Everything That Rises Must Converge Afterword by Benny Andrews

How do I start describing why I chose to illustrate a story by Flannery O’Connor? I knew I couldn’t just approach doing something from her work as if it were a typical illustration commission. I had to face up to the deeper meaning of not only her roots, but also mine.

First of all, we existed, during her lifetime, in two very different worlds; in fact in many ways two opposing worlds. This woman was to us, the African-Americans of her time, a “white lady.” We spoke of them “white ladies” like one would speak of unworldly creatures, like moss growing high up on tall trees out of reach of mere earthlings, us. To many of her kind we weren’t even mere earthlings; we were just a few years and steps removed from being living farm equipment. Whenever we’d meet her kind on the streets of my hometown Madison (which was 30 some miles from her hometown of Milledgeville), racial customs demanded that we step aside and not dare to look up and connect with their eyes.

This racist and segregated culture, the same one that she and I lived in, had erected a wall that we Afro-Americans were so effectively kept outside of that it was a crime to even peck inside. Like two never-touching parallel lines, it was ordained that she and I would die like we lived, forever having nothing to do with each other’s dreams or aspirations.

No, Flannery O’Connor would not have given me an audience during her lifetime. I would have never been invited to her home or probably been given much time to say anything of significance at her lectures. She recounts her response when she was asked to see James Baldwin in one of her letters.

“No I can’t see James Baldwin in Georgia … I observe the traditions of the society I feed on it’s only fair. Might as well expect a mule to fly as me to see James Baldwin in Georgia.” April 25, 1959. (Letters of Flannery O’Connor, p. 329)

In another letter dated May 21, 1964 she writes, “About the Negroes, the kind I don’t like is the philosophying prophesying pontificating kind, the James Baldwin kind. Very ignorant but never silent. Baldwin can tell us what it feels like to be a Negro in Harlem but he tries to tell us everything else too.”

I, the Negro boy, who was forced to step aside for the “white ladies” of her sort was seeing, thinking, and gathering inventory for the future. As I moved out into the bigger world I resisted “the society that she fed on.” I became the kind of Negro that she didn’t like, the James Baldwin kind, a militant.

I’ll say up front, Flannery O’Connor is in my mind a great writer. She depicted things bigger than the physical world she lived in. Nevertheless, she also retained a lot of the very worst that she lived in. The truth is that the society that she lived in was sustained by cruelty, oppression and murder. It was an inhumane world and to paraphrase one of her story titles, it was “an artificial white made world.”

Five years after she was born I was born. The Negro boy and the white lady shared the same sunrises and sunsets, the changing seasons, and the red clay of Madison and Milledgeville. We also both dreamt beyond our environs. But the news that we read in the Atlanta papers meant different things to us. The “troubles between the races” as it was often discreetly put in the papers, didn’t say the same thing to her that it said to me. The stories about Negroes being beaten for not observing the segregation laws meant different things to us. The “mixing of the races up North” meant different things to us. What we hoped for and dreamt of were different.

“So much depends on what you have an ear for,” O’Connor wrote in a letter dated July, 1957. “And I don’t think you can have much of an ear for when you’re over 20–that is, for a new kind of talk and life. The advantages and disadvantages of being a Southern writer can be endlessly debated, but the fact remains that if you are, you are.”

I agree with Flannery O’Connor, and all I’d have to do is substitute artist for writer.

So, why did I take this dare? I could use some worn-out metaphors to explain the reasons. I could say that when you play with fire you risk being burned, or when you swim in deep water you risk drowning. But the reason is that I’ve looked into O’Connor’s works, and I’ve found more than the superficial, much more. She confronts the leaping flames and churning waters. I’ve looked into her works, and I have found revelations.

Reading her letters is a unique experience. I personally think they are a must if one really wants to understand her writing. In them she reveals as much about the culture she lives in as she does about herself. It is these kinds of revelations both in her letters and her stories where we do share a lot in common.

Now I am challenged to bring those two parallel lines together. I see her writings to be so much bigger and more everlasting than her society’s traditions. Like any person attempting to be creative,to seize anything that can be of use in forging a work that is bigger and more significant than the ordinary, I see her work as being of use in making a more powerful force than our two parallel lines make. The portions of the story that I chose to illustrate originate in O’Connor’s deteriorating old world, one that would end in a death that would haunt her descendants. Those choices make this volume a convergence, and it is my hope that they rise and in their rising converge two different worlds.

I have been challenged to gather up all of the volatile elements that O’Connor plies her characters with and make visual images of them: the white son, a sharpened sword with an elegantly carved handle in a monographed sheath held by a reluctant and confused warrior; the white mother, a misshapen bundle of addled confusion formed into a hodgepodge collection of myths; the black mother, an iron horse loaded with steaming and burning embers chugged into a pumping, puffing engine that refuses to use its brakes; and the little boy, an assimilation of many imported and Americanized cultures that are almost indefinable because of their having as many contradictions as they have collaborative elements.

The final illustration, like the ending of O’Connor’s story, remains open-ended. Neither offers definitive solutions. The Negro and the white lady have met down at the crossroads, but that’s just where they are, at the crossroads. It is up to the reader of the story and the viewer of my art work to look at two Southerners and wonder, wonder, and hopefully wonder more.

Benny Andrews