Intended to add this section to the last entry, but having lost a number of texts with this technology, I hated to take a chance. Also the type is smaller than I care for and I have no idea how to change it or even if one can. So, another entry.
the title of this entry is also a play on the image of following Christ to Heaven. The minute I thought of other literature where the image is revealed, Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful short story, “Revelation,” came to mind. Lying in bed the other morning, unable to get back to sleep, it occurred to me that not only is there a blessing in the image, but there is also a danger. “Revelation” reveals both the danger and the blessing.
Mrs. Turpin’s husband Claud has a badly wounded leg which he reveals to the patients in the office waiting to see the doctor. However, as the story begins, the text focuses on Claud’s wife and suggests that there is a danger in her presence:
[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.]
Mrs. Turpin is judgmental of everything and everyone: she looms over the table, and is a”living demonstration” of the ridiculous and the inadequate. And it turns out that is a marvelous image of the danger of the way to Heaven. The danger is that she deludes herself into believing that she loves Jesus above all things when the story makes it clear that she truly loves herself above all things. Well, she does love Claude and she does love her idea of Jesus, always a real danger. For example, near the heart of the story. In talking to the mother in the story who is a counterpart of herself and her values, she exclaims, joyfully:
[“If it’s one thing I am,” Mrs. Turpin said with feeling, “it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’ It could have been different!”]
In one sense she is a good woman who helps her community but the problem is that her perpetual center of concern is herself. What she is about to learn in the story is how her life and vision ought to have been different. While Mrs. Turpin’s counterpart is the mother, her daughter, who has lived with those values and that blindness all her life is about to change everything for Mrs. Turpin. The daughter’s name is, significantly, Mary Grace. She is the secondary cause that God uses in the story to reorient Mrs. Turpin away from herself and to Him. Watch; the quote immediately follows the preceding quote:
[For one thing, somebody else could have got Claud. At the thought of this, she was flooded with gratitude and a terrible pang of joy ran through her. “Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” she cried aloud.
The book struck her directly over her left eye. It struck almost at the same instant that she realized the girl was about to hurl it. Before she could utter a sound, the raw face came crashing across the table toward her, howling.
Mary Grace’s book, entitled “Human Development,” which hits her left eye, is not the end of the action. Mary Grace tries to strangle Mrs. Turpin and before the doctor can remove her from Mrs, Turpin, she delivers a message. The really interesting thing is that Mrs. Turpin knows that Mary Grace is a messenger:
“What you got to say to me?” she asked hoarsely and held her breath, waiting, as for a revelation.
The girl raised her head. Her gaze locked with Mrs. Turpin’s. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” she whispered. Her voice was low but clear. Her eyes burned for a moment as if she saw with pleasure that her message had struck its target.]
And there it is. She thought she was on her way to Jesus only to be told that she’s an “old wart hog” from Hell. The thing that makes Mrs. Turpin such a magnificent character is that like Lear and Oedipus she is determined to get at the truth, for she knows that this judgment comes from a deeper dimension, from God himself:
[“I am not,” she said tearfully, “a wart hog. From hell.” But the denial had no force. The girl’s eyes and her words, even the tone of her voice, low but clear, directed only to her, brooked no repudiation. She had been singled out for the message, though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied. The full force of this fact struck her only now. There was a woman there who was neglecting her own child but she had been overlooked. The message had been given to Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman. The tears dried. Her eyes began to burn instead with wrath.]
Notice the way the concrete act, struck with the book, becomes a mental force; she is “struck” with a realization. Notice too that in this crucial passage that her name is Ruby. She has misdirected the focus of her life, evident even in this passage. Others there she believes deserved the message, the neglectful mother, the “white trash” woman. God may be attacking her values but her name is Ruby and she too is valuable.
In terms of the action in the story, Ruby’s wrath at being so badly treated, she thinks, leads her to the hog pen, like Jacob, to wrestle with God and vent her spleen. The hogs in the story have been an image of humanity, and the Turpin’s raise them, a grunting and a rooting and a groaning. Ruby has a hose and signifcantly hits one in the eye until finally, determined to know the truth, she roars out a question that immediately becomes her answer, but first all her obscene values come tumbling out of her mouth:
[“What do you send me a message like that for?” she said in a low fierce voice, barely above a whisper but with the force of a shout in its concentrated fury. “How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?” Her free fist was knotted and with the other she gripped the hose, blindly pointing the stream of water in and out of the eye of the old sow whose outraged squeal she did not hear.]
Next: [“If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then,” she railed. “You could have made me trash. Or a nigger. If trash is what you wanted why didn’t you make me trash?” She shook her fist with the hose in it and a watery snake appeared momentarily in the air. “I could quit working and take it easy and be filthy,” she growled. “Lounge about the sidewalks all day drinking root beer. Dip snuff and spit in every puddle and have it all over my face. I could be nasty. “Or you could have made me a nigger. It’s too late for me to be a nigger,” she said with deep sarcasm, “but I could act like one. Lay down in the middle of the road and stop traffic. Roll on the ground.”]
Finally: [She braced herself for a final assault and this time her voice rolled out over the pasture. “Go on,” she yelled, “call me a hog! Call me a hog again. From hell. Call me a wart hog from hell. Put that bottom rail on top. There’ll still be a top and bottom!”
A garbled echo returned to her.
A final surge of fury shook her and she roared, “Who do you think you are?”
The color of everything, field and crimson sky, burned for a moment with a transparent intensity. The question carried over the pasture and across the highway and the cotton field and returned to her clearly like an answer from beyond the wood.
She opened her mouth but no sound came out of it.]
God uses secondary causes in our lives. Ruby’s question to God, returns as an echo and answer from God, in a way the kind of answer the pious Job receives. “Who do you think you are?” Notice the language throughout; the watery snake in the air, the visionary light, and Ruby silenced as was Job. The reason this story came to mind first is what happens next. Ruby, finally silenced, receives what I will call the real way to Jesus in the story, his real centrality in one’s life and the need for real humility:
[A visionary light settled in her eyes. She saw the streak as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. She lowered her hands and gripped the rail of the hog pen, her eyes small but fixed unblinkingly on what lay ahead. In a moment the vision faded but she remained where she was, immobile.]
As in the beginning of the story the narrator focus Ruby’s small eyes, suggesting the smallness of her vision of realty that has just been firmly dealt with. She too was shocked and altered as she saw that all her virtues did not amount to a reason for self-satisfaction and pride. The final image in the story given my concerns is worth citing:
[At length she got down and turned off the faucet and made her slow way on the darkening path to the house. In the woods around her the invisible cricket choruses had struck up, but what she heard were the voices of the souls climbing upward into the starry field and shouting hallelujah.]
It suggests that what she is hearing now is that she is attuned to those souls who are on their way to Heaven. Given what she has seen and heard throughout her experience in the doctor’s office, what else would it be? The world itself reveals the presence of God, if one isn’t too busy thinking about oneself to look and listen. How could she not be changed forever?
Image: what a marvelous teller of tales worth reading, she was.. “If it’s only a symbol, to Hell with it.” Indeed, indeed.
Our journey is truly about real presence! This essay will probably do it for the idea of “following,” unless I remember or discover another work of literature that provides another compelling insight or perspective on the fundamental idea. There is, after all, much more that might be worthwhile regarding this story, the way in which the doctor’s office reveals itself to suggest the image of Plato’s Cave, for example, and what that signifies. Well, read the whole story, carefully. Grace is operative in almost all of her stories and in the two novels. Ha! Read them all. Hallelujah!
