Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch

Author:Brad Gooch
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Flannery, 20th century, O'Connor, General, Literary, American - 20th century, American, Literary Criticism, Biography, Authors, Biography & Autobiography, Milledgeville (Ga.), BIO000000, Women
ISBN: 9780316000666
Publisher: Little, Brown and Co.
Published: 2009-04-15T20:21:27+00:00

WITHIN WEEKS of this return from Tennessee, Flannery was inspired by a newly settled family of tenant farmers at Andalusia to begin work on the story that she would read aloud in the Cold Chimneys library on her next visit, in December. The Matysiaks, a Polish “displaced family,” consisting of Jan, the father; Zofia, the mother; twelve-year-old Alfred; and his younger sister, Hedwig, arrived in the fall of 1953. These Roman Catholic outsiders, speaking in accents more impenetrable than, but reminiscent of, Erik Langkjaer’s, drew from O’Connor a response both moral and comic. In newsy letters to the Cheneys, echoing her story, she persisted in referring to Mr. Matysiak, like an allegorical character, by the flat moniker “the D.P.,” for “displaced person.”

Having arrived in Georgia from West Germany, the Matysiak family had just spent six years as refugees, following the father’s incarceration during World War II in a German labor farm as a prisoner of war. “They had what were called ‘camps’ for people living in Germany who were not natives,” recalls Al Matysiak. “We moved from camp to camp.” A “jack-of-all-trades,” the father’s application to immigrate to the United States was finally accepted in 1951, and they wound up in Gray, Georgia. They traveled twenty miles each Sunday morning to the nearest Catholic church, Sacred Heart, where they met Mrs. O’Connor. By the fall of 1953, alert to reasonably priced labor, Regina had them resettled at Andalusia, and Alfred enrolled in Sacred Heart School, his presence at a school service noted in the Union-Recorder: “The boys in white marched in procession. Alfred Matysiak was the leader of the boys.”

The Matysiaks were hardly an unusual case. Life magazine reported in July 1945, “In the American and British zones of liberated Europe there had been discovered about 6,700,000 Displaced Persons. . . . More Poles, Balts and Yugoslavs elect not to go home, fearing the Communist domination of their fatherlands. In one group of 3,500 Poles, it was reported, only 19 chose to go back to Poland now.” The Displaced Persons Act of 1948, signed by President Truman, allowed entry of 400,000 of these DPs over a four-year period, against the opposition of many conservative Southern congressmen, including Texas Representative Ed Gossett, who viewed them as “subversives, revolutionists, and crackpots of all colors and hues.” Because half were Roman Catholics, Bishop William Mulloy testified at a 1948 congressional hearing, “It is our Christian duty and moral obligation to remove the displaced persons from their present plight.”

Milledgeville already had its share of such displaced families, with the active involvement of Father John Toomey, working through the Catholic Resettlement Commission. The first of these immigrants, the Jeryczuks, with two children, had arrived in July 1949, rating a feature story and picture in the Union-Recorder: “Displaced Family Arrives on Farm from Poland.” After briefly stopping at the parish house of Father Toomey, they had been escorted to a three-room shack on the Thornton dairy farm. Preparing in December 1951 for another displaced family that never finally moved to Andalusia, Regina and Mrs.

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