What is a writer 'entitled' to write?

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

Today, I read an unedited short story by Welty that she wrote for the New Yorker shortly after Medgar Evers’ death. (Thank you Adrienne for bringing it to my attention.) Written in the days following the murder, Where is the Voice Coming From? is raw - and horrific.
Welty was, of course, white. Which leads me to the question of whether the race (or any other immutable characteristic) of the writer is relevant to telling the tale. Welty’s story is told through the eyes of a white supremacist narrator. This is the same tactic that James Baldwin uses in Going to Meet the Man.
Welty’s story, though full of graphic images, still feels to me somewhat sympathetic to the narrator. That’s never the reaction I have to Baldwin’s take. Perhaps this is because he so brilliantly takes a bigot’s perception of the target of his rage’s most frightening characteristics and turns them around. Baldwin’s white supremacist monster is impotent - as if his target took his sexual prowess away. (Sexual prowess seems a common feared characteristic among the ‘other’ a bigot hates - it also figures prominently in anti-semitism.) I think this approach feels more ‘true’ than the pent up frustration of Welty’s narrator.
Is either writer ‘entitled’ to tell the story? O’Connor never shied away from race relations, though I think she largely stuck with using white character points of view. Or perhaps the question is whether Baldwin succeeds so magnificently because he gets into the “other’s” head.
Again, I will trust that O’Connor is right - that simply by surviving childhood I have enough information about life to tell stories I might not be ‘entitled’ to tell.

You can read the story at http://preview.tinyurl.com/k3aewe3

Habits

“It might be dangerous for you to have too much time to write. I mean if you took off a year and had nothing else to do but write and weren’t used to doing it all the time then you might get discouraged.”

Flannery O’Connor, The Habit of Being

I want to clarify that I am not taking a year off to write. I have several day jobs that fortunately don’t require me to be in a particular place at a particular time, leaving me with far more freedom that many other writers with day jobs. Still, the daily work has to be done. I write textbooks and newsletters as my bread and butter along with teaching the ins and outs of business law to undergraduate students. Plus, I run a small e-press that includes a literary magazine and work by emerging writers like J. Calvin Pierce, Adrienne Terrell Washington and John Pistelli, among others.

What I will be doing is setting aside the two hours O’Connor could devote to writing every day for the more creative projects - especially my WWI occupation saga based on family stories told during my childhood in post-war Norway. Those hours will be in full swing as soon as the relocation is complete. For now, as we prepare for the move, writing time is about an hour.

A read-off

It’s on. A James Baldwin - Flannery O’Connor read-off culminating in viewing Wise Blood and The Price of the Ticket via Netflix. And it looks like our first writerly visitor will be journalist and friend Adrienne Terrell Washington. We will debate race relations as viewed through the eyes of Baldwin and O'Connor and record the event. 

Why Flannery?

I have a dear friend who, shall we say, does not share my enthusiasm for all things Flannery. I thought of her when I recently came across a letter between O’Connor and playwright Maryat Lee.

The 1959 letter touches on everything from race relations to cocktail parties, Flannery O’Connor uses friend Brainard Cheney as a foil to explain her view of race relations in the South and in the Northeast - particularly urbane and sophisticated New York City. Mr. Cheney, she says, is trying to write a novel “set in interracial circles in New York,” but after two weeks in Gotham has been “unable to meet one Negro” socially. Cheney, she explains, would probably like to meet James Baldwin.

O’Connor apparently had been asked to see James Baldwin in Georgia but declined to do so because it would cause the “greatest trouble and disturbance and disunion.” She added that she had read one of his stories and “it was a good one.”

She ends the letter by suggesting that if Cheney wants to try again, “I’ll get him to call you and maybe you could scout up a few,” though she thinks he will instead rely on his imagination.

I don’t know whether Cheney ever met Baldwin or which story of Baldwin’s O’Connor read and found to be “a good one.” It could not have been “Going to Meet the Man,” which was not written until after O’Connor died. Nor did Cheney’s imagination allow him to finish that Northeast interracial novel - all his published works are set in the rural South.

So Adrienne, if you are reading this, I’d like to suggest that, in the parlance of our times, “it’s complicated.” Or not. So let’s talk soon - at Flannery’s.