PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE 2004–05

PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN EXPERIENCE 2004–05

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Revelation From, Everything That Rises Must Converge

By Flannery O’Connor

The Doctor’s waiting room, which was very small, was almost full when

the Turpins entered and Mrs. Turpin, who was very large, made it look

even smaller by her presence. She stood looming at the head of the

magazine table set in the center of it, a living demonstration that the

room was inadequate and ridiculous. Her little bright black eyes took

in all the patients as she sized up the seating situation. There was one

vacant chair and a place on the sofa occupied by a blond child in a

dirty blue romper who should have been told to move over and make

room for the lady. He was five or six, but Mrs. Turpin saw at once that

no one was going to tell him to move over. He was slumped down in

the seat, his arms idle at his sides and his eyes idle in his head; his nose

ran unchecked.

Mrs. Turpin put a firm hand on Claud’s shoulder and said in a voice

that included anyone who wanted to listen, “Claud, you sit in that chair

there,” and gave him a push down into the vacant one. Claud was florid

and bald and sturdy, somewhat shorter than Mrs. Turpin, but he sat

down as if he were accustomed to doing what she told him to.

Mrs. Turpin remained standing. The only man in the room besides

Claud was a lean stringy old fellow with a rusty hand spread out on

each knee, whose eyes were closed as if he were asleep or dead or

pretending to be so as not to get up and offer her his seat. Her gaze

 

 

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settled agreeably on a well-dressed grey-haired lady whose eyes met

hers and whose expression said: if that child belonged to me, he would

have some manners and move over-there’s plenty of room there for

you and him too.

Claud looked up with a sigh and made as if to rise.

“Sit down,” Mrs. Turpin said. “You know you’re not supposed to stand

on that leg. He has an ulcer on his leg,” she explained.

Claud lifted his foot onto the magazine table and rolled his trouser leg

up to reveal a purple swelling on a plump marble white calf.

“My!” the pleasant lady said. “How did you do that?”

“A cow kicked him,” Mrs. Turpin said.

“Goodness!” said the lady.

Claud rolled his trouser leg down.

“Maybe the little boy would move over,” the lady suggested, but the

child did not stir.

“Somebody will be leaving in a minute,” Mrs. Turpin said. She could

not understand why a doctor-with as much money as they made

charging five dollars a day to just stick their head in the hospital door

and look at you-couldn’t afford a decent-sized waiting room. This one

 

 

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was hardly bigger than a garage. The table was cluttered with limp-

looking magazines and at one end of it there was a big green glass

ashtray full of cigarette butts and cotton wads with little blood spots on

them. If she had had anything to do with the running of the place, that

would have been emptied every so often. There were no chairs against

the wall at the head of the room. It had a rectangular-shaped panel in it

that permitted a view of the office where the nurse came and went and

the secretary listened to the radio. A plastic fern, in a gold pot sat in the

opening and trailed its fronds down almost to the floor. The radio was

softly playing gospel music.

Just then the inner door opened and a nurse with the highest stack of

yellow hair Mrs. Turpin had ever seen put her face in the crack and

called for the next patient. The woman sitting beside Claud grasped the

two arms of her chair and hoisted herself up; she pulled her dress free

from her legs and lumbered through the door where the nurse had

disappeared.

Mrs. Turpin eased into the vacant chair, which held her tight as a

corset. “I wish I could reduce,” she said, and rolled her eyes and gave a

comic sigh.

“Oh, you aren’t fat,” the stylish lady said.

“Ooooo I am too,” Mrs. Turpin said. “Claud he eats all he wants to and

never weighs over one hundred and seventy-five pounds, but me I just

look at something good to eat and I gain some weight,” and her

 

 

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stomach and shoulders shook with laughter. “You can eat all you want

to, can’t YOU, Claud?” she asked, turning to him.

Claud only grinned.

“Well, as long as you have such a good disposition,” the stylish lady

said, “I don’t think it makes a bit of difference what size you are. You

just can’t beat a good disposition.”

Next to her was a fat girl of eighteen or nineteen, scowling into a thick

blue book which Mrs. Turpin saw was entitled Human Development.

The girl raised her head and directed her scowl at Mrs. Turpin as if she

did not like her looks. She appeared annoyed that anyone should speak

while she tried to read. The poor girl’s face was blue with acne and Mrs.

Turpin thought how pitiful it was to have a face like that at that age.

She gave the girl a friendly smile but the girl only scowled the harder.

Mrs. Turpin herself was fat but she had always had good skin, and,

though she was forty-seven years old, there was not a wrinkle in her

face except around her eyes from laughing too much.

Next to the ugly girl was the child, still in exactly the same position, and

next to him was a thin leathery old woman in a cotton print dress. She

and Claud had three sacks of chicken feed in their pump house that

was in the same print. She had seen from the first that the child

belonged with the old woman. She could tell by the way they sat- kind

of vacant and white-trashy, as if they would sit there until Doomsday if

nobody called and told them to get up. And at right angles but next to

the well-dressed pleasant lady was a lank-faced woman who was

 

 

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certainly the child’s mother. She had on a yellow sweatshirt and wine-

colored slacks, both gritty-looking, and the rims of her lips were

stained with snuff. Her dirty yellow hair was tied behind with a little

piece of red paper ribbon. Worse than niggers any day, Mrs. Turpin

thought.

The gospel hymn playing was, “When I looked up and He looked

down,” and Mrs. Turpin, who knew it, supplied the last line mentally,

“And wona these days I know I’ll we-eara crown.

Without appearing to, Mrs. Turpin always noticed people’s feet. The

well-dressed lady had on red and grey suede shoes to match her dress.

Mrs. Turpin had on her good black patent -leather pumps. The ugly girl

had on Girl Scout shoes and heavy socks. The old woman had on

tennis shoes and the white-trashy mother had on what appeared to be

bedroom slippers, black straw with gold braid threaded through them-

exactly what you would have expected her to have on.

Sometimes at night when she couldn’t go to sleep, Mrs. Turpin would

occupy herself with the question of who she would have chosen to be if

she couldn’t have been herself. If Jesus had said to her before he made

her, “There’s only two places available for you. You can either be a

nigger or white trash,” what would she have said? “Please, Jesus,

please,” she would have said, “Just let me wait until there’s another

place available,” and he would have said, “No, you have to go right

now”, and I have only those two places so make up your mind.” She

would have wiggled and squirmed and begged and pleaded but it

would have been no use and finally she would have said, “All right,

 

 

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make me a nigger then-but that don’t mean a trashy one.” And he

would have made her a near clean respectable Negro woman, herself

but black.

Next to the child’s mother was a redheaded youngish woman, reading

one of the magazines and working a piece of chewing gum, hell for

leather, as Claud would say. Mrs. Turpin could not see the woman’s

feet. She was not white trash, just common. Sometimes Mrs. Turpin

occupied herself at night naming the classes of people. On the bottom

of the heap were most colored people, not the kind she would have

been if she had been one, but most of them; then next to them — not

above, just away from — were the white-trash; then above them were

the home-owners, and above them the home-and-land owners, to

which she and Claud belonged, Above she and Claud were people with

a lot of money and much bigger houses and much more land. But here

the complexity of it would begin to bear in on her, for some of the

people with a lot of money were common and ought to