Jesus, Stab Me in the Heart! Flannery O’Connor at 100

When Flannery O’Connor’s collection of short stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, was published in 1955, The New Yorker ran a notice that was less than complimentary. The reviewer stated that

there is a brutality to these stories, but since the brutes are as mindless as their victims, all we have, in the end, is a series of tales about creatures who collide and drown, or survive or float passively in the isolated sea of the author’s compassion, which accepts them without reflecting anything.[1]

O’Connor told Betty Hester that the unsigned notice was moronic and lacked moral sense, but she admitted to Hester that the stories had a hard edge. The stories were hard because nothing was harder or less sentimental in life than the reality of original sin and the saving necessity of Christ, truths which O’Connor judged to be under attack.

I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.[2]

In “The River,” undoubtedly one of the stories in A Good Man Is Hard to Find that The New Yorker reviewer had in mind, Harry Ashfield, the young protagonist, is taken by his babysitter Mrs. Connin to the river to hear the preacher Bevel Summers. Harry jokingly tells Mrs. Connin that his name is Bevel, but at the river his life changes. The preacher baptizes Harry/Bevel and tells him that he now counts. Returned by Mrs. Connin to his parents’ godless existence, Harry/Bevel remembers the river as a place where he counts and sets out for it. When he arrives at the river, he sees Mr. Paradise, who the day before had openly mocked gospel believers. The child plunges into the water to escape Mr. Paradise and dies seeking after the kingdom of Christ.

For O’Connor, the boy’s death in seeking after the kingdom of Christ is not the horror in the story, but rather his deliverance. Modern unbelief, as symbolized with his parents and Mr. Paradise, is the horror. Life without God is without hope.

Baptism

Caroline Gordon praised “The River” as one of O’Connor’s stories that “nearly approach perfection.”[3] She told O’Connor, “I see even more clearly with this story what you are about. It is original. Nobody else has done anything just like it. And it is something that much needs to be done.”[4]

O’Connor was “highly pleased” that Gordon liked the story. She explained that she had been wanting to write about baptism but was struggling on how to do so. Particularly, she had been thinking about a woman baptizing a child that didn’t know what it was about. “The Church’s ceremony of Baptism is so elaborate! I keep trying to think of some way in fiction that I could convey the richness against the threadbareness of the other but my thought is none too productive.”[5]

O’Connor’s solution was to create two worlds. There is the unbelieving world of Harry’s parents. They live in an apartment that is sterile and reeks of cigarettes. They amuse themselves by holding parties, but they neglect Harry. The other world is that of the red muddy river, the domain of the preached Word and believers, where nothing said or done is a joke.[6] In this world, the River of Life made out of Jesus’s blood, Harry, baptized and given the new name, Bevel, counts.

Harry/Bevel and Mrs. Connin

O’Connor telegraphs what will happen with the story’s opening paragraph. At six o’clock on a Sunday morning Mr. Ashfield is shoving his son out of the half-open door of his apartment into the hallway. Mr. Ashfield heard a voice in return, “He ain’t fixed right.” The father muttered, “Well then for Christ’s sake fix him.”[7]

The voice belonged to Mrs. Connin, a believer, who informs Mr. Ashfield that she planned to take the boy to the river for a faith healing before bringing him back at night. Drumming his fingers on the door as he was eager to cast the boy off, Mr. Ashfield tells Mrs. Connin that it would be alright and tells his son, “Good-bye, old man.”

Before she leaves, however, Mrs. Connin heard a voice utter, “Bring me an icepack.” Mrs. Connin tells Mr. Ashfield that she will ask the Reverend Bevel Summers to pray for the boy’s sick mamma. She then added that maybe Mrs. Ashfield ought to see Summers since he has healed a lot of people. Mr. Ashfield replied, “maybe so” and then disappeared back into the dark apartment.

Mrs. Connin and the child departed into the gray morning blocked off on either side by unlit empty buildings. “Wipe your nose, Sugar Boy,” she instructed him, and he started to rub his shirt sleeve across his nose. She stopped him and asked, “Where’s your handkerchief?” He pretended to look in his pocket for one, which causes Mrs. Connin to blurt out, “Some people don’t care how they send one off.”[8]

She realized that she didn’t know his first name and asked the child his name. His name was Harry, and he had never thought at any time before of changing it, but he tells her, “Bevel.”[9] Happy to hear that he had the same name as the preacher, Mrs. Connin takes the child to her house. He goes out to play with her three sons, but they trick him into entering a pig pen where he is attacked by a mean shoat. The hog chases Bevel to the house where Mrs. Connin catches the boy up as he reached the steps. She shouted at the hog, which was humpbacked with part of his ear bitten off, to get away and told the boy, “That one yonder favors Mr. Paradise that has the gas station.” She then said, “You’ll see him today at the healing. He’s got the cancer over his ear. He always comes to show he ain’t been healed.”[10]

Earlier at breakfast, she had read the book “The Life of Jesus Christ for Readers Under Twelve” to Bevel while he sat on her lap. He learned that a carpenter, named Jesus Christ, made him.[11] From his parents, he had the impression that Jesus Christ “was a word like “oh” or “damn” or “God,” or maybe somebody who had cheated them out of something sometime.”[12] He also found out that this carpenter is powerful enough to drive a herd of pigs out of a man. Just before they leave the house to hear the preacher, he managed to put the book in the inner lining of his coat without Mrs. Connin seeing him.

They walked to the river with Mrs. Connin in front with Bevel, then the three boys in the middle, and Mrs. Connin’s daughter, Sarah Mildred, at the end to holler if one of the boys ran out into the road. They looked like a skeleton of an old boat with two pointed ends with the white Sunday sun both following and climbing fast through a gray haze as if it meant to overtake them. Having never been in the woods before, Bevel looked from side to side as if he were entering a strange country. The woods opened to an orange stream where the reflection of the sun was set like a diamond, and people were standing on the near bank singing. The preacher, his face all bone, looked no more than nineteen years old. He was standing about ten feet out in the stream with the water up to his knees. His focus was on Jesus and the cleansing of their sins.

“If you ain’t come for Jesus, you ain’t come for me. If you just come to see can you leave your pain in the river, you ain’t come for Jesus. You can’t leave your pain in the river,” he said. “I never told nobody that.” He stopped and looked down at his knees.

“I seen you cure a woman oncet!” a sudden high voice shouted from the hump of people. “Seen that woman git up and walk out straight where she had limped in!”

The preacher lifted one foot and then the other. He seemed almost but not quite to smile. “You might as well go home if that’s what you come for,” he said.

Then he lifted his head and arms and shouted, “Listen to what I got to say, you people! There ain’t but one river and that’s the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ blood. That’s the river you have to lay your pain in, in the River of Faith, in the River of Life, in the River of Love, in the rich red river of Jesus’ blood, you people!”

His voice grew soft and musical. “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it because that’s the River that was made to carry sin. It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river under my feet.”[13]

A fluttering figure moved forward, an old woman with flapping arms whose head wobbled as if it might fall off. A voice from the crowd shouted that she had been that way for thirteen years and then added, “Pass the hat and give the kid his money. That’s what he’s here for.” The shouting man, Mr. Paradise, wore a grey hat that was turned down over his right ear and raised up over his left ear to expose a purple bulge over his left temple.[14] Bevel stared at the man and then drew near to Mrs. Connin, moving into the folds of her coat. The preacher also glanced quickly at the man and said with his fist raised, “Believe Jesus or the devil! . . . Testify to the one or the other!”[15]

Mrs. Connin lifted the child up and told the preacher that she had a boy from town that had a sick mamma. She added that his name was Bevel and turned to the crowd and said, “ain’t that a coincident.” She then asked the child if he had ever been baptized, and the boy only grinned. Mrs. Connin raised her eyebrows to the preacher, “I suspect he ain’t ever been Baptized.” “Swang him over here,” the preacher said and took a stride forward and caught him.” The boy now in the preacher’s arms rolled his eyes in a comical way. “My name is Bevvvuuuuul,” the boy said in a loud voice, but the preacher did not smile. There was only the sound of Mr. Paradise laughing loudly.[16]

The boy’s demeanor, however, changed as he had the sudden feeling that this was not a joke. Everything with his parents was a joke, but from the preacher’s face, the boy knew that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke.

“Have you ever been Baptized?” the preacher asked.

“What’s that?” he murmured.

“If I Baptize you,” the preacher said, “you’ll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ. You’ll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you’ll go by the deep river of life. Do you want that?”

“Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go under the river.

“You won’t be the same again,” the preacher said. “You’ll count.”

Then he turned his face to the people again and began to preach and Bevel looked over his shoulder at the pieces of the white sun scattered in the river.[17]

That night Mrs. Connin returned Bevel to the apartment of his parents where a party is going on. As Mr. Ashfield went off to get the money to pay Mrs. Connin, one of the party guests asked the boy, “Well Harry, old man, have a big day?” Mrs. Connin immediately corrected the guest, “His name ain’t Harry. It’s Bevel.”[18]

His mother, lying on the sofa, for the first time shows interest in the boy and declares, “His name is Harry.” She gasps, “Whoever heard of anyone named Bevel?” In a shocked voice, Mrs. Connin told her that the child said that his name was Bevel, the same as the preacher, and the mother objected even more, taking the Lord’s name in vain. Mrs. Connin’s tone then turned deviant as she informed the mother that preacher baptized the boy. The mother sat straight up and muttered, “Well, the nerve!” Mrs. Connin then told her that the preacher also prayed for her affliction. “Healed!” She almost shouted. “‘Healed of what for Christ’s sake?’ ‘Of your affliction,’ Mrs. Connin said icily.”[19]

Mr. Ashfield, who had returned with money in hand to pay Mrs. Connin, chided Mrs. Connin, “Go on, go on,” he said, “I wanted to hear more about her affliction.” He waved the bill and said with his voice trailing off, “Healing by prayer is mighty inexpensive.” Mrs. Connin stood, staring into the room, with a skeleton’s appearance of seeing everything, and then left without taking the money.[20]

The mother, concerned about the lies he might have spread about her, questions Harry. As she did so, “he shut his eye and heard her voice from a long way away, as if he were under the river and she on top of it.”[21] The mother then discovered Mrs. Connin’s book, The Life of Jesus for Readers Under Twelve, that the boy had hid in his jacket. She read it mockingly to the party guests. A man remarked that the book, published in 1832, was valuable. The boy knew also that it was valuable, but not because of monetary worth. It was valuable because it testified to that place, the river, where nothing was a joke.

The next morning the boy awoke in the dark apartment before his parents. He looked out the window where the sun came in palely, stained grey by the glass. Deprived of the book, his connection with the other world, he went about overturning ashtrays and rubbing the ashes into the carpet. He laid on the floor a while and studied his feet which he held up in the air. “His shoes were still damp and he began to think about the river. Very slowly, his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.”[22] He left the apartment without a suitcase, for there was nothing in his old life that he wanted to keep.

When he got off the car at the end of the line, he did not see Mr. Paradise, who was fishing with an unbaited line, but Mr. Paradise saw him. Mr. Paradise picked out a foot long peppermint stick and started to follow the boy, but Bevel’s focus was on the river. Bevel reached the river determined “not to fool with preachers anymore but to Baptize himself and to keep on going this time until he found the Kingdom of Christ in the river. He didn’t mean to waste any more time. He put his head under the water at once and pushed forward.”[23] His head reappeared above the water as the river would not have him, and the thought ran through his mind that everything had been another joke. But then “he heard a shout and turned his head and saw something like a giant pig bounding after him, shaking a red and white club and shouting.”[24] Bevel tried again, and this time, he knew he was getting somewhere. Mr. Paradise, who had jumped into the river to retrieve the boy, rose empty-handed like some ancient water monster and stared with his dull eyes down the river as far as he could see.

Baptism and Death

Seven years after publishing “The River,” O’Connor wrote another shocking baptism scene in her novel, The Violent Bear It Away. Young Tarwater, accepting his call as a prophet, drowns the child Bishop when he baptizes him. In words that could be applied to “The River,” O’Connor explained why her baptisms were so dramatic.

Well, I tell stories that frequently hinge on the things of belief, and the man of our times is certainly not a believer. When I write a novel in which the central action is baptism, I have to assume that for the general reader, or the general run of readers, baptism is a meaningless rite, and I have to arrange the action so that this baptism carries enough awe and terror to jar the reader into some kind of emotional recognition of its significance. I have to make him feel, viscerally if no other way, that something is going on here that counts. Distortion is an instrument in this case; exaggeration has a purpose.[25]

In “The River,” O’Connor also takes special interest in the role of death in the believer’s pilgrimage to heaven. This is why she constantly describes Mrs. Connin as a skeleton in the story. In picking up Harry, Mrs. Connin is “a speckled skeleton in a long pea-green coat and a felt helmet” looming in the hallway. Riding the streetcar with the child to her home, she falls asleep and “began to whistle and blow like a musical skeleton.” In walking Harry and her children to the river, her group “looked like the skeleton of an old boat with two pointed ends, sailing slowly on the edge of a highway.”[26] When she returns the child back to the Ashfield apartment, she stood outside staring into the room “with a skeleton’s appearance of seeing everything.” The skeleton-like features of Mrs. Connin are shared in the story by Bevel Summers, whose face is all bone. The skeleton appearance of Mrs. Connin and the preacher indicate that both view life properly.[27] It is O’Connor’s way of signalizing her belief that “the creative action of the Christian’s life is to prepare for his death in Christ.”[28]

This combination of O’Connor’s attempt to speak to baptism and viewing death in relationship to the life to come led her to declare that the ending of the “The River” was positive. She said, “Bevel hasn’t reached the age of Reason; therefore, he can’t commit suicide. He comes to a good end. He’s saved from those nutty parents, a fate worse than death. He’s been baptized and so he goes to his Maker: this is a good end.”[29] It is his acceptance of grace, “the child’s peculiar desire to find the kingdom of Christ,” that makes the story work.[30]

Endnotes

[1] “Briefly Noted,” The New Yorker (June 18, 1955), 93.

[2] Flannery O’Connor to “A,” July 20, 1955, in Habit of Being, ed. Sally Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1979), 90.

[3] Caroline Gordon, “An American Girl,” The Added Dimension: The Art and Mind of Flannery O’Connor, eds. Melvin J. Friedman and Lewis A. Lawson (Fordham, 1966), 128. Another admirer of “The River” is Bruce Springsteen. When asked to name one book that shaped him, Springsteen stated that O’Connor’s A Good Man Is Hard to Find landed hard on him. “There was something in those stories of hers that I felt captured a certain part of the American character that I was interested in writing about. They were a big, big revelation.” Springsteen named his 1980 Billboard chart toping fifth album The River in tribute to O’Connor. One song that Springsteen recorded at the time but did not release until nearly twenty years later was “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Will Percy, “Rock and Ready: Will Percy Interviews Bruce Springsteen,” Doubletalk, no. 12 (1999), 2.

[4] Caroline Gordon to Flannery O’Connor, September 1, 1953, Good Things Out of Nazareth, ed. Benjamin B. Alexander (Convergent, 2019), 68.

[5] Flannery O’Connor to Caroline Gordon, September 1953, Good Things Out of Nazareth, 16.

[6] Joyce Carol Oates, New Heavens, New Earth (Vanguard, 1974), 158.

[7] Flannery O’Connor, Complete Stories (Noonday, 1995), 157.

[8] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 158.

[9] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 159.

[10] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 162. Carter Martin observes that Mr. Paradise is “associated with pigs, which function throughout the story, as they do biblically, as symbols of spiritual uncleanness.” Carter W. Martin, The True Country (Vanderbilt, 1994), 47.

[11] O’Connor’s use of “carpenter” here takes its full literal meaning of a maker, and Bevel, something a carpenter makes, is faced with the prospect of seeing himself anew. See, Ronald Schleifer, “Rural Gothic,” in Flannery O’Connor, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House, 1986), 87.

[12] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 163.

[13] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 165.

[14] According to Damien Ference, O’Connor’s choice of the left side for the placement of Mr. Paradise’s cancer is deliberate. He writes, “In Catholic symbolism the right (dexter) side is the good side and the left (sinister) side is the wicked side. For example, in the last judgment (Matt. 25:31–46), the sheep are at the right and the goats are at the left.” See, Damien Ference, Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist (Word on Fire, 2023), 98.

[15] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 166. Joyce Carol Oates argues that for O’Connor in her fiction the devil is that which keeps you from the kingdom of God. In “The River,” Mr. Paradise plays that part. Oates, New Heaven, New Earth, 159.

[16] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 167.

[17] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 168.

[18] When Mr. Ashfield sent off his son earlier that morning with Mrs. Connin, he had also called him “old man.” Now returning, having been baptized, the boy is a “new man.” It is a spiritual change not noticeable to the senses. See, Ference, Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist, 101.

[19] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 169.

[20] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 170. The parents believe that Christianity is a marketable commodity. Mrs. Connin’s repudiation of payment recalls Christ’s command to his apostles to wipe the dust from their feet on the thresholds of those homes which do not accept them.” Feeley, Voice of the Peacock, 134.

[21] The boy, because of his baptism, participates in the river of life, his mother does not. Martin, True Country, 53–54.

[22] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 172.

[23] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 173.

[24] O’Connor, Complete Stories, 174.

[25] Flannery O’Connor, “Flannery O’Connor: An Interview, by C. Ross Mullins,” in Conversations, 104–105.

[26] John May states that “the allusions to death and possibly to the ark foreshadow the ending of the story, but more importantly they emphasize the process of Harry’s passage through death to life that is at the heart of the story. He must leave the meaninglessness of his parents’ apartment in order to count, and death in the guise of Mrs. Connin is the agent of his passage.” John R. May, The Pruning Word: The Parables of Flannery O’Connor (Notre Dame, 1976), 65.

[27] Ference comments, “The fact that Mrs. Connin, her family, and Bevel Summers are the ones in the story described as skeletons or as “bony” signifies that they understand reality properly; they see that their lives are about more than this world, and they have chosen to spend their lives preparing for their final end with the one who created all ends and is the final end of all being.” Ference, Hillbilly Thomist, 109.

[28] Flannery O’Connor, “Introduction to A Memoir to Mary Ann,” Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), 223.

[29] “An Interview with Flannery O’Connor, by Katharine Fugin, Faye Rivard, and Margaret Sieh,” October 1960, Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, ed. Rosemary M. Magee (University of Mississippi, 1987), 58.

[30] O’Connor, The Added Dimension, 229.

Danny E. Olinger is a minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and serves as the general secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Ordained Servant Online, May, 2025.

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