CAROLINE McCOY is a writer and editor based in Savannah. She is the author of a collection of short fiction, Museum of Hard Times.
For more than two years, I have lived in the lower level of Flannery O'Connor's childhood home, which sits on a quiet residential block in downtown Savannah, Georgia. I had studied O'Connor's life and work in graduate school, and it was my research that enabled me to recognize the gray façade of the author's first residence during a routine Zillow search. This happened one morning in late September 2020, at the height of the pandemic. I was subletting an apartment in Savannah, spending my days scrolling through the same stock of dismal, overpriced rentals. Spotting the listing for the garden apartment on Lafayette Square, I imagined fate at play. A week later, I signed the lease.
Because the house functions as a museum devoted to her youth, I am continually reminded of O'Connor. Outside my front door stands an iron placard dating her time in the house (1925–1938) and detailing her major literary accomplishments (three O. Henry Awards and a posthumous National Book Award for her collected short stories). Occasionally, her admirers peer into my windows or ring my doorbell, mistakenly believing that the entrance to my apartment is the starting point for the weekend tours that run through the rest of the house. When they catch me coming or going, they ask questions that I have trouble answering succinctly, given my extensive knowledge of the writer. On the days when I encounter none of her fans directly, I hear the amplified voices of trolley-tour drivers saying her name as they wheel around Lafayette Square, which is also home to the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist, where O'Connor was baptized and received her first communion. Once, I opened my mailbox to find junk mail addressed to Mr. Flannery O'Connor.
But this story is incomplete. Narrative accounts of the rear exterior of the O'Connor home omit the existence of a small brick dependency, a single-story carriage house that edged the southern property line.
The narrow, three-story house was built in 1856. For the next century, the space I now rent was a dirt basement. Prior to Savannah's liberation by General William T. Sherman's troops in December 1864, the basement may have functioned as living quarters for enslaved people. A brick fireplace, sealed long ago, offers the only tangible clue to this history, though research indicates that enslaved people did reside in the lower levels of many Savannah townhouses. Newlyweds Edward and Regina O'Connor purchased the house in 1923, and in 1925, their only child, Flannery, was born. Though the family left Savannah in 1938, briefly staying in Atlanta before settling in the middle-Georgia town of Milledgeville, the house stayed under the ownership of a moneyed cousin, Katie Semmes, who lived next door and who helped the O'Connors financially. Upon her death in 1958, Semmes gave the house to the 33-year-old author, who opted to seize its investment potential and turn its floors into rental units. This is when my apartment came into being.
Real estate was not a foreign venture for O'Connor. Her father had worked in the business until his premature death from lupus (the same disease that afflicted her), and her mother began managing rental properties a short time later, likely out of financial necessity. I have read enough of O'Connor's letters—published and unpublished—to determine that she probably deferred to her mother in matters of renovating and
