Jesus is, perhaps, not as satisfied as Mrs. Turpin. No reader can help but be amused and disturbed by this passage, which is representative of O’Connor’s subtle observation of a world that was not her own, but which informed every inch of the one she inhabited. Blacks may have spent much of their lives on the margins, but she understood the ways in which they entered the circle. The theatrical modesty and duplicity exhibited by these blacks who are an audience for Mrs. Turpin’s troubles—despite the fact that she will never be one for theirs—are all just a part of the Southern code of manners.

O’Connor delighted in portraying the forms of domestic terrorism. It is a Catholic tenet that God judges by actions, but virtually all her white women characters judge by appearances. O’Connor greatly admired Faulkner. “Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down,” she remarked of Southern writers’ relationship to the Master. But there is no Faulknerian Snopes in O’Connor’s fiction. What she describes is far more evil: the nice lady on the bus who calls you “nigger” by offering your child a penny; or the old woman who loves to regale her grandchildren with stories about the “pickaninnies” of her antebellum youth. These are women who wouldn’t know grace if it slapped them in the face—which it often does. And why would any black person want to belong to the world that these women and their men have created?

For O’Connor, writing about integration was a way of exposing the dangers of clinging to the fiction of power. But, like Faulkner, O’Connor herself had difficulty assimilating the push toward integration which took the region so suddenly and violently in the fifties and sixties. She clung to the provincialism she satirized, and she was sometimes clumsy at conveying real life among blacks beyond her own circles—their class distinctions, their communication with one another apart from whites. The one false note in “The Displaced Person” (1955), for instance, comes when two black workers discussing the woman they work for fall into a kind of rural Amos ‘n’ Andy routine: “ ‘Big Belly act like she know everything.’ ‘Never mind . . . your place too low for anybody to dispute with you for it.’ ” A curtain falls over O’Connor’s insight—and her ear for speech. Luckily, she rarely tried to cover this ground—probably a prudent decision, given the murky and not altogether constructive works of some of the white liberals who did.

O’Connor received her M.F.A. in June of 1947, and Engle arranged for a fellowship that allowed her to stay at Iowa for another year and begin work on her unsettling first novel, “Wise Blood.” Hazel Motes, O’Connor’s Evangelical hero, wears a blue suit and a black hat and has white skin that crackles like pork rind in the hot Southern sun. He may look like a standard preacher, but he’s not like any the good citizens of his adopted town, Taulkinham, have ever heard of. An itinerant prophet, he believes only in his own church, “The Church Without Christ . . . where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way.” Motes is a backward innocent, raised a Baptist, who, instead of accepting Christ into his life, decides to be him. By denying Jesus, he turns his back on those who came before him, and who no doubt learned much of their discourse from the black preachers whose rhetoric soaks the Southern soil. But Motes has a grudge against Jesus: he equates Him with sin, or more specifically with the sins that he himself has committed and cannot escape—not in the eyes of his relatives, rotten with fake piety, who believe that only the Lord can wash him clean and are no better than niggers who think that the Lord will make them white.

Of “Wise Blood,” the writer and critic Stanley Edgar Hyman said, “Whatever caused Miss O’Connor to choose Protestant fundamentalism as her metaphor for Catholic vision, it was a brilliant choice. . . . It freed her from the constraints of good taste.” O’Connor’s humor lay in such paradoxes—in being an alienated Catholic in a world of Bible-thumpers, a single girl in a society of matrons. “It becomes more and more difficult in America to make belief believable, but in this the Southern writer has the greatest possible advantage. He lives in the Bible Belt,” she wrote, and went on: