When I started thinking about my American literary survey course this semester, I knew I wanted to have a story by Flannery O’Connor, partly because I teach in Georgia but also because I wanted to students to see her and other Southern writers in conversation with one another. I thought about doing “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or “Revelation,”but I chose a different story. I have not read O’Connor deeply, and during a trip to Mexico this summer, I found a copy of The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O’Connor in my hotel room. I flipped through the table of contents, and when I came across the title “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” I started to read. Right when I made it to the hotel room, I read this story, and it stood out to me because of the ways it deals with the Lost Cause narrative.

At this point, I had already decided to do stories such as William Faulkner’s “Dry September,” Kate Chopin’s “Désirée’s Baby,” Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Nelse Hatton’s Vengeance,” and more. Since I chose these stories, I knew that we would, at some point, come into contact with the Lost Cause narrative, and O’Connor’s story provides an opportunity to interrogate the pathological myth of the lost cause and the ways it impacts society, specifically in relation to the ways it gets passed down from generation to generation.

The story takes place in 1951 or 1952 and centers on General George Poker Sash, a 104 year-old Confederate solider, attending his 62 year-old granddaughter’s college graduation. Leading up the graduation, Sally constantly prays that her grandfather will make it to see her graduate since she has spent the past 20 years going to school during the summer to get her degree in elementary education. She wants the world to see his existence and to see him as she sees him. She wants him to be on the platform, for entire graduating class and audience to soak in, and she wants to say, “See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing for the old tradition! Dignity! Honor! Courage! See him!” She wants them to see him through the lens of the Lost Cause, as heroic, honorable, and upright.

Even as she wants this, George doesn’t have any use for history, or the “true” history of events. Rather, he lives in a dream world full of parades and grandeur where everybody loves him. He only cares about one event in his past, and event that took place in Atlanta in 1939, when he was 92 years old. This event, of course, is the world premier of the movie adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the End. It was here, at the premier, that he became a “general,” receiving his general’s uniform, a sword, and adoration. During the war, he was merely a major. At the premier, a group of United Daughters of the Confederacy clapped for him as he walked through the foyer, escorted by “an usherette in a Confederate cap and little skirt.”

Before the film, a “motion-picture industry” man came up on stage and introduced people connected with the film and other individuals. He introduced George sixteenth, and even though Sally told the man that her grandfather’s name was George Poker Sash, he man introduced him as “General Tennessee Flintolock Sash of the Confederacy.” George becomes an illusion, a false reality in this moment, moving from a major to a general and even having his name changed. The truth gets lost and the myth ascends. As he walked up to the stage, the “orchestra began to play the Confederate Battle Hymn” and people cheered for him as “usherettes in Confederate caps and short skirts held a Confederate and a Union flag crossed behind” him.”

After the man asked George his name and motioned to Sally to move him off of the stage so they could introduce the next person, “[h]e stood immovable in the exact center of the spotlight, his neck thrust forward, his mouth slightly open, and his voracious gray eyes drinking in the glare and the applause.” He soaked it all in, becoming a myth, a legend, a counter to reality. After the premier, people kept asking him to do different events from sitting in the Capitol City Museum on Confederate Memorial Day so people could see him amidst the other artifacts to being in parades. In the museum, he sat behind a rope, and “nothing about him [indicated] that he was alive.” He sat there motionless, until a boy tried to take his sword. He became a wax figure, another moment of unreality amidst reality.

Yet, he relished it because he beacme the center of attention. History didn’t matter to him because “[w]hat happened then wasn’t anything to a man living now.” It was, according to this logic, past, removed to the dustbin of history. However, his appearance countered that sentiment because he represented the past. He lived it. George, though, refused to acknowledge it, and as he sat in stage at Sally’s graduation, he heard the speaker proclaim, “If we forget our past . . . we won’t remember our future and it will be as well for we won’t have one.” George heard the words, but “[h]e had forgotten history and didn’t intend to remember it again.” Instead, he chose to form a new reality, devoid of the past.

Sally wants to uphold this historical fantasy where her grandfather served as a general to uphold “the old tradition” of the “glorious South.” She sought to keep that narrative alive, crafting a narrative that obfuscated reality. As an educator, she would have a hand in this process. Her grandfather would have served in the Civil War from 14 to 18, if he enlisted at the start. Ninety years later, his granddaughter, who we assume has already been working the school system, gets her education degree and continues the false narrative that has arisen surrounding her grandfather and the South. That means, of course, that others will grow up with the same ideas, propagating them even further into the future because individuals will learn them in the classroom, at home, and in the community. The false history supplants the factual one, and Sally can say, “See him! My kin, all you upstarts! Glorious upright old man standing for the old tradition!”

I want to, in the next post, continue this discussion by looking at the end of the story. Until then, though, what are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Bluesky @silaslapham.bsky.social‬.