Finding Flannery’s T

I have come to Lafayette Square to see what Flannery saw.

Others may seek out Andalusia, but it is Flannery’s childhood home that draws me. It is here, at 207 E. Charleton Street, that she spent the most important years of her life, from her birth in 1925 to 1938, when she and her family moved to Milledgeville. So it must be from her experiences here that she concluded “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his life.” Children, she told a friend, have nothing to do but observe the world around them and then later transfer those observations into their writing.

I and my two walking companions approach the house slowly, crossing Lafayette Square from the North, passing the Catholic church where Flannery was baptized and worshipped and the Catholic elementary school where Irish nuns taught her to read and write. It is a three story tabby stucco house with a steep stairway to the parlor level and the obligatory historical marker in front.

I know the house is closed for renovation, but that does not deter me. I climb the stairs, hoping to at least peak inside through the stained glass pane in the door. The door swings open. A young workman with missing front teeth greets me. He is wearing dusty jeans and a baseball cap and a great big smile, apparently not the least bit embarrassed at his dental impairment.

“Y’all want to look around?”

Do I ever.

He steps out of the way and we follow him. He apologizes for the “mess” and explains that the renovations are just beginning. Here, in the parlor, he shows how the historic preservationists have begun pealing back the paint and wallpaper, trying to get back to the wall covering as it existed in the late ’20s and the ‘30s. He explains that they are trying to put the building back exactly as it would have been when Flannery lived here, evoking her name as if he personally knows her.

Up the stairs we go, to the main bedroom floor and to the back bedroom that was Flannery’s. He points out her cradle, and some peacock feathers and the view from the window down to the garden level backyard below.  He becomes animated as he explains that this was where she trained the chicken to walk backwards and I love the way he assumes we know the story.

Our impromptu tour done, he escorts us back out.

“Now, don’t be strangers, “he says. “Come back when I’m done.”

My companions drift off down Charleton to look for a lunch place and I tell them to get a table and order for me. I’m not quite ready to leave and plant myself on the top step and look out over Lafayette Square. Big, broad live oaks shade the square, Spanish moss dripping from the branches, the sunlight that makes it through the dense canopy casts golden shadows across the grass. Squirrels frolic. Cicadas buzz. The humid air reeks of magnolia blossoms and decaying leaves. An elderly man sleeps on a bench, adding his snore to the cacophony. A woman in a bright flowered sleeveless dress walks a little white dog. Two teenagers in matching white oxford shirts and plaid skirts toting back packs chatter as they cross the square.

So this is Flannery’s T.

Until this moment I have doubted my right to recount the occupation. It had seemed too audacious. After all, I left Oslo at age nine. Yet here, on this porch, on this square and in this church and at the school just around the corner Flannery learned all she needed to know to understand humanity. Perhaps it is not so audacious after all to think that the hours I spent resting on my grandmother’s lap in a cabin in the Oslo woods listening to the adults describe the defining years of their generation are enough to tell their Truth.