“I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace.”   

       Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners  

       In the story A Good Man is Hard to Find, a grandmother is traveling with her son and daughter-in-law, their two children, and her cat. She presents herself as a very prim and proper Southern woman, dressed elegantly: “her collars and cuffs were white organdy trimmed with lace and at her neckline she had pinned a purple spray of cloth violets containing a sachet. In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady.” Ironically, this description indirectly shows just how far the grandmother’s goodness reaches. Everything she does is self-serving and often deceitful. At one point, the family makes a stop to eat, and while there, at the restaurant, her exchange with the owner and his wife makes plain just how much she thinks the world has gone to hell. She bemoans the fact that nobody can be as good as she thinks she is. Their conversation is spent commiserating about how “a good man is hard to find.” 

       During their conversation, the owner’s wife tells the family of a convict on the loose, known as the Misfit, and how their establishment would be just the place he would come to rob. Shortly after the family leaves, the foreshadowed meeting takes place and the grandmother along with her son and wife and children come face to face with the Misfit and his sidekicks. To fully appreciate the significance of this meeting, it’s important to keep in mind two guiding principles in O’Connor’s life and writing. One is that she believed the world is “under construction,” that evil is constantly tempting good and placing man in a position, with his free will, of having to choose between the two. Repeatedly, in her critical writings, O’Connor talks about a “moment of grace” and some “gesture” in which the grace is offered, one that is “unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the story lies.” It is in this confrontation between the grandmother and her family and the Misfit and his sidekicks that both of these elements, the grace and the gesture in which it’s received or rejected, are placed before us. It’s in this momentary, seemingly random, strange event, that the grandmother experiences a painful revelation: that not only is she in some ways responsible for the Misfit, who has no sense of social proprieties and can kill people with no pangs of conscience, but she is intimately tied to him.  

       Can we find in the violence that occurs in this scene the “gesture” and the offerings of a grace and its reception or rejection? And if so, can we understand what it means for the grandmother, her soul, and for the Misfit? Can we find this “gesture” and the possibilities for receiving or turning away from the graces offered in “Greenleaf,” “Revelation,” or “Heart of the Park,” or any other of her short stories?