Jordan Clark Smith
IN THE SPRING of 1960, Flannery O’Connor got a letter she did not want to receive. It was from Sister Evangelist, the Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta.
The Sister Superior wrote of a child, Mary Ann, who had come to the Home as a child of 3, with a tumor on her face and an eye lost to cancer. But, said the Sister, “the other eye sparkled, twinkled, danced mischievously, and after one meeting one never was conscious of her physical defect but recognized only the beautiful brave spirit and felt the joy of such contact.” Someone should write her story, said the Sister. In Flannery O’Connor’s words: “Not me, I said to myself.”
Jordan Smith died on Nov. 1, All Saints Day in some traditions. Ever since an accident when he was 8, Jordan had, according to his obituary, required “total care” and persevered through “unimaginable hardship.”
But his spirit persisted. The people who knew him and took care of him knew it; his family “has heard countless testimonies of depression cured, addiction conquered, and others professing renewed ability to face their own difficulties as a result of being with him.”
Mary Ann died at 12. She was not “an inspiration.” Like Jordan Smith, she was a living human being, and many people drew strength and joy from her presence. After many conversations, Flannery O’Connor gave in to the Sister Superior and wrote the introduction to “A Memoir of Mary Ann.”
It’s an easier route into her work for those of us who find her fiction hard to parse. With her terrible swift sword, she cuts into those who insist on the perfectibility of human life. As she says, “One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him.”
To the sentimentalists who say “Isn’t that sad,” or “How could this happen,” she says, “In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith.”