, and Spanish mackerel from the Atlantic Ocean. Savannah cuisine carries the flavor of Spanish, French, and West African cooking. On our return trip to Sewanee, farther up the road at the Harvest Moon Cafe in Rome, Georgia, we enjoyed a flavorful dish of collards cooked with onions and apples.

We only had three days to savor the "coastal empire," but we advise readers to spend at least a week in this city featured in Conde Nast Traveler, Travel and Leisure Magazine, Southern Living and TripAdvisor.com. However, book a flight when you begin planning the trip! Or better still, board a train!

MORE ABOUT FLANNERY O’CONNOR

Dr. Mary Ann Wilson

A few months ago, I visited Andalusia, home of Flannery O’Connor, one of the foremost writers in the South. I came home with a thick volume of her work, including some of her “Occasional Prose” and wrote a blog about my visit to this peaceful property in Milledgeville, Georgia where O’Connor once lived and wrote. Since that time, I’ve had an abiding interest in her work and am sorry I missed a lecture last week entitled “Surprising Grace in the Writing of Flannery O’Connor” given by Rt. Reverend Henry Parsley, the retired 10^th Bishop of Alabama and a former Chancellor of the University of the South. The lecture was sponsored by the Academy for Lifelong Learning which meets each month at St. Mary’s Conference Center here at Sewanee, Tennessee.

This week, on the heels of this lecture I received an e-mail from my good friend, Dr. Mary Ann Wilson, an English professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, telling me about her latest connection to Flannery O’Connor’s work. Dr. Wilson was featured in a recent issue of La Louisiane, the magazine of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, in which she was cited for discovering a 50-year old tape of an O’Connor lecture. The tape is a valuable recording of a talk O’Connor presented at Our Lady of Wisdom Catholic Church on the ULL campus just two years before she died of lupus during the 50’s.

Dr. Wilson was cleaning out her office files at the University when she came across a pink box with O’Connor’s tape entitled “The Catholic Writer in the Protestant South” (of which I have a print copy). She took the brittle tape to the University’s Center for Louisiana Studies and they used digitizing equipment to produce a 35-minute recording. The recording inspired Dr. Wilson to organize and coordinate a symposium that featured O’Connor scholars from throughout the U.S., and the audience heard parts of the recording during the sessions. The symposium was hosted by Our Lady of Wisdom’s Jeanmard Center in November, 2012.

Dr. Wilson reports that the tape captured the soft, South Georgia drawl of Flannery O’Connor, and applause and laughter punctuated the lecture O’Connor presented. Wilson teaches courses in Southern literature, many of them centered on Southern women writers, including O'Connor, this distinctive American writer of the twentieth century. She says that a colleague gave the O’Connor reel-to-reel tape to her years ago, and she forgot about it until she did a spring cleaning in her office.

Andalusia

After my visit to Andalusia in May, I read the particular essay which formed the basis for O’Connor’s lecture at ULL, “The Catholic Novelist in the South,” and re-read it after I received the article about Dr. Wilson. In the talk, O’Connor advocated that Catholic novelists in the future would be able to reinforce the vital strength of Southern literature, “for they will know that what has given the South her identity are those beliefs and qualities which she has absorbed from the Scriptures and from her own history of defeat and violation, a distrust of the abstract, a sense of human dependence on the grace of God, and a knowledge that evil is not simply a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be endured…”

O’Connor was a master at probing the mysteries of divine grace, and as a priest friend of mine said the other day at the breakfast table in St. Mary’s Convent, “We seem to find grace in everything she wrote, despite the depiction of characters who are driven to violence and their sometimes bizarre behavior…”

O’Connor scholars in the South are indebted to Dr. Wilson for rescuing this tape and getting it digitized for a permanent collection in the Edith Garland Dupre Library at ULL. The article about Dr. Wilson’s discovery appears in Volume 23, Number 1 of La Louisiane, a publication published twice a year at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. 

ANDALUSIA

Main House, Andalusia

The gravel and red clay road just off Highway 441 North in Milledgeville, Georgia leads uphill to a white frame house with a spacious screened front porch, its red roof gleaming in the May sunlight. The home, known as the "Main House," is the major residence in the complex that incorporates a smaller farm home, cow barn, equipment shed, calf barn, a water tower, an aging pump house, and a horse stable. It’s the former home of one of my favorite writers, Flannery O'Connor, and is the place where most of her work was completed before her life was shortened by the onset of lupus. The agricultural setting of a dairy farm provided the retreat necessary for O'Connor to depict what she called the "Christ haunted Protestant South" in her arresting fiction that made her one of the most important American writers of the 20^th century.

Home of farm workers
at Andalusia

We toured the 19^th century home, peering into O'Connor's downstairs bedroom/study that held a single bed, covered with a simple blue and white bedspread, set only a few feet away from a desk that held a manual typewriter, flanked by a straight-backed chair sans cushions of any kind. It was a stark room, a setting where O'Connor wrote her novels, short stories, essays, and letters from nine until noon every morning of her writing life. In the afternoons, she tended peafowl – at one time, she had fifty of them – and painted (even her self-portrait), sometimes entertaining people who would drop in to see her.

As we walked around the grounds that included a small pond, a peacock aviary, and a few nature trails, we thought about the mysterious, often violent fiction, that had emerged from the quiet landscape and connected with the words in O'Connor's essay, "The Fiction Writer and His Country:" "When we talk about the writer's country we are liable to forget that no matter what particular country it is, it is inside as well as outside him. Art requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know one's region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world…"

Diane next to red dirt road
beside Andalusia

As I walked through the grounds, I passed a completely dilapidated garage that seemed strangely incongruous with the well-kept landscape, a large pile of broken wood that mocked the romanticism I had attributed to the scene of a southern writer who had once said people didn't understand her writing about the people and region that surrounded her farm. O'Connor also said her Christian affiliation centered on redemption and what she saw in the world in relation to that redemption, adding that her Christian beliefs freed her to observe and affected her writing "primarily by guaranteeing her respect for mystery."

If you haven’t sampled the work of Flannery O'Connor, you might enjoy the short story collection, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) which includes a bizarre baptism in "The River," a one-legged woman's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People," and other discomfiting stories that bear out her words, "In order to recognize a freak, you have to have a conception of the whole man."

Main house, side view of Andalusia

We had been to deepest south Florida prior to the O'Connor visit, and after sojourning in an environ of Fort Lauderdale and being hustled like most tourists, for me, the visit to O'Connor country seemed to be an occasion of  a "blind sow finding an acorn," to descend to a "countrynism" that might have come out of the mouth of a character in one of O'Connor's stories.

In the small gift shop of the old farmstead, I bought a volume that included all of O'Connor's books, short stories, essays, and letters, published by the Library of America, and began reading it aloud to my friend, Vickie, while traveling home to Sewanee, Tennessee, arriving back on The Mountain after being transported by O'Connor's "The Train."

Photographs by Victoria I. Sullivan