They drove off again into the hot afternoon. The grandmother took cat naps and woke up every few minutes with her own snoring. Outside of Toombsboro she woke up and recalled an old plantation that she had visited in this neighborhood once when she was a young lady. She said the house had six white columns across the front and that there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front where you sat down with your suitor after a stroll in the garden. She recalled exactly which road to turn off to get to it. She knew that Bailey would not be willing to lose any time looking at an old house, but the more she talked about it, the more she wanted to see it once again and find out if the little twin arbors were still standing. "There was a secret-panel in this house," she said craftily, not telling the truth but wishing that she were, "and the story went that all the family silver was hidden in it when Sherman came through but it was never found . . ." ("A Good Man is Hard to Find")

Basic Set Up:

The grandmother in Flannery O'Connor's story wants to stop and see the old plantation house she visited as a young woman. Problem is, she has to convince her son, who is doing the driving.

The grandmother here remembers an old plantation house, and she makes her son take a detour to find it. The plantation house, of course, is a staple of the Southern landscape. During the period of slavery, grand plantation houses were found all over the South. Hey, slave labor is cheap, so the people who owned slaves could spend all their money on big houses.

By focusing on this vision of the plantation house, O'Connor thus points to the South's history of slavery and racial oppression. Even though the grandmother is remembering the plantation house as something beautiful, it's also true that it was built on the suffering of other people. There's violence in the house's history, and at the end of the story, in fact, violence erupts in an unexpected way.

The grandmother's memory of this house that she had seen as a "young lady" evokes the landscape of the grand old South. The details of the description evoke the South at its peak: "the house had six white columns across the front and… there was an avenue of oaks leading up to it and two little wooden trellis arbors on either side in front."

Through the description of the house, we're getting a vision of the South in all its grandeur and beauty—but O'Connor's here to remind us that not everything is what it seems.