Honest Hands
Prophets, preachers, and beaters in Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood"
Rest in peace to my car. It was nothing special; I never thought it was.
Two years ago, I bought a beater car. Did it have a radio? No. Did the locks work? See: radio. Was it reliable? Depends what you mean by “was.”
I told my car guy what I wanted: a cheap sedan, one I could slam with miles for two years while I commuted downtown for classes.
Two years later, right on schedule, it’s made the final voyage.
The timing was funny, though. I’d just opened Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, a book with a vehicular breakdown a bit like my own. Hazel Motes, the novel’s protagonist, is returning to the South and in the market for a ride. He shops, like me, for the cheapest money can afford. After searching multiple lots, he spots a beat up Essex and negotiates the price down to 40 bones. Repeatedly, the narrator refers to the car as “rat-colored,” to which I took personal offense.
Almost immediately, the car presents its flaws.
And look, I’ve been there. When you buy something cheap, you get what you pay for. Hazel is a realist, and as the reader you wonder how he might respond. You expect another example of his no-nonsense thrift. Maybe he’ll repair the car by hand, or otherwise show his resourcefulness.
But that’s not nearly what happens:
Haze had driven his car immediately to the nearest garage where a man with black bangs and a short expressionless face had come out to wait on him. He told the man he wanted the horn made to blow and the leaks taken out of the gas tank, the starter made to work smoother and the windshield wipers tightened.
The man lifted the hood and glanced inside and then shut it again. Then he walked around the car, stopping to lean on it here and there, and thumping it in one place and another. Haze asked him how long it would take to put it in the best order.
“It can’t be done,” the man said.
“This is a good car,” Haze said. “I knew when I first saw it that it was the car for me, and since I’ve had it, I’ve had a place to be that I can always get away in.”
O’Connor’s wry humor shines here. The reader has just followed Hazel’s search, spanning multiple pages, for the worst car available. Sentences ago, he was berating the vehicle. He was pointing to the missing back seat, calling the car more of a place to sleep than dependable transport. You’ve been thoroughly convinced it’s a heap of junk; but now that it’s his, he has a different story.
The chapter concludes:
“Was you going some place in this?” the man asked.
“To another garage,” Haze said, and he got in the Essex and drove off. At the other garage he went to, there was a man who said he could put the car in the best shape overnight, because it was such a good car to begin with, so well put together and with such good materials in it, and because, he added, he was the best mechanic in town, working in the best-equipped shop. Haze left it with him, certain that it was in honest hands.
Hazel articulates his desire only to work with an honest mechanic. The irony is that, faced with the truth, he pulls out of the lot and finds someone to tickle his ears. The “honesty” he sought was to be told he was the best, with the best car at the best shop.
Wise Blood is a book about religion. O’Connor’s critique here, in my estimation, applies to both customer and practitioner.
Flannery O’Connor, while known for her humorous and innovative vision of the Southern Gothic, was also famously a devout Catholic. I wonder if she had The Book of Jeremiah in mind as she sculpted this scene.
The Book of Jeremiah, if you aren’t familiar, includes one of the most popular, quotable scriptures in the Bible, Jeremiah 29:11. The book tells the story of the prophet, who warns Israel of the consequences of their idolatry—in particular, that they will come under exile to Babylon if they continue in their unfaithfulness. A sizable portion of the complaint against them is their dishonesty in refusing to acknowledge their idolatry.
The popular verse comes in chapter 29, but in chapter 28 there is another prophet, a false prophet, named Hananiah. He prophesies, essentially, “Don’t worry, guys. This will all be over soon. In two years, it’ll be like it never happened.” You can imagine why people longed to hear it. For someone charged with being in denial, exactly what you’d want to hear is that the consequences will be minimal. It’s the refusal to acknowledge reality, allowing cognitive dissonance to continue. After all, two years isn’t so bad.
It’s in chapter 29 that Jeremiah prophesies, setting the record straight:
10 This is what the Lord says: “When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will come to you and fulfill my good promise to bring you back to this place. 11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Here, in verse eleven, is the famous motivational phrase. It is rarely presented with verse ten’s context, though, that the deliverance in question is to arrive only after 70 years of exile. The relief wouldn’t come to those who heard it, but their children. The parents would first come to face the difficulty they welcomed.
It is a bit of irony to me that, after thousands of years of transmission, it seems this scripture is more often used for purposes like the false prophet Hananiah’s—to unwaveringly uplift, to patch our concerns with reality. The phrase alone doesn’t do much to upset our cognitive baselines, while the full story conveys something rather weighty.
This may seem a bit of an aside, but it overlays quite interestingly, I think, with all O’Connor suggests through her character Hazel Motes.
From the first pages, we learn Hazel’s grandfather was a prominent preacher. Though he’s disavowed his family’s faith, and the family trade, still it clings to him. Strangers mistake him for a religious man, citing his looks, his dress, and his manner of speech. He’s disappointed to resemble a preacher; they’re disappointed he’s not one, for he so fits the bill.
The novel follows, then, his rise as an anti-preacher. He vehemently denies his appearances as a man of faith. Before long, he’s standing on boxes, proclaiming with fire on his tongue that he isn’t a preacher. Anti-disciples begin to follow, and before long, he’s founded the anti-church.
It’s great comedy.
And in narrative terms, the earlier episode of Hazel and the mechanic is inessential. It doesn’t drive the plot forward, and if anything, it feels at first reading out of place.
Haze is, after all, the cynic’s cynic. He’s not one to be taken for anything. He has so much belief in disbelief, he’s given his life to convert new disbelievers. That optimism—silly wishful thinking—is what he hated about his family. Now he’s suddenly coping for the best?
It’s important for exposing Haze’s motivations.
He claims his allegiance is to honesty alone, not to hope in anything unseen, and certainly not that religion fluff. He makes clear his gripes with the common person’s chosen outlook (we could say vehicle, from the Latin vehere, to carry or convey). But he finds a literal vehicle in his possession and suddenly isn’t so objective. He criticizes others delusions, but now he’s clouded by his own.
Really, Hazel’s like the rest of us; there’s somewhere we want to be, and we pick a vehicle to get us there. Call it religion, call it belief, call it disbelief. It’s a rat-colored sedan. It’s a prophecy that this isn’t happening.
Under the hood, it’s all belief. As convinced as Haze is there’s nothing to believe in, he behaves as one almost more devout than those he criticizes. His outlook carries him to greater and greater levels of devotion. Having rejected one vehicle, and having chosen another, he’s yet unwilling to accept any flaws of his own. We follow the missteps of a man who, determined to be unlike his believing family, becomes ever more like them. In an author’s note before the book, O’Connor sets out her position that “comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.” Seeing the whole of the story’s drama distilled in the mechanic’s shop strips the humor of its more morbid tones, and allows you to truly laugh: this guy buys a clunker, but don’t tell him it doesn’t run.
The contradictions, laid bare.
You can imagine a more rational Hazel, shrugging over the car’s condition. I imagine he’d feel how I did at my car’s last moments: “I knew this day was coming. This was what I paid for.”
You can imagine a more calibrated mechanic, balancing good news with the bad.
You can’t, though, imagine Flannery O’Connor writing them. She might say that, to be honest, we’re not. Honesty is to be sought, but it’s not to be assumed—especially of ourselves.
We’re like Hazel, trading “I want to hear the truth” for the truth I want to hear. Like Hananiah, our dream is “like it never happened,” over hope that the future will happen yet. Earnest though we are, we’re mistaken about our own honesty; seeking out truth while we blind our eyes.
Optimism fails, but cynicism is its impersonator.
Speaking of my rat-colored car, see it in my brand new music video on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify.
Ah, yes! A definite post for our times. Or for their times, as the case may be.