When I was still teaching, I read this story aloud almost every semester. There’s a tale, possibly apocryphal, about Flannery O’Connor, giving a reading of this story and saying to the audience, This is a story about a family that goes on vacation and meets up with a murderer and he kills them all. I’m telling you that because I don’t want you to worry about what’s going to happen.
One other thing before I start to read: O’Connor was writing about a white family in Georgia, probably set in the 1950s, and the characters in one passage demonstrate their deeply embedded racism, and a couple of times use what we now call the N word. I’m not going to presume to edit Flannery O’Connor, so I’m going to read that dialogue exactly as she wrote it.
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~cinichol/229/O'Connor%20A%20Good%20Man%20is%20Hard%20to%20Find.pdf
Great one next Friday: The Man Who Knew Belle Starr, by Richard Bausch, a wonderful novelist and practitioner of writing in the short story form.
Thank you for reading this to me. So much to contemplate. More of this please🫶