A Good Man is Hard to Find
Flannery O'Connor was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of a very southern oriented family. Her parents came from a very prominent family. Her grandfather was the mayor of Milledgeville, Georgia for many years. During the time that Flannery was growing up, black Americans were beginning to fight for their equality under the law, a fact that the white southerners were not yet used to. All of these facts helped shape her beliefs and attitude toward life. Racism is a part of history that some people want to hold on to and others want to forget. O'Connor uses the grandmother as the main character to symbolism how life was like in the years around slavery and how her life was when she was a little girl growing up. She also uses her grandmother to try to show how the older generation was unwilling to accept the new changes, and how they tried to influence the younger generations into believing their way was the right. There are several racist remarks and issues that take place in the story. The first is her reference to black children "Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!" she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. "Wouldn't that make a picture, now?" (1136). The term pickaninny
"I call my self The Misfit." He said, "because I can't make what all I done wrong fit all I gone through in punishment." (1145) This statement refers to the feelings blacks had during these hard times; we have done absolutely nothing wrong to deserve the punishment that we are going through. The grandmother tries to make the case that a family was buried there but in reality, the plantation slaves were buried there on an island in the middle of a cotton field. There is no way a rich southern plantation family would bury their own family members in the middle of a cotton field. An even better example of the O'Connor's feelings that slavery and racism are bad is her reference to the penitentiary (1143), which is in reference to slavery and racism. Going to the pen is bad and so is slavery and racism. A further, rather sentimental example of the way blacks were treated unjustly is provided by " Jesus thown everything off balance. It was the same case with Him as with me except He hadn't committed any crime and they could prove I had committed one because they had the papers on me."(1144) Which shows that even during hard times for blacks they still had faith in Jesus, and the "papers on me" refers to the slave papers that white southerners had proving that they ownership of the slaves. It would be easy to just say the blacks are dumb and can't read bu
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 926
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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