ALAN C. TAYLOR Boston University Redrawing the Color Line in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person” IN THE CONCLUSION TO FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S 1954STORY “THE DISPLACED Person,” a Polish DP named Guizac is crushed by a runaway tractor as three bystanders, their eyes “froze[n] . . . in collusion forever,” passively watch the “accident” occur (234). I emphasize the word “accident” here because it is clear throughout the story, and unmistakable in its crescendo, that each of the story’s characters, white and black, ultimately want the DP dead. What is unclear, however, are the motivations for such an emotion and the ways in which the death of this Polishimmigrantservesthesmallcommunity’svariousinterests.Iwould like to propose that we may find answers to these questions by locating O’Connor’s story within the unprecedented volatility of the color line experienced in the post-war US, but most intensely in the South, as a result of the policies of Jim Crow—a system that radically unsettled rather than stabilized the concept and the attendant privileges of whiteness. At first glance this statement may seem somewhat peculiar, given that Jim Crow’s express purpose was the maintenance of an apartheid system and a stable economy of difference that ensured the preservation of white social and biological purity from an adulterating black contaminant. Yet, as scholars such as Matthew Frye Jacobson and David Roediger have persuasively argued, one of the fundamental paradoxes of heightening the premium on race as color was that it systematically eroded the once salient differences between white “races”; in its attempt to draw a definitive color line separating monolithic white and black categories, Jim Crow unintentionally flung open the doors to the privileges of whiteness for a host of then distinctly raced immigrant groups such as Poles, Slavs, Saracens, Celts, Italians, and Jews, who were decisively “whitened” by the logic of Jim Crow (Jacobson 96). Though the notion of white “races” seems counterintuitive to a contemporary reader, Jacobson argues that it only appears so because we have “transported a late-twentieth-century understanding of ‘difference’ into 70 Alan C. Taylor a period whose inhabitants recognized biologically based ‘races.’” In that former system of racial perception, “one might be white and racially distinct from other whites” (6). Recovering this historical perspective, we see a curious paradox emerge from Jim Crow’s attempts to prevent miscegenation between white and black races: it inadvertently created miscegenation between white ones. Though native white Southerners had long lived within a society defined by the color line, the legacy of their plantation culture left them unprepared for the advent of what have been called the “partly colored races”(seeFoley,Handman,Bow).Whilenewimmigrantsoverwhelmingly settled in the more prosperous urban centers of the North and West, the rural South remained somewhat cloistered from these consolidations of whiteness;however,atmid-century,thesocialanddemographicchanges wrought by the war economy quickly transported the problem of racial alchemy to the South’s doorstep. During the first two years of the conflict alone the Bureau of Agricultural Economics recorded the loss of nearly three million agricultural workers, principally to the military and the industries which supported the war economy (Foley 205). In response, Congress passed legislation in 1943 and 1948 to relax strict immigration quotas and allow for the creation of guest worker programs that brought hundreds of thousands of Displaced Persons and Mexican braceros to work in the fields left vacant in the South. While exploiting this cheap global work force was a boon to the nation’s agricultural productivity, these new immigrants presented an insoluble problem to the polarized Southern racial order which was unable to parse the social positions of these “not non-whites” (see Barrett and Roediger). Though their phenotypes allowed them to construct the white identity that Jim Crow solidified as the key to privilege, the immigrants’ “foreign blood,” foreign language, and racial stigma simultaneously threatened that privilege by flagrantly suggesting a hybrid or amalgamated whiteness. And more troubling still was that these aspects of the immigrant’s otherness were not discernible with the visual logic that sustained Jim Crow, which relied on distinct physiognomic features or skin color to perceive difference and establish hierarchy—a fact that rendered the...