The first of four hundred initial “Ripples” (a nickname that never caught on) “weighed anchor” on campus on January 15, taking over the prime dorms of Ennis, Sanford, Mayfair, Beeson, and the top floor of the Mansion, their numbers eventually adding up to a startling fifteen thousand between 1943 and 1945. As regulations required the women to speak navy language, Ennis became the “U.S.S. Ennis,” and its floors, “decks”; its stairs, “ladders”; its windows, “ports.” As part of their training to replace navy men at shore stations, the Waves woke to reveille, marched sixteen miles daily, attended six lectures in Arts Hall, typed two hours, exercised one hour, and went to bed to taps at ten p.m. Their uniforms were navy blue suits, blue hats, black gloves, and low-heeled black shoes. “They’d get out every morning at six marching between the dining hall and the library,” remembers Jane Sparks Willingham. “It wasn’t a happy mix, but it was necessary.”
Many of the Jessies, now crowded three or four to a room, had mixed feelings about this reverse invasion, as the Waves transformed their women’s college into a battleship in dry dock. But they usually cut their resentment with a grudging patriotism. “We had very little contact with them,” Dr. Elizabeth Knowles Adams has recalled. “Some of us were probably a little jealous because they seemed so glamorous in their uniforms.” For the proponents of the social equality of women, the presence of independent female soldiers on campus could be seen as a bonus. “Woman Power” became essential in the national emergency, and the radical-sounding slogan was adopted for regular use by the United States government, as well as by the Board of Regents of Georgia. Yet even the social feminist Helen Matthews Lewis found their unavoidable presence invasive: “They were always in the way, keeping us from getting to class.”
Mary Flannery skipped the patriotism and went straight for the comedy; in the Waves, she found her most reliable cartoon topic. Not since the nuns she liked to mimic at Sacred Heart had she seen so many single women together in uniform. The first of her series of Waves cuts appeared on January 23, a day after fifteen staff officers were introduced to the students during morning Chapel. The setting is a campus corner, where two girls espy a couple of Waves walking toward them. “Officer or no officer,” says one in a plaid skirt, “I’m going to ask her to let me try on that hat.” There followed two years of girls butting their umbrellas along the backs of marching Waves’ legs; girls clinging to tree trunks, like cats, to escape a drilling platoon; girls sneaking to check if Waves carried gunpowder in their handbags; or using Waves for archery practice.
Not only women, but male soldiers also bivouacked more and more in Milledgeville. Few showed up in O’Connor’s cartoon world, yet they were a force in the town and on campus. Although the only local “base” belonged to the navy women at GSCW, there were many military bases nearby: Camp Gordon, Augusta; Fort Benning, Columbus; Camp Wheeler, Cochran Field, and Warner Robins Field, Macon; as well as a naval hospital in Dublin. On weekends, throngs of servicemen with leave passes crowded into Milledgeville. As there were not enough hotels to house them, or families to take them in, they often slept on porch swings, or in sleeping bags, on campus. “When convoys passed, the soldiers threw down notes for the GSCW students to pick up,” recalls Charmet Garrett, who lived in Ennis Hall across Hancock Street. The military presence in town was dense enough for Bob Hope to broadcast his NBC radio show live from Russell Auditorium, for an audience of Waves and Jessies, on May 18, 1943.
Male soldiers became known to Mary Flannery mostly through Sacred Heart Church, and the USO, or United Service Organizations. A number of Roman Catholic soldiers would show up at her church on Sunday, and the Clines often invited them home for a family dinner. As early as 1941, Aunt Gertie reported to Agnes Florencourt that “two of the soldiers came over from Macon — Louis met one and asked him over, so Mary told Louis to ask him to dinner. . . . they were both at church.” The Clines were just as involved with the USO — Aunt Katie was appointed chairman after the opening of its social club, in December 1943, in a storefront at the corner of Hancock and Wilkinson streets. On Sunday mornings, soldiers who crashed on the campus of GSCW sauntered across the street to the USO to clean up and enjoy free coffee and doughnuts.
While short, solid, gray-haired Katie Cline was a regular presence at the post office, she had known other more engaging moments in her life. As a young woman, she was a member of the Georgia Military College Players Club, acting in light comedies with Bardy, brother of Oliver Hardy, later of the Laurel and Hardy comedy team, then a rotund, teenage, silent-movie projectionist at the Palace Theatre in town. The second most memorable chapter of her life, locally, was her generous hospitality to soldiers during the war. “Miss Katie used to sit out on the porch on a Sunday morning and talk to all the passers-by,” Betty Boyd Love has recalled. “If a lone service man happened by, he might be invited to dinner.” One wounded soldier later wrote to her from Camp Wheeler, “I can still remember vividly the first time I had dinner in your home. It was just grand, Miss Cline.” Another wrote her from Fort Benning, “About this time of day I’d be sitting on your veranda, begging for a Coca-Cola and cake — if I were in Milledgeville.”
One Sunday, Aunt Katie invited home from church John Sullivan, recently assigned as a sentry to the naval training station at the college. As Sally Fitzgerald, who met Sullivan once, in Cincinnati during the 1980s, told the story, he had been “a handsome Marine Sergeant, resplendent in his dress blues.” Following the service, he was handed a note, written by Miss Katie, inviting him to be the guest of “the Cline sisters” for a midday dinner at their home on Greene Street. He accepted, and met their cherished niece, in her freshman year at GSCW. The two quickly developed a rapport based partly on a similar family background: an Ohio boy, Sullivan came from a large Roman Catholic family. They were able to trade funny stories, and share suppressed giggles, as he became a regular visitor, a “fixture” welcomed by all the aunts and uncles.
Of course, he and Mary Flannery were quite different. He was blithe, outgoing, confident, and at ease with his good looks. She was painfully shy, given to awkward gestures, and, as Mary Boyd was fond of pointing out, not used to the company of boys. Yet because Sergeant Sullivan appreciated her offbeat wit, and wry inside tips about Southern mores, they went on what amounted to “dates” — long walks, an occasional movie. He even escorted her to one college dance, though he quickly discovered that she was truly a bad dancer — she later claimed to have a “tin leg.” The foiled attempt may have contributed to her April 1943 cartoon on the opening of the college gym for dances, portraying a “wallflower” of a girl in a long striped skirt, with glasses, sitting alone, watching other couples dance. The caption: “Oh, well, I can always be a Ph.D.”
When Fitzgerald interviewed Sullivan, forty years later, he claimed that theirs had been “a close comradeship,” not a romance. Yet the two played at romance enough to tease a hopeful mother. Once, as they sat together on the couch in the parlor, Regina called liltingly over the stairwell, “Mary Flannery, wouldn’t you and John like to polish the silver?” After an exchange of amused glances, her daughter wickedly answered with a flat “No.” Following Sullivan’s transfer to a training camp for the Pacific war zone, O’Connor did show signs of a modest “crush.” She wrote many drafts of her own “Dear Soldier” letters, stashing them between the pages of her college notebook. In a journal entry, she made fun of herself for “casually” dropping to her family that she had just heard from John. This exchange of letters lasted until he entered St. Gregory’s Seminary, just after the war, briefly studying for the priesthood.
Her “crush” was enough of a blip — or a carefully concealed secret — that no relatives or classmates in Milledgeville remember the marine sergeant. What remained for O’Connor, though, was the PhD thought balloon that she floated during their time together. For at eighteen, she was hatching a plan for a life away from Milledgeville — studying journalism, or working as a newspaper cartoonist. No one in her family took these plans seriously. John Sullivan did, and he offered “admiration and encouragement.” She must have felt in him some of her missing father: the handsome man, occasionally in uniform, who was both confidant and supporter. Like one of the suitors in her later stories — the less likeable Mr. Shiftlet, for instance, who comes walking up the road in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” — his surprise visit had subtly enlivened things.
D
URING THE TIME She
was getting to know John Sullivan, coincidentally enough, Mary Flannery took a class with an English teacher who finally responded with understanding and enthusiasm to her writing. The professor who “got” her work was Miss Hallie Smith, a large and nurturing woman, one of those in the cadre of GSCW professors who belonged to the Audubon Society, and qualified in all respects as a “suffragette-spinster.” In the spring 1943 quarter, while O’Connor was in her class, Smith gave her own talk to the DAR on “Woman, a Strength in Freedom’s Cause,” trumpeting the importance of “womanpower in this war and other wars.”
The elective course O’Connor took with Miss Smith that spring quarter was English 324, Advanced Composition. As the capstone of the composition sequence, the class included only a dozen young women. “Miss Hallie required us to write something for each class — then, to my chagrin, she expected us to read it aloud,” recalls Marion Peterman Page. “It wasn’t long before I realized that the only writer in the class was Mary Flannery. The efforts of the rest of us were so juvenile compared to her. She seemed to be very shy and very modest. She was a mousy looking young lady, but one forgot that when she read what she had written.” Another member of the class, Karen Owens Smith, who usually sat in the front row with Mary Flannery, a few feet from the teacher, remembers “a twang to her voice that I can still hear.”
On March 24, O’Connor handed in her first assignment, two descriptions of a street scene, one photographic, the second poetic. Naming her street Raphael Street, after Katie Semmes’s husband, she evoked Charlton Street in Savannah with a lineup of “six, tall grey buildings.” Yet she had obviously been reading James Joyce’s short story “Araby,” too, and precociously tried to copy the style of the Irish Catholic writer. On Dublin’s North Richmond Street, in Joyce’s story, “The other houses of the street . . . gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.” On O’Connor’s Raphael Street, “gaunt houses all of somber, grey stone, gaze austerely at each other.” Miss Hallie was thrilled with the effort. On the single typed page, signed “M. F. O’Connor,” she wrote in red pencil, “A+.”
Five days later, O’Connor handed in a typed, one-page character study. “Nine out of Every Ten” was signed with a pseudonym that could have popped out of a Merriweather Girls novel, “Jane Shorebanks.” The sketch details a vapid young lady walking along chewing gum to the beat of the “Missouri Waltz.” In red pencil, Miss Hallie wrote an exclamatory “A!” and added, “Won’t you submit something to the Corinthian?” Miss Hallie sensed in O’Connor’s depiction of a face “sagging and contracting” as a girl chews a “slippery mass” of chewing gum a different tenor of writing talent. O’Connor had previously published, in the winter 1943
Corinthian,
a mock review of a children’s book about Ferdinand the bull, deeming the book “highly recommendable literature for the college student,” and a satire on replacing cars with horses, “Why Worry the Horse?”
Over the next ten weeks, O’Connor wrote a series of short, descriptive exercises: lemon gelatin (“translucent mush”); celery (tastes like “sucking warm water out of a dish rag”); a kitchen; a velvet collar; and a mahogany table, much like the one in the dining room in the Cline Mansion. A description of a general store proprietor, for which she received an “A, An excellent use of the details at your disposal!” included “loud-labeled tin cans,” close in wording to the “tin cans whose labels his stomach read” in the general store in Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.” She created vignettes of a black laundress talking to a white woman, a third-grade teacher on a bad day, and a Mrs. Watson reading movie magazines under a hair dryer. A single-scene character study of an imperious Mrs. Peterson being ushered to her seat at the theater was titled “The Cynosure,” signed with another silly, feminine pseudonym, “Gertrude Beachlock,” and marked “Excellent. Let me have a copy. A.”
The one full-blown story she wrote for class was her most startling work of the semester, revealing a grasp of materials that her classmates never suspected from the “plain looking girl, unassuming.” Says Marion Peterman Page, “At the time it seemed too deep for me to understand.” The graphic tale, titled “A Place of Action,” transpires on Saturday night in a black neighborhood, complete with a “zuit-suited” character who is stabbed by a woman he is hassling. While the story is melodramatic, and turns entirely on a stereotyped cast of characters, its use of violence as its climax, and its downbeat setting — “a dingy corner” — signal a writer finding her voice. Miss Hallie wrote “good” next to the description of the knife: “A thick, red coating hid its glimmer.” Her final comment: “You might call your theme Saturday Night. Would you like to submit this to the Corinthian?”
O’Connor took Miss Hallie’s advice. She began to publish stories as well as satires, though nothing as edgy as “A Place of Action,” as its racy treatment of urban blacks was a definite taboo for a young Southern lady of the time. Her first published story, printed that spring, was “Elegance Is Its Own Reward,” a weird tale, in the style of the “humorous” Poe, about a husband murdering both his wives, one with a hunting knife, the second by way of strangulation. Another written about the same time, and published in the fall 1943
Corinthian,
“Home of the Brave,” was set in wartime Milledgeville, turning on two snobbish matrons rolling bandages at a ladies’ aid society while engaging in a lot of gossip, as “belligerent,” she wrote, as “the Battle of Stalingrad,” including their criticizing of Eleanor Roosevelt for not staying home enough.