The South, Flannery O’Connor, and the Hard Truths We Carry

I’ve been a Southerner all my life. Born and raised in North Alabama, I spent my first nineteen years in a small rural town where the air was thick with humidity, gospel music, and the unspoken rules of Southern hospitality. It’s a place that shaped me deeply—both in beautiful and complicated ways.

Recently, I’ve been reading Flannery O’Connor, and I’ve instantly fallen in love with her writing. There’s something hauntingly familiar about her stories. O’Connor had a rare gift for telling deeply Southern stories while exposing the darker realities hidden within Southern culture. That’s a hard thing to do—especially from the inside.

Most of the time, when critiques of the South come, they come from outsiders. And when you’re Southern, it’s easy to get defensive. Outsiders often only see the negative: the racism, the hypocrisy, the poverty, the violence. They miss the warmth, the resilience, and the quiet acts of everyday grace. But Flannery was one of us. She understood the South not just as a setting, but as a soul. And because she belonged to it, she could tell the truth about it. A hard, uncomfortable truth—but one spoken in love.

We all wrestle with our past. The South produced some of the most selfless and courageous people I’ve ever known. It also gave rise to a form of religion that could be stunningly hypocritical—one that many of us are still recovering from. O’Connor’s characters often reflect that contradiction. Many are fiercely religious, but their faith is tangled up in ignorance, racism, and pride. They quote Scripture one moment and spew racial slurs the next, without the slightest awareness of the evil they carry inside.

That hits close to home for me. My father was a homicide investigator. From a young age, I saw firsthand the darkness that lived just beneath the surface of our Bible Belt community. Flannery O’Connor doesn’t shy away from that darkness—she stares it down. Her stories remind us that evil doesn’t just lurk in the shadows; it lives in our hearts. And sometimes, the most dangerous villain isn’t out there somewhere—it’s in the mirror.

It’s not always clear who the “bad guy” is in her stories, because everyone is guilty to some degree. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s the uncomfortable truth she wanted us to see. That we are all in need of grace. That we are all capable of both cruelty and kindness. That Southern culture, like all cultures, is a complicated mix of beauty and brokenness.

One of her lines has stayed with me:

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”

That’s the kind of clarity we need today. Especially in the South. Especially in me.

And maybe that’s where redemption begins—with the courage to tell the truth about who we are.