FREE ESSAY ON REVELATION

REVELATION

The story opens with Ruby Turpin entering a doctor's waiting room with her husband Claud
who has been kicked by a cow. As she and Claud wait, she takes hard stock of the other
people in the room. There was some white-trash, a red- headed youngish woman who was not
white-trash, just common, a well-dressed, pleasant looking lady, and her daughter, an
ill-mannered ugly girl in Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks who was reading a book titled
Human Development. Listening to the Gospel song playing on the radio in the background,
Mrs. Turpin's heart rose. [Jesus] had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He
had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said.
Thank you thank you thank you! A few moments later, agreeing with the pleasant lady in
regard to her ugly tempered daughter that 'It never hurt anyone to smile,' Mrs. Turpin
notes, If it's one thing I am, . . .it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been
beside myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides,
I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!' . .
.'Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!' she cried aloud. Suddenly the book Human
Development struck her directly over her left eye. Nurse, doctor, and mother scramble to
subdue the ugly girl. Transfixed by the girl's eyes focused on her, Mrs. Turpin asks
'What you got to say to me?' waiting, as O'Connor says as for a revelation. Go back to
hell where you came from, you old wart hog [the girl] whispered. Haunted by this command,
Ruby Turpin spends the rest of the day in puzzlement and concentration. Finally, while
hosing down the hog pen that evening she whispers to God in a fierce voice, What do you
send me a message like that for? How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell
too? If students can understand the answer to this question, they can understand the
medieval notion of Original Sin. Struggling against the recognition that she shares in
the common legacy of humanity, Ruby Turpin wants to know how she is like a hog, and why
with plenty of white-trash around the message had to come to her. Challenging God to go
on and call her a wart hog from hell, to put the top rung on the bottom, she yells out
There'll still be a top and a bottom! Shaking with fury, she demands of God, Who do you
think you are? In a final vision, something akin to the great medieval leveling of death
and damnation and salvation forces itself upon her. With an ironic humor reminiscent of
Chaucer and beatific purification echoing Dante, O'Connor writes A visionary lights
settled in her eyes. She saw the streak [of the setting sun] as a vast swinging bridge
extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a horde of souls
were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the
first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of
freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end
of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like
herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it
right. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others
with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense
and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and
altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. In painful clarity, Ruby
Turpin recognizes, as one critic put it, the inadequacy of her respectability and the
shallowness of her values (Pepin 26). The vision shows her how--considered by God no more
worthy than white-trash, or niggers, or freaks--she can be both a wart hog before the
judgment seat of God and saved, too. If Revelation can help students understand the
nature of Original Sin and the inscrutable nature of God's wisdom, the A Good Man is Hard
to Find can certainly help them see both the frailty of human will and the kindred nature
of human existence. Like Ruby Turpin, the grandmother of A Good Man Is Hard to Find
considers herself a lady. Dressing for her road trip to Florida with her son Bailey, his
wife, and their three children, she carries her white cotton gloves and pins a purple
spray of cloth violets containing a sachet to her neckline; as her interior monologue
tells us, In case of an accident anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once
that she was a lady. And the thought is grimly prophetic. Badgered into traveling down a
rutted dirt road that the grandmother mistakenly thinks will lead to an old plantation,
they do have an accident.