You’re possibly fed-up with me at this point. Couldn’t this have been one blog post? Sure, but then I wouldn’t have the space to tell you about the Hungarian Bible Salesman that came calling on Joy/Hulga, err, I mean Flannery O’Connor, when she lived at Andalusia. The Bible Salesman loved Flannery, but the love wasn’t reciprocated and she sent him broken-hearted back to Hungary. Without an artificial limb.

Flannery and her mother inherited this farm as a dairy farm from Flannery’s uncle sometime around 1940. He wasn’t the first owner of Andalusia, which had been a plantation when he took it over in the early 1930s. He made it into a dairy farm, then when Flannery’s father died in 1941 from complications of Lupus, her mother made the decision to run it alone as a widow. Righteous.

The only piece of furniture in the house that predates the family is an absolutely hideous and disturbing sideboard that Flannery’s entire family hated and wanted removed, but she begged her uncle to keep it on account of the “pleasure of the hanging pig,” and so he did.

A dairy farm proved to be too demanding for Regina Cline O’Connor, so she made it into a beef farm. Beef cattle are easier to run than dairy cattle. She hired a family who moved into the house behind the main house, Hill House, and much like Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman, the ladies would chat in the kitchen in the mornings as Flannery readied herself in her room, before entering the kitchen to make her way to the bathroom.

Flannery and her mother lived on the first floor of the house, as Flannery couldn’t successfully navigate the stairs. The original parlor of the house was turned into Flannery’s room and a second parlor was added on. The women’s bedroom’s were separated by Regina’s office, which housed, among other unique artifacts, an artist’s rendering of Jesus Christ that was signed by a Pope. Which Pope I can’t recall. I wish I could.

The second parlor housed a set of bookcases that her family hated so much, they sold them to a man in Savannah who drove up and picked them up while Flannery was away. When she returned, she immediately called the man in Savannah and purchased them back from him and he returned them post haste.

Thanks for going down this rabbit hole with me. I hope you are learning things you never knew before and I hope you don’t mind my foggy memory and horrible literary jokes. Remember, you are what you read…

M.