Bailey
Bailey is the son of the principal character in the story, the Grandmother, and is the father of June Star and John Wesley. He drives the car as the family embarks on their vacation. Bailey’s major importance in the story is his relationship to other people, especially his mother. He allows her to boss him around and to convince him to go out of the way to visit an old house she remembers from her childhood, where the family is killed. Bailey seems unresponsive to his wife and children, allowing them to take advantage of him. Overall, Bailey, who wears a yellow shirt with blue parrots, perhaps symbolizing his cowardice, is a “flat” character.
Bailey Boy
See Bailey
Red Sammy Butts
Red Sammy Butts owns the barbecue restaurant called the Tower at which the family stops on their car trip. O’Connor describes him as fat with his stomach hanging over his khaki pants “like a sack of meal swaying under his shirt.” Signs along the highway advertise his barbecue: “Try Red Sammy’s Famous Barbecue. None like Famous Red Sammy’s! Red Sam! The Fat Boy with the Happy Laugh. A Veteran! Red Sammy’s Your Man!” He orders his wife around and engages in empty chatter with the Grandmother. Red Sammy’s statement, “A good man is hard to find,” in reference to the proliferation of crime and a nostalgia for the days when people did not have to lock their doors, becomes the title of the story.
The Grandmother
The Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is the story’s principal character. Her religious epiphany at the story’s end provides the philosophical thrust behind the narrative. By giving her no name other than Grandmother and crotchety conversation that provides much of the story’s humor, O’Connor paints her as a tragically comic caricature, one that a reader can easily, but wrongly, feel superior to. She is selfish and pushy; in fact, her desire to see a house from her childhood results in the family’s death at the end of the story. The story’s primary action involves a family car trip on which they encounter an escaped criminal and his gang. If the Grandmother had not insisted they detour to see the old house, which, she realized too late was in Tennessee, not in the part of Georgia where they were, the family would have escaped the disaster. The Grandmother is critical of the children’s mother, who is never named, and she dotes on her son Bailey although she treats him like a child. She demonstrates racist behavior by calling a poor Black child “a pickaninny … Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?” and she reveals a superior moral attitude. In her conversation with the murderer, an escaped convict called the Misfit, the Grandmother says that she knows he is from “good people,” as she tries to flatter him in order to save her own life. Her last words to him as she reaches out to touch his shoulder, “You’re one of my own children,” signify that she has experienced a final moment of grace. The Misfit shoots her three times, but her transcendence to grace is underscored by the fact that she died “with her legs crossed under her like a child’s and her face smiling up at the cloudless sky.” Through her portrait of the Grandmother, O’Connor demonstrates her strong belief in the salvation of religion. Everyone’s soul deserves to be saved, she is saying, no matter how impious their actions in life.
The Misfit
The Misfit is an escaped murderer who kills the family at the end of the story and shoots the Grandmother three times in the chest. Described as wearing tan and white shoes, no socks, no shirt, he is an older man with glasses “that gave him a scholarly look.” By his speech, readers can tell that he is rather uneducated. However, he speaks to the grandmother and the others with deliberate politeness. He remains calm throughout the scene as he instructs his two companions, Bobby Lee and Hiram, to take the family to the woods. He says to the Grandmother, “it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t reckernized me.”
In the Misfit’s conversation with the Grandmother about Jesus throwing “everything off balance,” O’Connor presents a view of a world out of balance. Just as the story’s violence does not seem to match its comedy, the Misfit’s life of punishment has not fit his crimes. In a long section of dialogue, the Misfit unburdens his soul to the Grandmother about his father’s death, his own mistreatment, and his feelings about the world’s injustices. He kills her when she calls him one of her “own babies.” Although critics have interpreted the actions and words of the Misfit in many ways, one reading is that he brings the Grandmother to a moment of grace in which she makes an unselfish, religious connection with another human being, something she had been incapable of before that time. In his comment,”She would of been a good woman… if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life,” the Misfit seems to understand that her grace required an extreme situation. The Misfit, by helping the Grandmother understand her own mortality and connection with “all God’s children,” may actually be an unlikely—and evil— messenger from God.
Red Sam
See Red Sammy Butts
Red Sammy
See Red Sammy Butts
June Star
June Star, the granddaughter of the principal character in the story, is rude, self-centered, and annoying. She argues with her brother John Wesley and seems disappointed when no one is killed in their car accident. When Red Sammy’s wife asks her if she would like to live with them, June Star replies, “No I certainly wouldn’t…. I wouldn’t live in a broken-down place like this for a million bucks!” She, like many of O’Connor’s characters, serves as comic relief or as an example of realism.
John Wesley
John Wesley, the eight-year-old grandson of the principal character of the story, is described as a “stocky child with glasses.” He is portrayed as a kid with normal interests and actions. His enthusiasm to see the house his grandmother tells them about, mainly to explore the secret panel she says it contains, influences his father Bailey to make the fateful detour. John Wesley’s name is undoubtedly an ironic reference to the English priest who was one of the founders of the Methodist church.
Source Credits:
Short Stories for Students, Volume 2, Flannery O’Connor, Edited by Kathleen Wilson, Published by Gale Research, New York, 1997.