A few weeks ago, I wrote about the intersection of writers and gardening. I mentioned that Flannery O'Connor's Andalusia in Milledgeville, Georgia, had gardens and peacocks. Yesterday, as I looked up writers with Savannah ties, I came across the fact that O'Connor was born and mostly raised in Savannah. Her childhood home is now site of a museum and gardens. Now I have two O'Connor-related gardens to visit next time I'm in Georgia. One of the more interesting facts on the museum's web site, was a snippet about a 6-year-old O'Connor and her trained chicken. She trained a chicken to walk backward. This apparently caught the attention of Pathe News Service and they came to Savannah to see for themselves. They filmed O'Connor and her talented chicken and it ended up in a 1931 newsreel that theater patrons would see before the cartoon and double feature. The writer sarcastically noted later that this was quite an event for her and everything that followed was an "anticlimax." The writer died of lupus at 39. Her anticlimax included some fine writing. She's influenced thousands of us with her spare style featuring "grotesques" (her term) of the South. Plenty of humor too. Not sure if any story or novel featured a backward-walking chicken. Who would believe that? The Misfit?
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