Free Flannery by Brad Gooch

staircase that split forward and backward — called “good morning stairs” for the greetings exchanged on the middle landing — she found herself in a familiar world. While Sister and Duchess kept bedrooms on the first floor, and Aunt Gertie stayed in “the big room” on the east side of the cavernous second floor, her parents’ bedroom adjoined hers in a separate apartment on the west side. Here the teenage girl could shut the door and be alone in her long, narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom, once again overlooking a backyard — where she kept geese and her mother planted daffodils — as well as the formal boxwood gardens of the Old Governor’s Mansion. She spent countless hours on her stool at a high-legged clerk’s desk, drawing and writing. To further escape the bustle downstairs, she retreated to a vast attic room, full of trunks and chests (a garret much like the third floor in Savannah) and with a front gabled window that looked out over Greene Street to the cemetery beyond.
    The school where she was hastily enrolled was quite unlike either St. Vincent’s or Sacred Heart. First known as Peabody Model School when it was founded in 1891, Peabody Elementary was a lab school for practice teachers from the education department of Georgia State College for Women. Many of their supervising professors had studied at Teacher’s College at Columbia, testing ground for the liberal pedagogy of John Dewey, so the favored methods were eclectic and experimental. Mary Flannery’s classroom was on the second floor in the middle of a series of “Choo-Choo” buildings, connected by overhead walkways, on the main college campus. As of 1935, a new principal, Mildred English, an educator with a national reputation, made sure that all of her pupils were taught and graded not only in Reading, Social Studies, Science, and Arithmetic, but also in Arts, Health Activities, and Social Attitudes and Habits.
    Though she had been in class for only two months when the year ended, her instructor, Martha Phifer, filed a full report card, including a special note: “Mary Flannery needs to work on her spelling this summer.” Otherwise she was rated satisfactory in most areas: “Speaks distinctly with well-pitched voice”; “Contributes information to group”; “Enjoys singing with the group”; “Has good posture.” Responding to a survey, Mrs. O’Connor answered with snappy honesty about her daughter. To the question “Approximate time spent on home work?” she answered, “Very little.” To “Does he have any home responsibilities?” the answer was “No.” To “Does he prefer being alone rather than with others?”: “Occasionally enjoys others.” She listed as her daughter’s only physical defect “Error in vision.”
    Mary Flannery’s only friend in Milledgeville in the seventh grade was Mary Virginia Harrison, the daughter of the postmaster Ben Harrison and her mother’s friend Gussie Harrison. Their match was made by the mothers. “Her mother handpicked her few friends in Milledgeville,” recalls Jack Tarleton. Mary Virginia was an unlikely choice for the newcomer. While Mary Flannery was chronically shy, on the tall side for her age, gawky, and wearing glasses akin to her character Mary Flemming’s “gold-rimmed spectacles,” Mary Virginia was strikingly pretty, vivacious, and didn’t like being alone for a minute. Yet the girls clicked. Mary Flannery remade the Merriweather Club into a secret society for two, with its own official flower, the dandelion. She designed a pin for her friend inspired by the colors of a pet parrot, and together the girls memorized the signs for Burma Shave along the highway to Macon, where they visited their dentist.
    Staying, otherwise, mostly to herself, O’Connor expressed her inner life through her birds. “I remember sitting on the swing on the front porch of Greene Street, and Flannery walking by with this little bantam on a leash, and that is really my first memory of