The Displaced Person

David Griffith

Reading Flannery O’Connor in the age of Islamophobia.

Illustration: June Glasson, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux

At a little more than fifty pages, “The Displaced Person” is one of Flannery
O’Connor’s least anthologized stories—and if you share her beliefs about
what she called “topical” stories, it’s also one of the most problematic.
O’Connor was wary of stories that focused squarely and perhaps
sentimentally on social issues. Her own “Everything that Rises Must
Converge,” featuring a bigoted white woman riding a newly integrated bus,
was, she feared, just such a story—though in a letter to a friend she
confided that she “got away with it … because I say a plague on
everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”

In the very same letter, O’Connor writes that “the topical is poison,”
lambasting Eudora Welty’s famous story “Where Is the Voice Coming
From,” written from the point of view of the man who assassinated the civil
rights leader Medgar Evers. “It’s the kind of story that the more you think
about it the less satisfactory it gets,” O’Connor wrote. “What I hate most is
its being in the New Yorker and all of the stupid Yankee liberals smacking
their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland.”

Like many in the South, O’Connor abhorred racism but was slow to
embrace integration, feeling that to rush things would lead to more
violence. This stance may have been part and parcel of her attitude
toward topical writing. To be topical, she thought, was to risk arguing for
social changes that couldn’t be brought about by mere idealism, but by
the hard, messy, and sometimes violent work of transforming hearts.

And yet “The Displaced Person” is undeniably topical, right down to its
title—and its topic makes it peculiarly resonant at present, when governors
are vowing to refuse Syrian refugees and Donald Trump has outlined an
arrantly bigoted plan to bar all Muslims from entering the U.S.

O’Connor takes her title from the Displaced Persons Act, which, between
1948 and 1952, permitted the immigration of some four hundred thousand
European refugees into the United States. President Truman signed the
bill with “very great reluctance” for what he saw as its discriminatory
policy toward Jews and Catholics: the Act stipulated that, in order to be
eligible, one must have entered Germany, Italy, or Austria before
December 22, 1945, which, according to Truman, ruled out 90 percent of
the remaining Jewish people displaced by the war. Similarly excluded were
the many Catholics who’d fled their largely Communist countries after the
December 22 deadline.

“The bad points of the bill are numerous,” Truman wrote. “Together they
form a pattern of discrimination and intolerance wholly inconsistent with
the American sense of justice.” He called the decision to enforce the
December 1945 deadline “inexplicable, except upon the abhorrent ground
of intolerance.”

Despite the bill’s restrictions and limits, the public was deeply concerned,
as some Americans are now, with the possibility that “subversives” might
infiltrate the country under the Act—and that the huge influx of refugees
would take jobs from American workers.
According to Brad Gooch’s biography Flannery, the Matysiaks, a Polish
family of four who would become the basis for O’Connor’s story, arrived in
rural Georgia in 1951, having been eligible for immigration under the Act.
They settled in the tiny town of Gray, Georgia, and they met Regina
O’Connor, Flannery’s mother, at Sacred Heart Church in Milledgeville, the
only Catholic Church for miles. By the fall of 1953 they’d moved into a
three-room shack at Andalusia, the O’Connor homestead. Their new home
had a stove, but no indoor plumbing, and its curtains were made from feed
sacks—not much different from the houses James Agee and Walker Evans
had documented nearly twenty years earlier in Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men.

The Matysiaks were not a complete anomaly. The pastor of Sacred Heart,
Father John Toomey, had worked through the Catholic Resettlement
Commission, an international organization created by Pope Pius XII, to
help other refugee families settle in the area. But O’Connor, who didn’t like
to travel much because of her lupus, drew her inspiration from those who
were closest to her—and so the Matysiaks, having settled almost literally
in her backyard, captured her imagination.

The first image in “The Displaced Person” is news-reel footage of “a small

room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms
and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a
knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised
clutching nothing”: victims, the reader should intuit, of the Holocaust. The
image is stunning, and the story’s protagonist, Mrs. Shortley, reacts to it
with a deep fear, setting the tone for the rest of the story. Whatever evil
had caused the death of all those people, she thinks, has infected these
refugees, and is now in danger of infecting America:

Watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden
intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have
carried all those murderous ways over the water with them directly to
this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to
them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to
 others? The width and breadth of this question nearly shook her. Her
stomach trembled as if there had been a slight quake in the heart of
the mountain and automatically she moved down from her elevation
and went forward to be introduced to them, as if she meant to find out
at once what they were capable of.

The word Holocaust is never used in the story—nor are Jew and Hitler. In
the absence of specificity, the mass murder feels somehow even more
mysterious, senseless, and unspeakable. But it also puts the reader more
firmly in Mrs. Shortley’s perspective: completely lacking any context that
would move her to see this heap of bodies as victims, as human, as
people like her.

Mrs. Shortley’s husband is the caretaker and general handyman on a farm

owned by the widow Mrs. McIntyre. The Shortleys oversee Astor and Sulk,
two black men who have been hired hands for some time. Mrs. Shortley
treats them like wayward children—in her eyes, they should be handled in
a way that’s consistent with “their limitations.”

But trouble begins when Mrs. Shortley dies of a stroke and a refugee
named Mr. Guizac, known throughout the story as only the Displaced
Person, threatens to upset the social order. With Mr. Shortley gone
attending to the funeral arrangements, Mrs. McIntyre hires the Displaced
Person to assume authority over Astor and Sulk; they complain bitterly
that he’s working them too hard. The rest of the story focuses on Mrs.
McIntyre and her struggle to get rid of the Guizacs. “I will not have my
niggers upset,” Mrs. McIntyre says, confronting the Displaced Person. “I
cannot run this place without my niggers. I can run it without you.”

The story is full of such barbs, suggesting that the perceived racial
pecking order ultimately overrules any notions of Christian charity. “I am
not responsible for the world’s misery,” Mrs. McIntyre thinks to herself as
she scolds Guizac.

*
“The Displaced Person” brims with overt criticism of Christian racists—but
there seems to have been an even deeper personal and spiritual need for
O’Connor to write about the Matysiaks. In December 1953, just a few
months after the displaced family arrived, O’Connor received a Christmas
gift from Catholic Worker magazine, the publication arm of the movement
founded by the Catholic activist Dorothy Day. The gift was a prayer card
printed with “A Prayer to Saint Raphael”:

O Raphael, lead us towards those we are waiting for, those who are
waiting for us! Raphael, Angel of Happy Meetings, lead us by the hand
towards those we are looking for!

. . . Lonely and tired, crushed by the separations and sorrows of earth,

we feel the need of calling to you and of pleading for the protection of
your wings, so that we may not be as strangers in the Province of Joy,
all ignorant of the concerns of our country.

According to Gooch’s biography, the prayer became a favorite of

O’Connor’s, eventually working its way so deep into her imagination that it
inspired some of the rhetoric and imagery in the final section of “The
Displaced Person.” Mr. Shortley, feeling that his job might be at risk,
begins complaining to Mrs. McIntyre, asking her why the Displaced Person
should be afforded better treatment than someone who had “fought and
bled and died in the service of his native land.”

O’Connor is so often remembered as a misanthropic homebody—but she

was comforted by the idea of a God that gave preferential treatment to the
most vulnerable among us. The very concept of displacement—to be
without a community to care for you—rises to the surface in this story,
and, as in much of O’Connor’s work, ostensibly Christian characters lose
the courage of their convictions.

When a priest tries to calm Mrs. McIntyre down, to help her see the lack of
charity in her thinking, he evokes a version of John 3:16: “When God sent
his Only Begotten Son … ” McIntyre interrupts with words that shake the
foundations of the story:
 “Father Flynn!” she said in a voice that made him jump.

“I want to talk to you about something serious!”

The skin under the old man’s right eye flinched.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she said and glared fiercely, “Christ was just
another D.P.”

Reading O’Connor’s work with broader notions of displacement in mind,

you begin to see it in nearly every story, and even in her personal life. The
traveling Bible salesman in “A Good Country People,” the one-armed con
man in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” the senile and disoriented
Civil War vet in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”—and especially the
misfit and grandmother from O’Connor’s most famous story, “A Good Man
Is Hard to Find,” the former an escaped convict who cannot recollect “all
he done to deserve the punishment he got” and the latter a “good
Christian woman” who reflects sentimentally on the old order of the
South, an order that is now, in one of O’Connor’s most hilarious jokes,
“Gone with the Wind.”

All of these characters are displaced, if not literally, then figuratively.

They’re either morally rudderless, existentially lost, or both; they cannot
accept that the world has changed and passed them by. These displaced
persons are dark agents of change. Their pitifulness causes them, and the
reader, to confront the radical command to love our neighbor as
ourselves, to be like the Good Samaritan who sets aside deeply engrained
bigotry to minister to the needy.

But the Guizacs’ displacement is different. Mr. Guizac and his family are
unique in O’Connor’s fiction in that they are the only Catholics, and they’re
the most blameless of any of O’Connor’s displaced characters. They are in
need of refuge and willing to work hard to earn their keep. The judgment
they confront is the result of what the theologian Kelly Johnson calls “the
fear of beggars,” a distrust and anger that stems from all that the indigent
make us contemplate in ourselves: our deficiencies, our brokenness.
These encounters end, at best, in neglect, but they can also lead to
violence.

As she grew older, O’Connor became more and more displaced herself.
While her friends and contemporaries were winning grants and traveling
abroad, she was marooned in Georgia. Her only romantic relationship—at
least the only one we know about—was with Erik Langkjaer, a Norwegian
traveling book salesman, likely the inspiration for Manley Pointer in “Good
Country People.” He visited her at Andalusia whenever he was in the area,
bringing with him news of the outside world. He had lived in New York and
had an aunt closely connected to Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker,
which is how O’Connor came to subscribe to their magazine. In a letter
recounting one of her visits with Langkjaer, O’Connor writes, “The only
conclusion we came to about [ministering to the poor] was that Charity is
not understandable … Strange people turn up.”

Indeed, Christian charity is a constant challenge. Its necessity arises

not from any soggy sense of guilt or social responsibility but from Jesus’s
description of the final judgment, found in the twenty-fifth chapter of the
Gospel of Matthew. Only those who fed the hungry, gave water to the
thirsty, clothed the naked, welcomed the stranger, cared for the ill, and
visited the imprisoned will be gain eternal life. And yet an overwhelming
number of Americans, if polls are still to be believed, consider themselves
Christian and believe America to be a Christian nation, one where the
nativity scene is as recognizable as the Stars and Stripes: a tableau
intended to remind even nonbelievers of the virtue of giving shelter to the
weary traveler.

Many of our self-styled Christian leaders would do well to seek out “The
Displaced Person,” which, like O’Connor’s best work, carries a dark moral
force without recourse to didacticism or sentimentality. In its dogged
focus on the obligation of Christians to help the oppressed, the story
shrugs off its topical elements; O’Connor dwells not on the abominations
of the Third Reich but on the long shadow cast by this kind of evil. In this
way, Mrs. Shortley was, in a sense, correct when she looked upon that pile
of bodies in the news reel—violence is a contagion, as the late René Girard
theorized, begetting more violence, which begets more violence, and on
and on and on.

Dave Griffith is the author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of
Violence in America. He lives in Northern Michigan, where he directs the
creative-writing program at Interlochen Center for the Arts.