A quiet Southern town, writ large

CARMEN ALARCON, a native of Colombia, tore through the farmhouse kitchen as if chasing a misbehaving child about to escape into the warm Georgia evening.

“¡Hola! I want to talk to you,” she yelled, friendly but insistent, as she left my side, flew around the corner and zeroed in on an unseen stranger.

“Tell me about Flannery,” she demanded.

I followed closely behind because I had also come to Milledgeville, Georgia’s antebellum capital, largely for Flannery -- as in Mary Flannery O’Connor, the internationally acclaimed short-story master who spent her most productive years at Andalusia, the onetime dairy farm where we stood.

But I didn’t come just for O’Connor. I also wanted to see Milledgeville -- where Georgia seceded from the Union -- through the eyes of a distinctly Southern writer. I thought seeing the town where she spent her adolescence, attended college and lived most of her adult life might also provide insight into O’Connor’s world and work.

For now, though, I was chasing a 30-year-old Colombian through the O’Connors’ kitchen and into their parlor.

I found Carmen seated on the couch with Dorrie Neligan, who had been friends with O’Connor’s late mother. Regina Cline O’Connor, a widow, lived with and cared for Flannery after the author developed lupus, the chronic auto-immune disease that forced her to return home permanently in 1951. O’Connor died in 1964 at age 39. Neligan remembered her as private and hard to know well.

For a fan, this was not news. But merely being at the farm, an obvious inspiration for the settings of such stories as “A Circle in the Fire,” “The Displaced Person” and “Good Country People,” had left Carmen quivering with excitement.

She had discovered O’Connor while living in Savannah, Ga., the author’s birthplace, and was writing a paper on O’Connor to finish her degree at a Colombian university.

As we walked back to our cars on a warm day last spring, I remarked on her enthusiasm. She stood stock-still and looked intensely into my eyes.

“This is the first time I’ve come to Andalusia,” she said, as if relaying life-and-death information. “Right now, where I’m standing, I’m actually drunk on Flannery O’Connor.”

Most visitors to Milledgeville, it is safe to say, do not get drunk on mid-20th century American literary figures.

Old state capital

THE town, in the red clay hills of middle Georgia about 100 miles southeast of Atlanta, was the state capital from 1804 to 1868. Its biggest draws are historical -- the castle-like Old State Capitol and the Old Governor’s Mansion, which reopened in 2005 after a $10-million renovation.

If you’re seeking off-the-charts Southern ambience, ornate graveyards and dark tunnels of live oaks hung with Spanish moss, go to Savannah, where O’Connor lived her first 12 1/2 years.

Milledgeville is simpler, a slow-paced college town with about 19,000 residents. Its tiny, tree-lined downtown has no parking meters, but it seems to have survived the Wal-Mart Supercenter nearby.

Students at Georgia College & State University -- called the Georgia State College for Women when O’Connor graduated from it in 1945 -- patronize a few bars. There’s also Blackbird Coffee, a pleasant coffee shop, and several surprisingly good restaurants.

Hints of nonliterary celebrity also exist. At Dodo’s Pool Room, where the vinyl stools and snack counter seem straight from the 1950s, a framed picture of the comedic duo of Laurel & Hardy sits above a box of Swisher Sweets. Oliver Hardy also grew up partly in Milledgeville.

But for in-depth history, my fiancee, Laura, and I jumped aboard the town’s trolley.

Our first stop was the Old Capitol, a neo-Gothic building on the grounds of Georgia Military College, a prep school and junior college. We climbed a split stairway and briefly visited the airy chamber where Georgia voted to secede from the Union. From there, the tour also rolled past downtown’s white-columned antebellum mansions, which Union Gen. William T. Sherman spared in November 1864.

O’Connor spent her adolescence in one such home, built in the singular Milledgeville Federal style, with cantilevered balconies and fan-shaped windows, among other characteristics. At another, the Stetson-Sanford House, she and her mother regularly lunched in a first-floor restaurant.

The next day, Laura and I visited what is perhaps Milledgeville’s biggest attraction, the Old Governor’s Mansion. This gorgeously restored Greek Revival building features a gilded interior dome and details accurate down to the stenciled and shellacked canvas flooring -- a sort of 19th century linoleum, our guide explained. The tour included formal parlors, a hidden spiral staircase and basement work areas where slaves once prepared meals.

In all likelihood, little of this would have impressed O’Connor. She was born in Savannah in 1925, into a good Milledgeville family, and was resolutely Southern, but she had little use for the glorification of the Civil War, and she declined to become a belle.

“She hated all that stuff,” said Marshall Bruce Gentry, an English professor at the local college and editor of the Flannery O’Connor Review. Instead of moonlight and magnolias, the devout Catholic used the South -- and Milledgeville -- to write about the drama of sin and salvation, human depravity and oft-rejected grace.

Tersely and precisely written, her short stories typically begin with sly, laugh-out-loud-funny descriptions of her characters’ pettiness, greed and pride. They often end tragically or violently, with murders, fires, strokes and myriad other disasters. The grotesque characters and violent outcomes, O’Connor said, were necessary to shock modern, nonreligious readers into seeing her vision.

Still, she wrote, “I am always having it pointed out to me that life in Georgia is not at all the way I picture it, that escaped criminals do not roam the roads exterminating families, nor Bible salesman prowl about looking for girls with wooden legs.”

O’Connor’s reputation continued to grow after her death, aided by the posthumous publication of her nonfiction writing and letters. Both reveal a woman with profound spiritual insight, a sly sense of humor and disdain for “interleckshuls,” as she called them.

In her lifetime, though, critics often misunderstood her work. Certainly, it wasn’t well received in Milledgeville.

Mary Jones, who once waited on O’Connor and her mother at the Sanford House, told me that she found O’Connor’s first novel, “Wise Blood,” jammed at the back of a shelf in her parents’ closet.

“All the little old ladies in town went out and bought it because they were friends with [O’Connor’s mother] Regina, and then it was scandalous,” she said. “People didn’t understand where she was coming from.”

Most Milledgeville residents still don’t consider the town’s most renowned daughter a major source of civic pride. At a barbecue joint, one local told me he didn’t know much about her. As I walked away, he told his friends, “I think she was a writer or something.”

When I told my Atlanta housemate, Mark, that I was coming to Milledgeville, I wasn’t sure whether he would associate the town with O’Connor, antebellum history or both.

Ironically, it was neither. Like most Georgians, Mark thought first of Central State Hospital. The mental institution, more than 160 years old, has become synonymous with Milledgeville in Georgia lore.

With nearly 12,000 patients at its peak in the 1960s, the hospital was one of the largest mental institutions in the world. It housed as many residents as Milledgeville itself, and probably more, census records show.

According to scholar Jean Cash’s biography on O’Connor, the author delighted in taking guests past the hospital’s open windows when she was an adolescent. A similar mental institution figures in another O’Connor story, “The Partridge Festival.”

I was delighted to learn that the facility had a small museum, open only by appointment. I pulled in front of the hospital’s main building, a white-domed behemoth that looked a bit like the White House.

The museum, a short walk away, was not particularly well kept. But its artifacts from psychiatry’s dark ages were engagingly sinister: a straitjacket, an electroshock machine, gleaming lobotomy probes and portraits of nursing directors wearing scowls worthy of Nurse Ratched.

These days, the hospital typically houses only 800 to 850 patients, said Terea Jacobs, my guide for the day. Most of the old wards have been converted into state prison barracks. The razor wire glinted through the pine trees.

The irony seemed worthy of O’Conner herself: Although a tourist destination, Milledgeville is also a place where many have come quite unwillingly.

Where O’Connor lives on

FLANNERY O’CONNOR may not draw the most tourists to Milledgeville, but she probably attracts them from the farthest distances -- Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and Kerala, India, according to the guest book at the Flannery O’Connor Room at the college.

Besides the Andalusia farm, the college tops the list of places to find the author’s memorabilia and works. The O’Connor Room exhibits her wooden desk and one of her Royal manual typewriters. Photographs of the author hang on the walls, as do her illustrations for the college yearbook.

More scholarly is the library’s Flannery O’Connor Collection, which includes manuscripts and letters -- although primary materials are available only to scholars.

Wanting to hear her voice, I listened to a 1959 tape of O’Connor reading one of her best-known stories, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” She had a heavy yet genteel Southern accent that pulled me in, although I’d read the story several times before.

For literary travelers, though, Andalusia is the must-see. O’Connor lived there with her mother from 1951 to 1964, writing “Wise Blood,” the stories collected in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and the posthumously published “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” She also wrote her second novel, “The Violent Bear It Away,” on the farm.

Andalusia, open to the public since March 2003, averages more than 200 visitors a month, said Craig Amason, executive director of the Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation and the farmhouse’s de facto tour guide. Some cry when they step onto the screen porch or when they see O’Connor’s crutches leaning against the wardrobe in her bedroom, Amason said.

Urban sprawl has surrounded Andalusia, which was rural during O’Connor’s lifetime. Standing next to the weathered wooden barn, you can hear announcements from a Ford dealership; the Wal-Mart Supercenter is less than a mile away. The peafowl, chickens, geese and swans that O’Connor collected are also long gone.

Still, the trees hide Andalusia from its surroundings, and it’s easy to see O’Connor’s characters here -- in the barn, crossing the pastures or ambling up the track from the highway. Even the sprawl evokes Mr. Fortune, the greedy grandfather of “A View of the Woods,” who sells his daughter and grandchildren’s lawn for a gas station.

Back in town, at the Memory Hill Cemetery, O’Connor is buried next to her mother, beside a vine-covered chain-link fence. But to find the author’s spirit, there is probably no better place than downtown’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where O’Connor attended Mass daily.

Visiting on Sunday, Laura and I watched incense swirl around the priest, the Bible and the host. Laura, a cradle Catholic, called the Mass “old school,” and I felt a hint of the mystery.

O’Connor would have been pleased; we had followed her work to where she subtly, but insistently, pointed.

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Going to the source

GETTING THERE:

From LAX to Atlanta, Delta and Air Tran have nonstop service. United and Air Tran have direct flights (stop, no change of plane) and US Airways, American, Northwest, America West, United, Continental, Delta and Midwest Express have connecting service (change of plane). Restricted round-trip fares start at $288. Milledgeville is about 100 miles southeast.

WHERE TO STAY:

Antebellum Inn, 200 N. Columbia St.; (478) 454-5400, www.antebelluminn.com, is Milledgeville’s best place to stay. This B&B;, in a 116-year-old home combining Victorian and Greek Revival styles, has four-poster beds. Doubles $89-$129.

Hampton Inn, 2461 N. Columbia St.; (800) 426-7866 or (478) 451-0050, hamptoninnmilledgeville.com, is one of several hotels along U.S. 441 north of downtown. It has a pleasant dining area and an outdoor pool. Doubles $77-$82.

Best Western Inn & Suites, 2621 N. Columbia St.; (478) 453-2212, www.bestwestern.com, is across the highway from Andalusia, the O’Connor farm. All suite-accommodations. Doubles from $72.

WHERE TO EAT:

Cafe South, 138 W. Hancock St.; (478) 804-9988, cafesouth.com, offers elegant dining in an attractive downtown storefront with big windows. Dinner menu is heavy on seafood. Entrees $8.95-$18.95.

Pig in a Pit, 1835 N. Columbia St.; (478) 414-1744, is a local favorite for slow-smoked barbecue. Serves pulled pork, chicken, ribs and other barbecue favorites. Combo plates and barbecue baskets $4.50-$15.75; sandwiches $3.25-$4.

Velvet Elvis, 113 W. Hancock St.; (478) 453-8226, is a new and hip place on the main drag. The focus is on seafood, but the fried green tomato sandwich is fun. Entrees $13.50-$19.50.

O’CONNOR SITES:

Andalusia, 2628 N. Columbia St.; (478) 454-4029, www.andalusiafarm.org. Visitors can see the main house and other parts of the grounds. Suggested donation $5 per person.

Flannery O’Connor Room, the Museum at Georgia College & State University, 221 N. Clarke St.; (478) 445-4391, library.gcsu.edu/museum. Free.

Flannery O’Connor Collection, at the college’s Library and Information Technology Center, library.gcsu.edu; (478) 445-0988, in the same building as the museum but with an entrance on the opposite side. Arrangements to visit the collection should be made as far in advance as possible (at least three weeks).

Memory Hill Cemetery, 300 W. Franklin St.; www.friendsofcems.org/memoryhill, is O’Connor’s final resting place.

OTHER SIGHTS:

The Old Governor’s Mansion, 120 S. Clarke St.; (478) 445-4545, www.gcsu.edu/mansion. Tours leave on the hour, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays and 2 to 4 p.m. Sundays; $10 for adults.

Georgia’s Old Capital Museum, (478) 453-1803, www.oldcapitalmuseum.org, on the ground floor of the Old State Capitol, 201 E. Greene St. Admission $5 adults.

Central State Hospital, 620 Broad St.; www.centralstatehospital.org. Open only by appointment. Contact Terea Jacobs at (478) 445-4317.

Dodo’s Pool Room, 128 W. Hancock St.; (478) 452-1512, with its snack counter and stools, feels like a piece of the 1950s.

Lockerly Arboretum, 1534 Irwinton Road; (478) 452-2112, www.lockerlyarboretum.org, has lovely paths winding past labeled examples of Georgia flora. Lockerly Hall, a gorgeous antebellum mansion, also sits on the grounds.

TO LEARN MORE:

Milledgeville Convention and Visitors Bureau; (800) 653-1804, www.milledgevillecvb.com.

-- Ben Brazil