A bit ago, Chelsea (the other one) posted an entry on the writer’s inspiration. That is also fascinating to me, too. Not so much to really know where the ideas come from, though. I think most (I say most only to avoid an absolute) writers take their inspiration from the things that happen around them and tweak them to fit in a/the story.
Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, says:
“[My momma] and Mrs. S______, the dairyman’s wife, have been making curtains for the windows out of flowered chicken feed sacks. Regina was complaining that the green sacks wouldn’t look so good in the same room where the pink ones were and Mrs. S________ (who has no teeth on one side of her mouth) says in a very superior voice, ‘Do you think they’ll know what the colors even is?’ Usually the families that have been got around here for dairy work have turned out to be Polish shoe makers and have headed for Chicago just as soon as they could save the money.”Colored chicken feed sacks as curtains? Doesn’t that ring a bell or three? Flannery O’Connor wrote in The Displaced Person,
“They had collected a piece of odd furniture here and a piece there and they had taken some flowered chicken feed sacks and made curtains for the windows, two red and one green, because they had not had enough of the red sacks to go around. Mrs. McIntyre said she was not made of money and she could not afford to buy curtains. ‘They can’t talk,’ Mrs. Shortley said. ‘You reckon they’ll know what colors even is?’”I think it reveals a bit more about Mrs. Shortley’s character to know where her dialogue came from. I mean, that statement isn’t quite one of a person we should respect in the first place, but when writing to S&R, she deems it necessary to tell them that the woman who made the comment had teeth only on one side of her mouth, and Flannery O’Connor also made the judgment she usually refrains from in her fiction, of telling that the voice was, “very superior.”
It’s interesting.
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Really, "Polish" just wasn't suitable for inclusion? Too controversial? Too likely to be taken as code for you-know-what ethnic group?
This skittish attitude dovetails with the way the editor clucks her tongue at O'Connor's "imperfectly developed" racial sensitivity. Fear not, however: O'Connor also created Negro characters who are credits to their race! (Paul Elie also has the idea that O'Connor somehow compensated for her racism by creating black characters who are morally superior to the white characters around them.)
Earlier this editor goes to some lengths to assure the reader that Flannery was much more attractive than her pictures.
Jeesh.
Bet O'Connor would have had choice remarks to make about all of this.