Flannery by Brad Gooch

boy, standing there watching her. She was going to get into that house one way or another. Convention didn’t mean anything to her.”
    Christ the King Cathedral was a three-block walk from the O’Connors’ home. Dedicated in January 1939 as a sister church to St. John the Baptist in Savannah, marking the cohering of a Savannah-Atlanta diocese, this Gothic Revival cathedral, built of Indiana limestone, stood on four acres on Peachtree Road that had belonged a few years earlier to the Ku Klux Klan. The shadow history of Buckhead throughout the twenties and early thirties included lots of Klan activity. The Buckhead robe factory pumped millions of dollars into the city’s economy, attracting such firms as Coca-Cola and Studebaker to advertise in the Klan newspaper. Christ the King was actually built on the site of the Klan’s former national headquarters, the antebellum “Imperial Palace.” As Jews and Catholics had both been targets of the Klan, the foreclosure of the property by a Jewish banker, and its subsequent sale to the Catholic Church, was a bit of revenge.
    During the academic year 1939–40, Mary Flannery was enrolled at North Fulton High School, a segregated public school built in 1932 to serve the white children on this expanding edge of northern Atlanta. Designed by the neoclassicist architect Philip Trammell Schutze, North Fulton was a quintessential high school, a classical Georgian Revival brick building, trimmed in white wood, with towering Ionic pillars, through which more than a thousand students and nearly fifty teachers passed daily. “Mary Flannery and I were there at the same time,” recalls Dr. Peter Cline, “but not in the same classes. You could be in the same grade, and take the same courses, but have different teachers. It was a relatively large school. . . . I used to walk to North Fulton every day. People didn’t have two cars back then. It was still the Depression.” Also at North Fulton, unknown to her, was O’Connor’s future poet friend James Dickey, then a football player.
    Every bit as progressive as Peabody, North Fulton’s up-to-date layout included twenty-three classrooms, two lecture halls, seven science labs, an auditorium, cafeteria, gym, armory, shooting gallery, the newly opened W. F. Dykes Stadium, named for the school’s first principal, and an industrial arts building with house-drawing, electrical, and woodworking studios. Of the young girl’s uneasy reaction to this cutting-edge display case of learning, her friend Caroline Gordon later reported, “She once described her early education to me as a vacillation between the convent school and what she called ‘the life of Riley.’ The nuns whom she had for teachers in Savannah stressed discipline, as nuns do. The ‘progressive’ schools which she attended in Atlanta and later in Milledgeville offered an eclecticism which the convent-bred child evidently found bewildering.”
    The local patriarch of the Cline family was Dr. Bernard Cline, presiding in Atlanta as Aunt Mary did in Milledgeville. At holiday dinners at the Cline Mansion, Uncle Bernard would sit across from Aunt Mary in the place of his deceased father. A single gentleman, tall and handsome, nearly sixty, with fine silver hair, light blue eyes, and a dignified bearing, he was an ear, nose, and throat specialist, a graduate of Emory Medical School, with further medical studies in New York City and Vienna. “Our uncle Bernard footed the bills for a lot of things,” explains Dr. Peter Cline. Uncle Bernard’s best friend was Louis Cline, his affable, low-key, younger brother. While Mary Flannery was in school in Atlanta, Uncle Louis was selling used cars, perhaps giving her a special angle on Haze Motes’s purchase of his old Essex at Slade’s used-car lot in
Wise Blood.
“He’s never mentioned my father to me,” she later wrote, of Louis, to Betty Hester. “If he did, he’d say something like, ‘He was a nice fellow,’ and wag his