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Good Country People
by Flannery O'Connor
Besides the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone, Mrs. Freeman had two
others, forward and reverse, that she used for all her human dealings. Her forward
expression was steady and driving like the advance of a heavy truck. Her eyes never
swerved to left or right but turned as the story turned as if they followed a yellow line
down the center of it. She seldom used the other expression because it was not often
necessary for her to retract a statement, but when she did, her face came to a complete
stop, there was an almost imperceptible movement of her black eyes, during which they
seemed to be receding, and then the observer would see that Mrs. Freeman, though she
might stand there as real as several grain sacks thrown on top of each other, was no
longer there in spirit. As for getting anything across to her when this was the case, Mrs.
Hopewell had given it up. She might talk her head off. Mrs. Freeman could never be
brought to admit herself wrong to any point. She would stand there and if she could be
brought to say anything, it was something like, “Well, I wouldn’t of said it was and I
wouldn’t of said it wasn’t” or letting her gaze range over the top kitchen shelf where
there was an assortment of dusty bottles, she might remark, “I see you ain’t ate many of
them figs you put up last summer.”
They carried on their most important business in the kitchen at breakfast. Every morning
Mrs. Hopewell got up at seven o’clock and lit her gas heater and Joy’s. Joy was her
daughter, a large blonds girl who had an artificial leg. Mrs. Hopewell thought of her as a
child though she was thirty-two years old and highly educated. Joy would get up while
her mother was eating and lumber into the bathroom and slam the door, and before long,
Mrs. Freeman would arrive at the back door. Joy would hear her mother call, “Come on
in,” and then they would talk for a while in low voices that were indistinguishable in the
bathroom. By the time Joy came in, they had usually finished the weather report and
were on one or the other of Mrs. Freeman’s daughters, Glynese or Carramae. Joy called
them Glycerin and Caramel. Glynese, a redhead, was eighteen and had many admirers;
Carramae, a blonde, was only fifteen but already married and pregnant. She could not
keep anything on her stomach. Every morning Mrs. Freeman told Mrs. Hopewell how
many times she had vomited since the last report.
Mrs. Hopewell liked to tell people that Glynese and Carramae were two of the finest girls
she knew and that Mrs. Freeman was a lady and that she was never ashamed to take her
anywhere or introduce her to anybody they might meet. Then she would tell how she had
happened to hire the Freemans in the first place and how they were a godsend to her and
how she had had them four years. The reason for her keeping them so long was that they
were not trash. They were good country people. She had telephoned the man whose
name they had given as reference and he had told her that Mr. Freeman was a good
farmer but that his wife was the nosiest woman ever to walk the earth. “She’s got to be
into everything,” the man said. “If she don’t get there before the dust settles, you can bet
she’s dead, that’s all. She’ll want to know all your business. I can stand him real good,”
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he had said, “but me nor my wife neither could have stood that woman one more minute
on this place.” That had put Mrs. Hopewell off for a few days.
She had hired them in the end because there were no other applicants but she had made
up her mind beforehand exactly how she would handle the woman. Since she was the
type who had to be into everything, then, Mrs. Hopewell had decided, she would not only
let her be into everything, she would see to it that she was into everything – she would
give her the responsibility of everything, she would put her in charge. Mrs. Hopewell
had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people’s in such a
constructive way that she had kept them four years.
Nothing is perfect. This was one of Mrs. Hopewell’s favorite sayings. Another was:
that is life! And still another, the most important, was: well, other people have their
opinions too. She would make these statements, usually at the table, in a tone of gentle
insistence as if no one held them but her, and the large hulking Joy, whose constant
outrage had obliterated every expression from her face, would stare just a little to the side
of her, her eyes icy blue, with the look of someone who had achieved blindness by an act
of will and means to keep it.
When Mrs. Hopewell said to Mrs. Freeman that life was like that, Mrs. Freeman would
say, “I always said so myself.” Nothing had been arrived at by anyone that had not first
been arrived at by her. She was quicker than Mr. Freeman. When Mrs. Hopewell said to
her after they had been on the place for a while, “You know, you’re the wheel behind the
wheel,” and winked, Mrs. Freeman had said, “I know it. I’ve always been quick. It’s
some that are quicker than others.”
“Everybody is different,” Mrs. Hopewell said.
“Yes, most people is,” Mrs. Freeman said.
“It takes all kinds to make the world.”
“I always said it did myself.”
The girl was used to this kind of dialogue for breakfast and more of it for dinner;
sometimes they had it for supper too. When they had no guest they ate in the kitchen
because that was easier. Mrs. Freeman always managed to arrive at some point during
the meal and to watch them finish it. She would stand in the doorway if it were summer
but in the winter she would stand with one elbow on top of the refrigerator and look
down at them, or she would stand by the gas heater, lifting the back of her skirt slightly.
Occasionally she would stand against the wall and roll her head from side to side. At no
time was she in any hurry to leave. All this was very trying on Mrs. Hopewell but she
was a woman of great patience. She realized that nothing is perfect and that in the
Freemans she had good country people and that if, in this day and age, you get good
country people, you had better hang onto them.
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She had had plenty of experience with trash. Before the Freemans she had averaged one
tenant family a year. The wives of these farmers were not the kind you would want to be
around you for very long. Mrs. Hopewell, who had divorced her husband long ago,
needed someone to walk over the fields with her; and when Joy had to be impressed for
these services, her remarks were usually so ugly and her face so glum that Mrs. Hopewell
would say, “If you can’t come pleasantly, I don’t want you at all,” to which the girl,
standing square and rigid-shouldered with her neck thrust slightly forward, would reply,
“If you want me, here I am – LIKE I AM.”
Mrs. Hopewell excused this attitude because of the leg (which had been shot off in a
hunting accident when Joy was ten). It was hard for Mrs. Hopewell to realize that her
child was thirty-two now and that for more than twenty years she had had only one leg.
She thought of her still as a child because it tore her heart to think instead of the poor
stout girl in her thirties who had never danced a step or had any normal good times. Her
name was really Joy but as soon as she was twenty-one and away from home, she had
had it legally changed. Mrs. Hopewell was certain that she had thought and thought until
she had hit upon the ugliest name in any language. Then she had gone and had the
beautiful name, Joy, changed without telling her mother until after she had done it. Her
legal name was Hulga.
When Mrs. Hopewell thought the name, Hulga, she thought of the broad blank hull of a
battleship. She would not use it. She continued to call her Joy to which the girl
responded but in a purely mechanical way.
Hulga had learned to tolerate Mrs. Freeman who saved her from taking walks with her
mother. Even Glynese and Carramae were useful when they occupied attention that
might otherwise have been directed at her. At first she had thought she could not stand
Mrs. Freeman for she had found it was not possible to be rude to her. Mrs. Freeman
would take on strange resentments and for days together she would be sullen but the
source of her displeasure was always obscure; a direct attack, a positive leer, blatant
ugliness to her face – these never touched her. And without warning one day, she began
calling her Hulga.
She did not call her that in front of Mrs. Hopewell who would have been incensed but
when she and the girl happened to be out of the house together, she would say something
and add the name Hulga to the end of it, and the big spectacled Joy-Hulga would scowl
and redden as if her privacy had been intruded upon. She considered the name her
personal affair. She had arrived at it first purely on the basis of its ugly sound and then
the full genius of its fitness had struck her. She had a vision of the name working like the
ugly sweating Vulcan who stayed in the furnace and to whom, presumably, the goddess
had to come when called. She saw it as the name of her highest creative act. One of her
major triumphs was that her mother had not been able to turn her dust into Joy, but the
greater one was that she had been able to turn it herself into Hulga. However, Mrs.
Freeman’s relish for using the name only irritated her. It was as if Mrs. Freeman’s beady
steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact.
Something about her seemed to fascinate Mrs. Freeman and then one day Hulga realized
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that it was the artificial leg. Mrs. Freeman had a special fondness for the details of secret
infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children. Of diseases, she preferred the
lingering or incurable. Hulga had heard Mrs. Hopewell give her the details of the hunting
accident, how the leg had been literally blasted off, how she had never lost
consciousness. Mrs. Freeman could listen to it any time as if it had happened an hour
ago.
When Hulga stumped into the kitchen in the morning (she could walk without making the
awful noise but she made it – Mrs. Hopewell was certain – because it was ugly-
sounding), she glanced at them and did not speak. Mrs. Hopewell would be in her red
kimono with her hair tied around her head in rags. She would be sitting at the table,
finishing her breakfast and Mrs. Freeman would be hanging by her elbow outward from
the refrigerator, looking down at the table. Hulga always put her eggs on the stove to boil
and then stood over them with her arms folded, and Mrs. Hopewell would look at her – a
kind of indirect gaze divided between her and Mrs. Freeman – and would think that if she
would only keep herself up a little, she wouldn’t be so bad looking. There was nothing
wrong with her face that a pleasant expression wouldn’t help. Mrs. Hopewell said that
people who looked on the bright side of things would be beautiful even if they were not.
Whenever she looked at Joy this way, she could not help but feel that it would have been
better if the child had not taken the Ph.D. It had certainly not brought her out any and
now that she had it, there was no more excuse for her to go to school again. Mrs.
Hopewell thought it was nice for girls to go to school to have a good time but Joy had
“gone through.” Anyhow, she would not have been strong enough to go again. The
doctors had told Mrs. Hopewell that with the best of care, Joy might see forty-five. She
had a weak heart. Joy had made it plain that if it had not been for this condition, she
would be far from these red hills and good country people. She would be in a university
lecturing to people who knew what she was talking about. And Mrs. Hopewell could
very well picture here there, looking like a scarecrow and lecturing to more of the same.
Here she went about all day in a six-year-old skirt and a yellow sweat shirt with a faded
cowboy on a horse embossed on it. She thought this was funny; Mrs. Hopewell thought
it was idiotic and showed simply that she was still a child. She was brilliant but she
didn’t have a grain of sense. It seemed to Mrs. Hopewell that every year she grew less
like other people and more like herself – bloated, rude, and squint-eyed. And she said
such strange things! To her own mother she had said – without warning, without excuse,
standing up in the middle of a meal with her face purple and her mouth half full –
“Woman! Do you ever look inside? Do you ever look inside and see what you are not?
God!” she had cried sinking down again and staring at her plate, “Malebranche was
right: we are not our own light. We are not our own light!” Mrs. Hopewell had no idea
to this day what brought that on. She had only made the remark, hoping Joy would take
it in, that a smile never hurt anyone. The girl had taken the Ph.D. in philosophy and this
left Mrs. Hopewell at a complete loss. You could say, “My daughter is a nurse,” or “My
daughter is a school teacher,” or even, “My daughter is a chemical engineer.” You could
not say, “My daughter is a philosopher.” That was something that had ended with the
Greeks and Romans. All day Joy sat on her neck in a deep chair, reading. Sometimes
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she went for walks but she didn’t like dogs or cats or birds or flowers or nature or nice
young men. She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.
One day Mrs. Hopewell had picked up one of the books the girl had just put down and
opening it at random, she read, “Science, on the other hand, has to assert its soberness
and seriousness afresh and declare that it is concerned solely with what-is. Nothing –
how can it be for science anything but a horror and a phantasm? If science is right, then
one thing stands firm: science wishes to know nothing of nothing. Such is after all the
strictly scientific approach to Nothing. We know it by wishing to know nothing of
Nothing.” These words had been underlined with a blue pencil and they worked on Mrs.
Hopewell like some evil incantation in gibberish. She shut the book quickly and went out
of the room as if she were having a chill.
This morning when the girl came in, Mrs. Freeman was on Carramae. “She thrown up
four times after supper,” she said, “and was up twict in the night after three o’clock.
Yesterday she didn’t do nothing but ramble in the bureau drawer. All she did. Stand up
there and see what she could run up on.”
“She’s got to eat,” Mrs. Hopewell muttered, sipping her coffee, while she watched Joy’s
back at the stove. She was wondering what the child had said to the Bible salesman. She
could not imagine what kind of a conversation she could possibly have had with him.
He was a tall gaunt hatless youth who had called yesterday to sell them a Bible. He had
appeared at the door, carrying a large black suitcase that weighted him so heavily on one
side that he had to brace himself against the door facing. He seemed on the point of
collapse but he said in a cheerful voice, “Good morning, Mrs. Cedars!” and set the
suitcase down on the mat. He was not a bad-looking young man though he had on a
bright blue suit and yellow socks that were not pulled up far enough. He had prominent
face bones and a streak of sticky-looking brown hair falling across his forehead.
“I’m Mrs. Hopewell,” she said.
“Oh!” he said, pretending to look puzzled but with his eyes sparkling, “I saw it said ‘The
Cedars’ on the mailbox so I thought you was Mrs. Cedars!” and he burst out in a pleasant
laugh. He picked up the satchel and under cover of a pant, he fell forward into her hall.
It was rather as if the suitcase had moved first, jerking him after it. “Mrs. Hopewell!” he
said and grabbed her hand. “I hope you are well!” and he laughed again and then all at
once his face sobered completely. He paused and gave her a straight earnest look and
said, “Lady, I’ve come to speak of serious things.”
“Well, come in,” she muttered, none too pleased because her dinner was almost ready.
He came into the parlor and sat down on the edge of a straight chair and put the suitcase
between his feet and glanced around the room as if he were sizing her up by it. Her silver
gleamed on the two sideboards; she decided he had never been in a room as elegant as
this.
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