Through
creates humor as she depicts comedic characters with regional dialects and ridiculous physical
appearances. For instance, Bailey's wife is described as having a face
...broad and innocent as a cabbage...tied around with a green
head-kerchief that had two points on the top like a rabbit's ears.
O'Connor lightly ridicules some of her Southern characters, too, such as the little
girl whose name is June Star and the man the grandmother should have married, Mr. Teagarden,
whose initials were E.A.T. and the black boy read them on a watermelon mistaking them for
directions. The owner of Sammy's Famous Barbecue is, indeed, laughable with his monkey in the
chinaberry tree and his khaki trousers that sit low on his hips with his stomach hanging over
them "like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt." O'Connor's depiction of his
manner of speech is simply hilarious as he sits down at a table near the grandmother's family
and emits "a combination sigh and yodel." And, his regionalis also
humorous:
"Yes'm, I suppose so," Red Sam said as
if he were struck with this answer.
Certainly,
O'Connor continues to have fun with the character of June Star who rudely tells Red Sam's wife
who says something many would say in her region as something meant to be a compliment to a cute
child,
"Would you like to come be my little
girl?""No, I certainly wouldn't," June Star said. "I
wouldn't live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!" and she ran back to
the table.
Nor does June Star lose her headstrong
attitude even when confronted by the Misfit and his friends. She talks back to them,
asking them, "What are you telling US what to do for?" and after Hiram is told to hold
her hand and lead her off, she says, "I don't want to hold hands with him....He reminds me
of a pig."
Even the two men and the Misfit are somewhat comical in
appearance:
One was a fat boy in black trousers and a red
sweat shirt with a silver stallion embossed on the front of it. He moved around on the right
side of them and stood staring, his mouth partly open in a kind of loose grin. The other had on
khaki pants and a blue striped coat and a gray hat pulled down very low, hiding most of his
face....The driver...was an older man that the other two. His hair was just
beginning to gray and he wore silver-rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look.
He...didn't have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him
and was holding a black hat and a gun.
At the same time,
however, there is a certain black humor, a dark comedic quality, to the description of the three
men, especially later when the Misfit dons Bailey's Florida shirt and the grandmother murmurs,
"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!"
Also, there is a blending of humor with horror in certain instances as in the
incongruity of the tone of O'Connor's description of the grandmother's desperate cry to her son
who is being taken off to be shot:
There were two more
pistol reports and the grandmother raised her head like a parched old turkey hen crying for
water and called, "Bailey Boy, Bailey Boy!" as if her heart would break.
Likewise, the Misfit's callous remark to throw the grandmother
where "you thrown the others" juxtaposed with his gentleness of picking up the cat
that rubs itself against his leg is horrifically funny. Indeed, the story develops from light
to very dark humor.
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