December 17, 2000 | Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock, AR)
Author: BRET SCHULTE
Page: J1 | Section: J1
OPELOUSAS, La. -- Opelousas Catholic High School lies flat and worn alongside this ragged town's tallest building, St. Landry's Catholic Church. Nearby, a cramped graveyard sits weighted with weather-stained tombs. The scene is given wing by stone angels and the outstretched arms of a dying Jesus, who beckons toward him the march of the holy and the dead--in this case, the Roman Catholics of the South.
In any such procession, some pride of place would fall to Flannery O'Connor, a Georgia-born disciple of deep religious and literary feeling. The much-sung O'Connor, dead at 39 of a wasting illness in 1964, led her tragicomic characters into absurd and often ugly snarls of moral conflict, where truth shines absolute but dimly through pride and ignorance.
Taught with reverence in high schools and colleges across the country, O'Connor's tales have proved aptly evocative of the recent goings-on in Opelousas, where her short stories were removed from the classroom before the start of the school year.
The edict descended from the bishop of the Lafayette diocese, Edward O'Donnell, who passed final judgment on the disputed writer after an uproar over her inclusion in Opelousas Catholic's curriculum. News of the action incited a clamor among literary devotees and watchdog Roman Catholics. The Catholic culture magazine Crisis expressed incredulity: "The only Catholic admitted by mainstream secular critics to the canon of 20th-century American authors--now excised by Catholics. A woman known in her own day for her anti-racism--now placed on the forbidden list on the grounds of racism."
The controversy broke in mid-August, when a gathering of angry black parents protested the assignment of O'Connor's short story "The Artificial Nigger" on a summer reading list for incoming 11th-grade English students.
The story had been assigned by Arsenio Orteza, a 13-year resident in this mostly black community 50 miles west of Baton Rouge. A newcomer to the school, Orteza had previously taught English at the school's cross-town rival, Westminster Christian Academy.
Orteza, 38 years old but so young-looking that only his tie separates him from the senior class, was preparing his classroom for the first day of school when he was called to the principal's office.
There, principal Karen Domengeaux confronted him with the news that his reading list, which included a second O'Connor story, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," had enraged black parents with its inclusion of the word "nigger."
Among the most vocal parents was Patrick Fontenot, an insurance agent whose children are no longer enrolled at Opelousas Catholic. He pulled his two daughters out of the high school three years ago because they "didn't have a social life there."
He makes the point that the percentage of black students has declined steadily since Opelousas Catholic was born of the 1972 marriage between all-white Academy of the Immaculate Conception and all-black Holy Ghost.
Then evenly mixed, the Opelousas Catholic student body is now only 10 percent black. The principal attributes the decline to the high cost of Catholic education. Fontenot blames it on a "tense environment," which he asserts would be easily ignited by the epithets found throughout O'Connor's stories.
Fontenot, who didn't read "The Artificial Nigger" until well after the bishop's decision, says his revulsion at the title was substantiated by the text.
"That book showed no value of literary content," he says. "They tried to say that this book was being written to make fun of racism. Well when I read it, it was a grandfather teaching his son to hate blacks and Jews."
GRIEVANCE TO THE BISHOP
Amplifying the parents' complaint was the Rev. Malcolm O'Leary, the black former chancellor of Opelousas Catholic. He is also pastor of Holy Ghost church, which boasts the largest black congregation of any Catholic parish in the nation, and which has a black Jesus hanging above the altar.
Father O'Leary and several parents -- none of whom had read "The Artificial Nigger"--brought their grievance to Bishop O'Donnell, a white civil-rights veteran with an activist bent dating back to the 1960s.
Without contacting Orteza or principal Domengeaux, the bishop acceded to Father O'Leary's demands. "The Artificial Nigger" was not to be taught.
"But I was still thinking, 'Well I'm sure the bishop will do the right thing,' " Orteza says. "Just because, I figured, 'How could he do anything else?' "
Orteza's reaction was echoed by scores of letter-writing supporters: secular O'Connor fans, practicing Catholics, even clergy. One priest scripted an appeals process that would involve the Vatican--a notion that even the intense Orteza dismisses with a laugh.
It's a rare chuckle from O'Connor supporters, who remain rankled about Opelousas. At Baylor University, O'Connor scholar Ralph Wood labels Bishop O'Donnell's decision "an act of outrageous proportions."
Wood, a practicing Baptist, says O'Connor's value to the American canon is thoroughly demonstrated in the volumes of fiction issued by the Library of America. Founded in 1979, this ongoing publishing effort--funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew Mellon Foundation--is intended as an authoritative, official, preservation of American literature.
"After [William] Faulkner, she is the first 20th century writer to be included," says Wood. He cites her as the great Christian writer of the modern age: "She deepens, stretches, enlarges and above all toughens Christian faith by subjecting it to the most rigorous tests: the test of unbelief, of evil and pain and suffering, the huge social difficulties implied in racism and scientific reductionism, which is the idea that human behavior can be reduced to quantifiable terms."
Orteza never got to plead such a case to the bishop. After his initial visit to the principal's office, he was told to await further word.
"[Then] it was the second day of school and I was paged into the office," he recounts. "This time Mrs. Domengeaux and Father O'Leary were in there, and she wanted me to explain my purpose in assigning the work. I started going into a whole presentation on the importance of O'Connor, and he sat there poker-faced. I went on and on and on for a really long time, and I wasn't going to change a thing. It had already been done."
NO RACIAL INCIDENTS
Domengeaux says there is no record of racial incidents at Opelousas Catholic, a single-story facility ornamented with effigies of the Virgin Mary and the crucified Christ. She makes it a point to comment on the school's many black valedictorians, senior class presidents and homecoming court members in recent years.
White students say race is a non-issue at "OC." Black students say they sometimes feel disenfranchised, though far from discriminated against. One black junior football player shakes his head over the question.
"There's no racist thing here," he says.
But Bishop O'Donnell, a veteran of 1965/s historic Selma-to-Montgomery protest march, isn't buckling. He maintains that nothing is banned at Opelousas Catholic, including O'Connor's short-story collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find , which includes the inflammatory title "The Artificial Nigger."
"I would suggest that anybody who says that needs to get their facts straight," the bishop says. "It was not banned. It's still on the [library] shelves and students can read it if they wish. The question was if it should be on the required list."
Bishop O'Donnell does acknowledge that an unrequired text is going to be an untaught text--thus failing to expose students to an anthology generally regarded as the finest work among O'Connor's two novels and two short-story collections.
An addendum to the decree, which the bishop says was written by Father O'Leary without his knowledge, states that "no similar book" to the contested O'Connor volume can be required reading at Opelousas Catholic. Even with this postscript, the bishop supports his priest's effort to regulate the school's reading material.
What's in dispute here is not O'Connor. It's the use of the word "nigger," which appears in innumerable literary works. If the bishop's decree were executed to its fullest extent, the blacklist would include the Gospel writers of the Second Greatest Story Ever Told: America's.
William Faulkner, Mark Twain and Eudora Welty all used the N-word while unfolding the drama of this country's racial coming-of-age. Black writers as well--among them such luminaries as Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison--have employed such epithets in their renditions of a pained history. Poet Langston Hughes referred to black children as "pickaninnies" in his Harlem-inspired work.
O'Connor unfurls these terms to bring body and soul to her morality tales--which are set in the Jim Crow-era South, often a native land to Biblical righteousness, and paradoxically, racism.
O'Connor's fiction has been hailed as a call to any in need of a forgiving God, white as well as black. In her Catholic vision, all of mankind shoulders the yoke of original sin. Pride, greed, slothfulness--the whole litany of fallen human behavior qualifies. So does racism. But sin is the issue, not the details.
This surprisingly theological approach to the human condition inspired an essay by black novelist Alice Walker, who wrote: "... essential O'Connor is not about race at all, which is why it is so refreshing, coming as it does, out of such a racial culture. If it can be said to be 'about' anything, then it is 'about' prophets and prophecy, 'about' revelation, and 'about' the impact of supernatural grace on human beings who don't have a chance of spiritual growth at all."
Orteza quoted Walker's essay at a school board meeting held in the aftermath of the bishop's decree. He argued that O'Connor's message is one of grace, not race--and that now it will be lost to his Catholic students.
The banning, says the teacher, "is going to further racism among black people, because black people will never know there was a white author who wrote with passionate disapproval about the very sins they suffered from the most. Who knows what these kids must be thinking of the name Flannery O'Connor?"
INDIGNATION AND SHOCK
While the bishop professes to understand full well O'Connor's place in the literary canon as well as the Catholic Church, Father O'Leary admits to no direct familiarity with the acclaimed Catholic writer. He has declined to read the story in question, saying, "That woman can't teach me anything about racism."
Bishop O'Donnell acknowledges initial shock at the indignation of the black priest and parents: "They presented me with one thought, and that was that they objected violently to the inclusion on a required reading list of a short story by Flannery O'Connor titled 'Artificial Nigger.' The reason for their problem was not anything in the short story itself, but simply the word in the title."
This being the case, a deeper theological issue comes into play.
The Catholic Church has always claimed to be the bearer of profound truth, which it bestows upon its adherents through Catholic instruction. Not the least of those conduits is a vast network of parochial grade schools, high schools and colleges that make it America's largest provider of private education.
The Catholic concept of profound truth defines itself as an anti-fundamentalist approach to the understanding of Scripture. It encourages readers to see beyond the details of the Bible, beyond the historical and social influences that may have flavored its rendering--and to peer directly into the core of its message.
The story of Genesis, for example, is not considered a literal record of the first six days of darkness and light. Yes, Earth's inchoate form was shaped by an omnipotent and benevolent God. But whether it happened in six days or 6 billion years is a matter of little importance. Catholics who read the Creation Story should unearth from it God's love for us, and in turn, our inclination to sin against Him.
This in mind, it could be concluded that these aggrieved parents of Opelousas have been failed by their Catholic instruction. The "profound truth" of Flannery O'Connor's stories, evident in "The Artificial Nigger," is that pride and ignorance can coalesce into paralyzing fear and the occurrence of sin.
In the story, the rural Mr. Head, an impoverished white man, takes his orphaned grandson Nelson to big-city Atlanta on the boy's first trip from home. The purpose is clear: to scare the lad into staying a backwater boy for good. Mr. Head tells him before they depart, "You may not like it [Atlanta] a bit. It'll be full of niggers."
O'Connor's narrative continues: "The boy made a face as if he could handle a nigger." The grandfather asserts: "You ain't ever seen a nigger. There hasn't been a nigger in this county since we run that one out 12 years ago."
On the train to Atlanta, Mr. Head explains Nelson's situation to a stranger: "Ignorant as the day he was born, but I mean for him to get his fill once and for all."
Once arrived, the two get lost in the black part of town. Choking with panic, they are finally forced to ask a bystander for directions back to the rail depot. Soon after, the 10 year old collides with an elderly woman and breaks her ankle. In a biblical moment, the righteous Mr. Head denies knowing his grandson. They both flee, disgraced. Soon they come to what O'Connor describes as "the plaster figure of a Negro sitting bent over a low brick fence that curved around a wide lawn. 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. One of his eyes was entirely white and he held a piece of brown watermelon."
The black effigy, in O'Connor's words, expresses "a wild look of misery." Mr. Head and Nelson gaze at the figure "as if they were faced with some great mystery." Mr. Head perceives that "Nelson's eyes seemed to implore him to explain for once and for all the mystery of existence."
Still shamed and embarrassed, "Mr. Head opened his lips to make a lofty statement and heard himself say: 'They ain't got enough real ones here. They got to have an artificial one.' "
Like much of O'Connor's writing, "The Artificial Nigger" is only obliquely concerned with racism. A firm integrationist by 1950s' standards and an admirer of Martin Luther King, as evident in the published volumes of her letters, O'Connor left it to her readers to recognize that blacks and whites are equal partners in the human race.
This short story, one of her personal favorites, moralizes in its conclusion on the damning effects of pride.
On the train home, Mr. Head is gripped in a moment of grace and assesses his deeds with a divine judgment. Clutched with agony, the aging man despairs--and for the first time in his hypocritical existence is awash in the consolation of celestial mercy.
"He saw that no sin was too monstrous for him to claim as his own," the narrative concludes, "and since God loved in proportion as He forgave, he felt ready at that instant to enter Paradise."
For his part, Nelson's face lightens and he mutters: "I'm glad I've went once, but I'll never go again."
In contrast to the assertion of Opelousas' black parents, O'Connor scholar Wood sees "The Artificial Nigger" as "an embodied narrative expression of some human reality or truth, which if it could be expressed in other terms it would. It's a story about the ways in which black people in the American South can serve as signs of grace to a white world."
The image of the sorrowful black statue "becomes a crucifix," Wood says. "It was an emblem of Christ's own suffering. That it has been banned by a Catholic bishop is a sign of either immense ignorance or immense cowardice. Maybe both."
IRONY IN REAL LIFE
It doesn't take a literary scholar to grasp the irony of the O'Connor controversy at Opelousas Catholic. A group of fearful parents, admittedly ignorant of the author they're protesting, have succeeded in shelving a story about the perils of ignorance.
It seems that these parents, like the story's Mr. Head, want to halt their children's worldly education--preferring that they stay willful and uneducated, forever banished to the fate of their elders. It's the very story O'Connor wrote two generations ago.
"Does this event prove the accuracy of her vision?" says Orteza. "Oh yeah."
As the teacher sees it, "Obviously these students can never be introduced to 20th century Southern writing, which is only arguably the most important strain of American writing. So the most I can do is tell them, 'I am not allowed to teach you these things. Here are some critical writings explaining why they are really important. Please read them on your own.'"
Father O'Leary, who served six years as chancellor of Opelousas Catholic, pleads his case on the virtue of charity. If a word offends, he says, it's a sin.
"They don't consider how a black man feels," proclaims the priest, a popular church leader with a master's degree in education.
Whites "feel they can do anything they want to black people," says Father O'Leary. "Not too many people see this, but the main objection is that it's directly opposed to charity. Charity says, 'I have no right to offend another person.' If I know I'm hurting your feelings, then I commit a serious sin."
The priest also expresses concern that vocalizing racial epithets in the classroom, even in a work of literature, will add fuel to what he views as a volatile situation. In his years as chancellor, he says, there were frequent brawls between white and black students (an assertion denied by the principal and current students).
The priest also makes the point that blacks live in a racially charged atmosphere in Louisiana, which nearly elected avowed segregationist David Duke as its governor just five years ago. "Duke carried this part of Louisiana, and these are Catholics," says Father O'Leary, who believes that if the purpose of teaching O'Connor is to teach the evils of racism "then do it directly. There's no sense in embarrassing black kids just for the opportunity to teach white kids that racism is wrong."
Orteza refutes the notion that the purpose of an English class is to teach morals--as if, he says, it were Sunday school: "I would never deliberately try to reduce fiction or poetry to a [moral] lesson. And that's why when the bishop says there are other books you can use to teach anti-racism, to me he has just no understanding of what an English class should be."
Defending his decision, Bishop O'Donnell says the recent events at Opelousas Catholic shouldn't have "any impact at all" in other schools, private or public, across the United States.
But Orteza, along with a host of others, fret for the future of literary instruction. Expelling a writer of O'Connor's stature from the classroom leaves her colleagues, such as the all-American Twain or the gothically abstract Faulkner, exposed to the winds of political correctness.
