stood before a crimson and steel assault

Instead, the story gives primacy to the sensorial memory that is the legacy of the assault, the images and words that will haunt Hulga the rest of her life: the salesman’s insistence that she take off her wooden leg in front of him because it’s what “makes her different,” how he wields this vulnerability against her as he pushes her down and “with eyes like two steel spikes, would glance behind him where the leg stood.” That elision evokes the roaring silence that she will now endure, returning to this horrifying experience within the solitude of her mind. O’Connor artfully elides what exactly the Bible salesman does, or doesn’t do, to Hulga in the barn. Though the story was published over sixty years ago, the sick abuse of power is disturbingly similar to any number of testimonies that have emerged this past year. As he leaves her there, unable to walk, he boasts that he once stole a woman’s glass eye, too. The Bible salesman takes what he wants from Hulga, and steals her artificial leg. It is not until he and Hulga are in the barn, where there are no witnesses, that the salesman reveals the Bible in his valise is nothing more than a box with a flask inside and a condom.

Once he gets beyond the front parlor and has Hulga, the adult daughter of the household, to himself, he doesn’t bring up anything more about “Chrustian service.” Watching Kavanaugh lose control of his “good country folk” performance and become increasingly overcome with rage, I thought of O’Connor’s salesman absurdly repeating the word “Chrustian,” of the terrible theatrics of our politics. It is also an open secret in American literature, especially in the works of women writers.īrett Kavanaugh’s description of his daughter’s prayers at dinner brought to mind the theatrical piety of the Bible salesman in Flannery O’Connor’s story “Good Country People.” That Bible salesman comes off as earnest-at first-as he scopes out a family’s front parlor and decries the absence of the Bible that “good Chrustians” would certainly display there. That silence, unheard by anyone else but shatteringly loud inside one’s head, is an open secret in American life. The hashtag #WhyIDidntReport generated thousands of testimonies about the societal forces that push victims into silence in the aftermath of assault. Why didn’t Blasey Ford tell her “loving parents,” Donald Trump discharged on Twitter.

Detail from the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Shirley Jackson’s HangsamanĬhristine Blasey Ford’s testimony last week opened a desperately needed national conversation about the nature of silence in the aftermath of trauma.

Stood before a crimson and steel assault