Banning Flannery
DREHER, ROD
Banning Flannery Down and out in Louisiana. BY ROD DREHER The Catholic Church teaches that our moral and intellectual failures may sometimes be excused by something it calls "invincible...
...And once the question had shifted from literature to the bishop's racial credentials, there was really only one answer...
...For that reason, I direct that the books in question should be removed from the reading list immediately and other readings substituted for them...
...Orteza explained to his superiors that he had assigned the King James Bible primarily for its literary importance: the translation that inspired the vast bulk of English and American literature...
...And Bishop O'Don-nell, in ordering the elimination of O'Connor's volume, directed that "no similar books" replace it: All books containing those racial epithets are forbidden, regardless of context...
...But these are not stories with happy endings...
...These days, whenever you run across cant like that, you can be reasonably sure that somebody is up to no good...
...Indeed, O'Leary says, he didn't invite the teacher to meet with the parents "because they would have been at his throat if he had been in the room...
...Thanks to Bishop Edward J. O'Donnell's abject surrender to the forces of political correctness, a southern Catholic school— Opelousas Catholic High—has the dubious distinction of being the first recorded school in America to ban the southern Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor...
...The parents of black students at Opelousas Catholic had demanded that O'Connor's collection of stories, A Good Man Is H^^d to Find, be removed from reading lists because it contains characters who use the words "nigger" and "pickaninny...
...Think of how much American literature that leaves out...
...The Artificial Nigger" in particular offers a psychologically penetrating portrait of cracker racism as a projection of the fear of impotence in the face of the unknown...
...But Father O'Leary's response was instead to lead the wild-eyed band into Bishop O'Donnell's office to demand action...
...In the wake of the bishop's epistle, Father O'Leary has set himself up as the arbiter of racial correctness for the school's literature courses...
...O'Leary received the letter from his ordinary that he wanted...
...Later, Fontenot said, "I had read about this bishop right after he came here, about how he was all for civil rights, how he had marched with King, and I had a good opinion of him...
...The school, the delegation told the bishop, is a tinderbox of racial animus...
...The parents objected to both the title story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and a story called "The Artificial Nigger," which O'Connor considered the finest thing she ever wrote...
...You might suppose that the first duty of a Catholic priest—faced with parishioners ready to commit physical violence against a teacher for assigning a book—would be to engage in a little moral instruction...
...The Diocese of Lafayette is a fabulous mixture of races, nationalities and ethnic groups," its website declares...
...Both stories are set in the Jim Crow South and feature white bigots as protagonists...
...This kind of reality is what she dealt with in her work...
...None of them had read the book they wanted banned, after all...
...Fontenot informed the bishop he did not want to be "patronized...
...Essentially, O'Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming, as it does, out of such a racial culture," the black novelist Alice Walker once wrote about O'Connor...
...BY ROD DREHER The Catholic Church teaches that our moral and intellectual failures may sometimes be excused by something it calls "invincible ignorance"—an absolute incapacity to understand that what we're doing is wrong...
...Flannery could have made a funny story out of this herself," said William Sessions, a retired English professor and a close personal friend of O'Connor's...
...He assigned How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find, and the King James Version of the Bible...
...But when I sat with him for that hour the other day, and saw the demeanor with which he tried to placate us, I saw that he was the same as all the others...
...Flannery developed a view of people who were all suffering, all corrupt, all subject to misunderstandings...
...The scene must have been worthy of Tom Wolfe (another writer whose novels now can't be taught at Opelousas Catholic...
...William Faulkner...
...Banished without reprieve...
...We celebrate our diversity...
...If it can be said to be 'about' anything, then it is 'about' prophets and prophecy, 'about' revelation, and 'about' the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don't have a chance of spiritual growth without it...
...Basically, anything that has to do with race is off-limits," said Arsenio Orteza, the teacher whose assigning of O'Connor to his eleventh-graders sparked the furor...
...Ah, so that's it: power, respect, saving face, standing up to the Man...
...It was for his own safety...
...Days later, Fr...
...Bishop O'Donnell, who says that he has read O'Connor, is reported to have told the group that O'Connor was no racist and the stories in question are actually anti-racist...
...Why is it that black people are always the ones who have to back down...
...those...
...But then, two weeks before school started, several black parents approached Fr...
...Gone...
...Maybe The Scarlet Letter is the way to go, and I'll have to hope there aren't any adulterers who object in the community...
...that leaves him with a whole lot of explaining to do...
...He asked how the group would react if they were to learn that O'Connor's work is taught at Xavier, Grambling, Southern, and other black Louisiana universities...
...A dead letter...
...They got even more upset," said Reginald Tatum, a black school board member who was present...
...These unspeakable stories with those...
...No wonder Tatum observed later, "This is not about Flannery O'Connor...
...Fontenot replied testily...
...Malcolm O'Leary, a black priest affiliated with the school, charging that their children were being forced to read the racist work of Flannery O'Connor...
...we celebrate in unity...
...It started earlier this summer, when Orteza, a high-school literature teacher with thirteen years of classroom experience, was hired by Opelousas Catholic...
...But for their bishop, the head of the Diocese of Lafayette, who set aside common sense, basic fairness, and intellectual integrity to crumble to the parents' bullying—well, in his case it looks more like willful ignorance, and Rod Dreher is a columnist for the New York Post andfilm critic of Our Sunday Visitor...
...Prime stuff, you would think, for study in a Catholic high school in the Deep South...
...words might encourage a racist white child to insult a black child, who would strike back, and then . . . well, Armageddon...
...According to delegation member Patrick Fontenot (a community leader who removed his youngest children from Opelousas Catholic years ago), O'Leary told the bishop that he "shouldn't wait for a black child to be killed" before he took action...
...A group of parents immediately complained that Catholic students ought not to be using a Protestant Bible—and the response forms an interesting contrast...
...It was all 'You black folks are too sensitive, you're going overboard.'" Well, mightn't the bishop have had a point...
...The plea of invincible ignorance seems just about the only hope for Catholic parents in a southern Louisiana town who succeeded this summer in banning from a local Catholic high school the work of the woman widely held to be the greatest Catholic fiction writer of twentieth-century America...
...This is about racial tension...
...The school asked him to give a summer reading list to his incoming juniors...
...In fact, the bishop's edict goes further...
...In these stories, the author, a white woman who lived in rural Georgia until her death from lupus in 1964 at age thirty-nine, exposes and condemns the hellish pride that leads these characters to dismiss black people as "niggers" and "pickaninnies...
...c^^sa finita est...
...That was the wrong thing to ask...
...Mark Twain...
...But Father O'Leary says neither he nor, to the best of his knowledge, any of the parents have read O'Connor's stories—^which doesn't bother him...
...That is simply a matter of fact and should be respected in so far as is possible...
...How did an ill-informed but insistent minority manage to impose its bumptious will on an entire school— with the chancery's backing...
...No one can tell another person whether or not he or she should be offended," the bishop wrote...
...It is he who decreed that no book stained by the n-word may ever be taught: Lafayette est lociuta...
...Opelousas Catholic's chancellor undertook to explain to the complaining parents in great detail why they were wrong, and the parents backed down...
...Black authors Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, even local writer Ernest J. Gaines...
Vol. 5 • September 2000 • No. 48
