Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” and the Legacy of Lynching

Abstract

Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” is her longest short story, but it stands out in other ways. For one thing, it bumps up against the legal framework of Jim Crow—in the form of anti-miscegenation laws—that generally goes unmentioned in her writing. Moreover, the fact that the story contains possibly the most frank outburst of racial animus in her works—the proper Mrs. McIntyre’s denunciation of her employee Sulk as “a half-witted thieving black stinking nigger” (222)—suggests that the mounting crisis in race relations came closer to emerging as a central focus here than elsewhere in the 1950s writings of an author who famously declared that in fiction “the topical is poison” (The Habit of Being, 537). The title character himself may point to the prominence of race in the story, for although he is Polish, and thus as a legal and social matter counts unambiguously as white, critics have noted the “racial ‘inbetween-ness’” of his “apparently miscegenated body” (Taylor 71, 78), which “seems strangely uncategorizable” (O’Gorman 36). A close reading, in fact, suggests that O’Connor uses the other characters’ complicity in the refugee’s death as a way to approach a topic she did not represent directly anywhere in her fiction: the violence and threat of violence used by Southern whites to retain their supremacy. That the Polish Mr. Guizac ultimately becomes a surrogate for Blackness may seem surprising, since in some respects other than color he differs from and is even antagonistic toward the Black hands already present on Mrs. McIntyre’s dairy farm, Astor and Sulk. His somewhat ferocious diligence and efficiency contrast with their apparently less energetic application, along with that of the whites employed on the farm, Mr. and Mrs. Shortley. The prospect of more of Mr. Guizac’s kind swarming over the Atlantic to drive out lowwage workers even prompts Mrs. Shortley to predict, “The time is going to come...when there won’t be no more occasion to speak” of a Black person (206). As for Mr. Guizac himself, “The Negroes made him nervous” (202). https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2021.1965520