Do you remember David Letterman’s “Stupid Pet Tricks?” The greatest author Savannah has ever produced would have fit right in on Letterman’s wacky segment.
Flannery O’Connor is one of the South’s most beloved authors. The deeply sardonic writer, whose work is characterized as “Southern Gothic,” penned the novels "Wise Blood" and "The Violent Bear It Away," as well as the short story collections "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge."
During her career, O’Connor won the O. Henry Award for Best Short Story three times and was posthumously awarded the National Book Award for The Complete Stories.
Flannery O’Connor’s Historic Childhood Home in Savannah, where she lived from her birth in 1925 until 1938, is a modest house on Lafayette Square. With a view of St. John’s Cathedral across the square, it’s no wonder O’Connor had an intensely complex interest in Catholicism. The home now operates as a museum devoted to her life.
Visitors can see O’Connor’s room and some of her childhood belongings, learn about what life was like during the Great Depression, or catch one of the many literary events that are regularly hosted there. Local writers and artists hold a quirky annual parade at O’Connor’s home on her birthday. The home also contains the Bruckheimer Library, a collection of rare books.
There is more to O’Connor’s legacy than her literary achievements, though. Throughout her life, O’Connor’s passion was raising chickens (and later peacocks) and she kept several in the garden of her Savannah home. One particular chicken, “a buff Cochin Bantam,” was so remarkable that in 1932, Pathé News sent a crew from New York to report on it.
Sure enough, you can still view the old news reel on YouTube, titled “Do you Reverse?,” of “young Mary O’Connor” setting her chicken on the ground and making it walk backwards as a narrator cracks silly jokes about it. There is some debate as to whether O’Connor was actually able to compel her chicken to walk backwards that day. As seen in the newsreel, Pathé’s cameraman was able to make all of the family farm animals including ducks, cows, and horses appear to walk backwards using simple camera tricks, thus casting doubt on the chicken’s abilities.
The experience was so exciting for O’Connor that she became obsessed with raising unusual chickens. She longed to own a three-legged chicken or something like the rooster that lived for 30 days without a head that she read about in Ripley’s book "Believe it or Not," but she never found one that interesting.
In her 1961essay, “Living with a Peacock,” O’Connor wrote, “I could sew in a fashion and I began to make clothes for chickens. A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white piqué coat with a lace collar and two buttons in the back. Apparently Pathé News never heard of any of these other chickens of mine; it never sent another photographer.”
Later in life, O’Connor recalled the event with her typical sarcastic wit. “When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News,” O’Connor said. “I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point of my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.”
If you visit Flannery O’Connor’s Childhood Home, be sure to remember and appreciate where O’Connor’s greatest accomplishment occurred.
Christopher Berinato is the author of Secret Savannah: A Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure
This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: That’s So Savannah: Did Flannery O’Connor teach a chicken to walk 'bawk'wards?
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