Flannery O’Connor’s Lost Cause: Desegregation in “A Late Encounter with the Enemy”

Abstract

ABSTRACT In keeping with the tendency to minimize the presence of racism in FLannery O’Connor’s works, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” has been judged an attack on Lost Cause ideology. O’Connor’s final public lecture, however, long generally available only in an abridgment removing the only appearance of the word “slavery” in her publications, makes clear that she considered Reconstruction a “violation” of white Southerners, who learned from compulsory acquiescence to such things as the enfranchisement of black men that evil is “a mystery to be endured.” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” likewise chimes with Lost Cause grievances by presenting a phantasmagoric transformation of an all-white college graduation into an all-black one, reflecting both white supremacist anxieties of displacement and a shifting legal landscape in which the Supreme Court, whose ruling in Brown would be promulgated eight months after the story appeared, had already hampered segregationist policies in higher education. This context, along with the story’s invocation of a prominent racial flash point in the immediately pre-Brown era, the integration of swimming pools, reveals the story both as a depiction of the white South under renewed siege, and as an instance of O’Connor’s notable resistance to dealing straightforwardly with the history of repression that informs the mores and manners dissected in her fiction.