SAVANNAH, Georgia — March 21, 2025, was the official start of Flannery O’Connor’s weekend birthday bash, leading up to her 100th birthday on March 25, 2025. I snagged a ticket to the social in Flannery’s childhood home.

I’d need multiple wardrobe changes but would wear the same earrings to every event — the feathered flamingo ones, a gift from a writing buddy, author Helen Bradley. Flannery was mad for peafowl.

“Why do you think Flannery’s legacy has endured?” I texted Helen.

“Because she was BOLD and led the way for women authors!” Helen texted back.

Flannery’s parlor gleamed with the look of a house freshly readied for a party. In Brooklyn, I’d also lived in a tall, skinny row house where the pocket doors had been removed to enlarge the parlor.

Flannery’s pram (stroller), which executive director Janie Bragg describes during tours as the “Rolls Royce” of prams, complete with shocks, porthole and Flannery’s monogram, sat in a corner. The only other sign of excess amid the middle-class furnishings was the gilded picture railing — another gift from rich cousin Katie who had lived next door. Flannery’s mother had still been living when the Flannery O’Connor Childhood Home Foundation & Museum acquired the house and helped ensure historical accuracy.  

On my way to the dining room, I introduced myself to a cheerful-looking man wearing a collar. Father Damian Ference, the vicar for evangelization for the Diocese of Cleveland, had already written one book about Flannery, with another coming out.

“Why are you obsessed with Flannery?” I quipped.

“Because I feel seen and understood and loved by her. I’m a priest, but I’m also an artist and have an artist’s heart.” He was as honest and quick on his feet as she was.

We agreed about the challenge to love God deeply and be a good artist.

“But she did it,” he said.

I needed wine before he made me cry. I grabbed a glass and a handful of cheese straws and headed outside to admire the freshly manicured garden designed by renowned landscape architect Clermont Lee. In Flannery’s time, of course, it held her chickens.

Back inside, the foundation’s president, Mary Villeponteaux, cracked open a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, and we raised our glasses to Flannery. Board member Roger Smith gave a shout-out to Flannery saying, “I’m thrilled people in Savannah still recognize the value of breathing the same air she breathed in her childhood home.”

After champagne and conversation, I returned to the parlor to rest my feet. A group of men stood in the doorway. Hands raised, voices flew, with a scene straight out of a Flannery story, both beautiful and strange. They jumped from Judgement Day to The River. “I think Mr. Paradise is an evil man,” someone said. “But hadn’t he bounded into the water to save the drowning boy?” someone else asked. Somebody quoted Mark 1:5-20.

The red-cheeked man with the camera dangling from his neck said he had been banned from teaching Flannery’s Good Country People to his students, Manley Pointer’s name the apparent objection. But wasn’t his carrying of Hulga’s leg “reminiscent of Jesus walking on water” and grace breaking through, Father Ference said, at which point he dashed across the room, grabbed Flannery’s short stories, quickly turned to a page as if he’d known the exact one, and read, aloud, the final scene.

I’d looked forward to meeting Frances Florencourt, Flannery’s remaining first cousin, but she was headed to Milledgeville, which was hosting its own tribute. But she’d emailed to say, “When I think of Flannery I think of how much fun she was and of her wonderful sense of humor! This is the side of her so many people don’t get. She loved the characters she wrote about and about the ones she didn’t write about. And doesn’t humor grow out of love?”

At that moment, Flannery’s house was certainly full of laughter and love.

March 22, 2025: There was a roster of tours to choose from — house tours, tours of the Cathedral-Basilica of St. John the Baptist, where Flannery was baptized and attended Mass, and the one I took, a walking tour of Flannery’s neighborhood, Lafayette Ward. Laid out in 1837, the square contained dwellings that reflected various socioeconomic levels, from modest row houses to an apartment complex to mansions, including the Andrew Low House, where Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts. The cathedral faces Flannery’s house, across the square. Right past it is St. Vincent’s Academy, where Flannery attended elementary school.

That night, my friends and I headed to the veteran-owned craft brewery Service Brewing, to hear North Carolina-based Colin Cutler & Hot Pepper Jam. A multitalented singer-songwriter who plays guitar, banjo and harmonica (and teaches college literature), Cutler performed every song from his Flannery-inspired album Tarwater. Hints of Bob Wills, Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Merle Haggard coursed through the “juke joint energy”-infused songs. “What got me back into country music was Merle Haggard,” Colin told me, earning my fanship.

And what had so grabbed hold of him that he’d devoted an entire album to Flannery? She taught him to look at life and people directly, he said. “People and their actions are themselves art, and any supernatural truth will shine through the natural.” Every inch a fine poet, he brought tears to my eyes when he sang The Cold That’s Forever, a meditation about coming home and nod to Flannery’s The Enduring Chill.

March 23, 2025: Before the parade, I went to Mass. As the lector read from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, admonishing them not to fall, I thought of a letter Flannery had written, commenting on Caravaggio’s painting imagining Paul’s conversion by being thrown off a horse. In true Flannery fashion, she struck at the heart of her own writing, observing, “I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse.”

Outside, the parade was in full swing — with local authors selling books, a vintage pop-up shop, lemonade, a corn-hole toss, paintings by folk artist Panhandle Slim. Young girls in cotton frocks stared up at me and a bunch of other Flannery look-alikes.

 A group of talented young dancers performed Irish dance opposite Flannery’s house, followed by improvisational opera. At 3:15, Father Drew Larkin, parochial vicar at the cathedral, blessed Flannery’s birthday cake by offering a prayer of gratitude for her life and work, the repose of her soul, and for the way she’d revealed truth through her favorite subject — grace.

Youngsters lined up for cake. My good friend Denise Flojo won the Flannery look-alike contest.

Flannery’s legacy endures for so many reasons, not least of which is her continuing uncanny ability to bring people of all stripes together in one place — saints and sinners alike, political opposites, young and old. I’d bonded with Denise and her family in this very square at my first parade in 2014. Many years later, Denise sponsored me when I entered the Catholic Church. Long before that, her husband Norman, God rest his sweet soul, hadn’t been as subtle as Flannery had, handing me a copy of Catholicism for Dummies.

The Sweet Thunder Band, a fixture at every celebration, led a parade around the square as partygoers and a guy in a gorilla suit sang When the Saints Go Marching In.

People went home. Vendors packed up. I headed back to the cathedral for adoration, which wasn’t on the birthday schedule but nonetheless seemed a fitting end. As a baby, Flannery could look out and see the cathedral’s twin spires from her crib.

I sat alone in a right-hand pew.

Flannery’s birthday celebration will continue throughout the year with lectures at the house and a fundraising gala in the fall.

But the sum and substance of what mattered most to her was encased in a monstrance on the altar, the continuing reality of the Incarnation. And so it was only fitting that on her (almost) birthday, Flannery should have the last word.

The story goes like this: She’d gone to an upper-crust dinner party in New York where she’d felt inadequate. At some point, late, during a conversation about the Eucharist, the host opined that she thought of it as a symbol, albeit a pretty good one. In a shaky voice, Flannery replied, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” She later wrote, “That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest is expendable.”