Document Type

Report

Project Title

Driving While Black

Principal Investigator

Katie Simon

Publication Date

2025

College or Department

Department of English

Funder

Academic Affairs

Award Date Range

2024-2025

Award Amount

3150.00

Abstract

This project investigates social, cultural, and historical contexts for Flannery O’Connor’s 1953 short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” and situates this work as a commentary on midcentury racialized codes in the South, particularly pertaining to traveling while black. The title of this short story comes from the blues tune “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” written in 1917 by the African American songwriter and actor Eddie Green. Green’s song became a well-known standard, widely recorded and performed by both men and women, with many performers improvising lyrics that alter or even subvert the original accommodationist content of the song. O’Connor’s version of the tune offers a series of reversals and subversions, playing with the theme of who is “good,” and querying the social conditions that might provide context for doing or being “good.” While O’Connor’s work is often read as religious allegory, this project opens up new approaches to ethical inquiry in her work, arguing that much of her fiction invites readers to consider not simply their religious faith, but also the wider regional, racial, gendered, and political contexts that affect beliefs and codes of conduct. In this story in particular, white characters are situated in violent scenes that would have been familiar as a kind of everyday terror for traveling black musicians performing on the blues circuit.

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