One of our finest explorations of America’s racial divide is a short story with an unprintable title. It uses that racist putdown that recently cost Paula Deen her living. The Georgia writer from the late ‘50s, Flannery O’Connor, titled her story “The Artificial N-----.” Not that O’Connor herself uses the word; it’s taken from the dialogue of the characters, a Mr. Head and his custodial grandson, Nelson. These two, riding a train in from the sticks to the big city of Atlanta for a once-in-a-lifetime visit, get lost in a suburb and come across “the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over. ... The Negro was about Nelson’s size and he was pitched forward at an unsteady angle because the putty that held him to the wall had cracked. ... He was meant to look happy because his mouth was stretched up at the corners but the chipped eye and the angle he was cocked at gave him a wild look of misery instead.”
WRITING SIDEWAYS
The plaster figure itself displays the artificiality of prejudice. In contrast, the story repeatedly shows Nelson amazed to discover that, in spite of his grandfather’s two-dimensional understanding of “n-----s,” black people are, in fact, real people. The story turns on Mr. Head’s pride. He is wise and moral, he thinks, and he takes Nelson to Atlanta to show him immorality so that Nelson will never wish to go back. On the train, Nelson sees a black person for the first time: “’You said they were black,’ he said in an angry voice. ‘You never said they were tan. How do you expect me to know anything when you don’t tell me right?’ ‘You’re just ignorant is all,’ Mr. Head said.”
In a piercing look at the way the young are bullied into the biases of their elders, O’Connor shows how Nelson’s anger at being misled and then put down by Mr. Head is redirected against the minority group: “He felt that the Negro had deliberately walked down the aisle in order to make a fool of him and he hated him with a fierce raw fresh hate; and also, he understood now why his grandfather disliked them.” To admit to the irrationality and indefensibility of race hatred is to betray one’s elders, so instead it becomes fuel to power the hatred into the next generation.
When the pair gets lost in a black neighborhood, Nelson caroms from fear to amazement to fervent desire for the exotic beauty he sees there. He’s shocked to find that “Negroes ... were passing, going about their business just as if they had been white.” The subtle, sideways approach O’Connor takes rescues the story from any finger-wagging moralism.
BETRAYAL
In fact, the story is not about race directly. Nelson runs ahead of his grandfather and accidentally slams into an elderly woman, knocking her to the pavement. When Mr. Head arrives at the scene, Nelson, terrified, clings to his legs for protection. The police have been called. Mr. Head is overcome by confusion and fear. “He stared straight ahead at the women who were massed in their fury like a solid wall to block his escape. ‘This is not my boy,’ he said. ‘I never seen him before.’
“He felt Nelson’s fingers fall out of his flesh.”
The rest of the story is heart-wrenching. “The boy was not of a forgiving nature but this was the first time he had ever had anything to forgive. Mr. Head had never disgraced himself before. After two more blocks, he turned and called over his shoulder in a high desperately gay voice, ‘Let’s us go get us a Co’Cola somewheres!’ Nelson, with a dignity he had never shown before, turned and stood with his back to his grandfather.”
MERCY
They get lost in the suburb. Mr. Head shouts to a passerby, “Oh Gawd I’m lost! Oh hep me Gawd I’m lost!” Then they arrive at the plaster figure. It becomes the moment of reconciliation. Mr. Head’s betrayal of Nelson recapitulates the societal betrayal that is racism. “They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy. Mr. Head had never known before what mercy felt like because he had been too good to deserve any, but he felt he knew now. He looked at Nelson and understood that he must say something to the child to show that he was still wise and in the look the boy returned he saw a hungry need for that assurance. Nelson’s eyes seemed to implore him to explain once and for all the mystery of existence.”