Produce
by Debra Allbery

No mountains or ocean, but we had orchards
in northwestern Ohio, roadside stands
telling what time of summer: strawberries,
corn, apples---and festivals to parade
the crops, a Cherry Queen, a Sauerkraut Dance.
Somebody would block off a street in town,
put up beer tents and a tilt-a-whirl.

Our first jobs were picking berries.
We'd ride out early in the back of a pickup---
kids my age, and migrants, and old men
we called bums in sour flannel shirts
smash-stained with blueberries, blackberries,
raspberries. Every fall we'd see them
stumbling along the tracks, leaving town.

Vacationland, the signs said, from here to Lake Erie.
When relatives drove up we took them to see
The Blue Hole, a fenced-in bottomless pit
of water we paid to toss pennies into---

or Prehistoric Forest, where, issued machine guns,
we rode a toy train among life-sized replicas
of brontosaurus and triceratops.

In winter the beanfield behind our house
would freeze over, and I would skate across it
alone late evenings, sometimes tripping
over stubble frozen above the ice.
In spring the fields turned up arrowheads, bones.
Those slow-pacing glaciers left it clean and flat here,
scraping away or pushing underground what was before them.


"Produce" by Debra Allbery, from Walking Distance. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

It's the birthday of a writer who said that her subject was "the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil." That's Flannery O'Connor (books by this author), born in Savannah, Georgia (1925). She was raised a devout Roman Catholic. She said, "I come from a family where the only emotion respectable to show is irritation. In some this tendency produces hives, in others literature, in me both." When her father was diagnosed with lupus, they moved to the town of Milledgeville, Georgia, to be near extended family. Her father died when she was a teenager.

O'Connor went off to a state college in Georgia and then to the University of Iowa to study journalism. She didn't like journalism much so she went to see Paul Engle, the director of the creative writing program. He called her into his office and at first she was too shy to speak. When she did Engle couldn't understand her Georgia accent, so he gave her a pad of paper to write down what she was saying. She wrote, "My name is Flannery O'Connor. I am not a journalist. Can I come to the Writers' Workshop?" Engle agreed.

O'Connor was homesick in Iowa City. She wrote a letter to her mother every day, and she went daily to St. Mary's Catholic Church, two blocks from campus. She got along fine with her roommates, but they loved loud music, and she preferred solitude. When her roommates left for the weekend, as they often did, she pulled down the shades, got out a stack of yellow paper, and went to work at her typewriter.

While O'Connor was a student in Iowa, at the age of 20, she began a journal of prayers, addressed to God. In it, she wrote, "I do not mean to deny the traditional prayers I have said all my life; but I have been saying them and not feeling them. My attention is always very fugitive. This way I have it every instant. I can feel a warmth of love heating me when I think & write this to You." She kept her prayer journal for two years. She wrote just 24 entries, and filled less than 50 pages. Her first prayer began "Dear God, I cannot love Thee the way I want to. You are the slim crescent of a moon that I see and my self is the earth's shadow that keeps me from seeing all the moon." In another entry she wrote, "Dear Lord, please make me want You. It would be the greatest bliss. Not just to want You when I think about You but to want You all the time, to have the want driving in me, to have it like a cancer in me." In the second-to-last entry she wrote, "Oh, Lord, I am saying, at present I am a cheese, make me a mystic, immediately. [...] My soul [...] it's a moth who would be king, a stupid slothful thing, a foolish thing, who wants God, who made the earth, to be its Lover. Immediately." But the next day she wrote: "My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately a half hour and seems a sham. I don't want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton — for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me." That was the end of the prayer journal.

When O'Connor was 26 she was diagnosed with lupus, the disease that had killed her father. She went home to Milledgeville, to live with her mother at Andalusia, the family dairy farm. She wrote every morning, at a desk that faced the back of a dresser so she would have no distractions. She went into Milledgeville for lunch and for the rest of the day she wrote letters, painted, read, went to Mass, or cared for her peacocks, chickens, ducks, and other birds. She wrote two novels, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear It Away (1960), and 32 short stories collected in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965). She died in 1964, at the age of 39.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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