Jenner, O’Connor, & “Holy Ghost”

Buzz Bissinger’s story about Caitlyn Jenner (forthcoming in Vanity Fair) “reveals that Jenner has not had genital surgery.”   And that puts in mind a story by Flannery O'Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”:

The tent where it was had been divided into two parts by a black curtain, one side for the men and one side for the women.  The freak went from one side to the other, talking first to the men and then to the women, but everyone could hear.  The stage ran all the way across the front.  The girls heard the freak say to the men, “I’m going to show you this and if you laugh, God may strike you the same way.” The freak had a country voice, slow and nasal and neither high nor low, just flat.  “God made me thisaway and if you laugh He may strike you the same way.  This is the way He wanted me to be and I ain’t disputing His way.  I’m showing you because I got to make the best of it.  I expect you to act like ladies and gentlemen.  I never done it to myself nor had a thing to do with it but I’m making the best of it.  I don’t dispute hit.”  Then there was a long silence on the other side of the tent and finally the freak left the men and came over onto the women’s side and said the same thing.

The child felt every muscle strained as if she were hearing the answer to a riddle that was more puzzling than the riddle itself.   “You mean it had two heads?” she asked.

“No,” Susan said, “it was a man and a woman both.  It pulled up its dress and showed us.  It had on a blue dress.”

The child wanted to ask how it could be a man and a woman both without two heads but she did not… .  

Was the person in the cover story “made thisaway” or has she “done it to myself”?  That is the question – the riddle, if you will; and the answer (to judge from the photographs) is as puzzling, to me right now, as the riddle itself.

• 2 June 2015
• #media commentary#flannery o'connor
• 2