The Geranium

When duty is not love

Tom loves it when I read to him. I consider it one of the quiet gifts of my life that we like the same kinds of books and enjoy the experience of reading together. Tom is the better reader—except that now his eyes do not move fast enough back and forth across the page, and his tongue cannot articulate the words clearly. Since I’m not an auditory learner, it is just as well. I am content to be the reader, seeing the words with my own eyes, stopping when I get lost or confused so I can reread and work toward understanding. Tom is patient with me as the reader, which, in its own way, is another kind of love.

Today I went to our neighborhood public library, and while I was browsing, I found The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor. Years ago, I was intrigued by Flannery O’Connor, having heard that she was an odd Southern Catholic woman who wrote shockingly violent and grotesque stories, yet with an element of redemption and grace woven through them. I think I tried to read one of her books once and quit because it didn’t make sense to me. I did, however, read her journal, which was beautiful. She deeply desired to be an author who wrote in a way that pleased God and brought Him glory. She wrote, “Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for Your story—just like the typewriter was mine.”

So tonight, Tom and I read “The Geranium.” I recommend you read the story, but here is a brief summary.

It is about Old Dudley, who lived in a small rural town in the South and goes to live with his daughter in a small apartment in New York City. Dudley is homesick for life in the country, where he and his Black servant, Rabie, would go fishing and hunting. He remembers Rabie fondly, but as he reminisces, it becomes clear that although Rabie treated him kindly, Dudley is marred by racist attitudes and behaviors.

As Dudley sits in the New York City apartment, he notices that in the window across from his, every day a drab geranium plant is moved out and set on the windowsill, precariously close to the edge, where it bakes in the hot sun, and then is moved back in at night. It deeply bothers him that the plant is not truly cared for and is not in the right environment to thrive. He says it reminds him of “the boy at home who had polio and had to be wheeled out every morning and left in the sun to blink.” It was what they did dutifully, without love, without much thought beyond the sense that this is simply what you do.

“The methodical, mechanical act of putting the plant out and bringing it back in—dutifully—does not help it thrive at all.”

Dudley is in New York because his daughter is doing her Christian duty of caring for him. No one else in the family would. She demanded that he come with her, and he succumbed. He is wretchedly homesick, displaced from everything that was comfortable and familiar. He misses his Black servants, who were kind and good, and he begins to sense—perhaps for the first time—that maybe he was not so good in return.

Then Dudley notices a sharply dressed Black man in the apartment across the hall. He is shocked that a servant could look so good. Remembering his fishing and hunting trips with Rabie, he wonders whether this Black servant might go fishing with him. But he soon learns from his daughter that this man is moving into the apartment and is not a servant at all. Dudley begins ranting and raving, making the worst kinds of racist remarks.

Later, Dudley goes out to get something for his daughter. On the stairs, he becomes lost in memory, and the Black man finds him—showing him love and kindness beyond belief, helping him back to his apartment one step at a time. When Dudley returns to the apartment, a lump rising in his throat, he breaks down into sobs. He looks out the window and sees that the geranium across the way is no longer on the windowsill. It has fallen to the ground. The owner does not care.

Dudley wants to go down the steps to save the geranium, but he remembers walking up the stairs behind the Black man who “pulled him up on his feet and kept his arm in his,” talking with him about hunting deer and calling him old-timer. He would not go down again and have a N. patting him on the back! So Dudley retreats into the apartment, while the geranium remains in a pile of dirt, its roots sticking straight up.

There are so many paradoxes in this story.

Dudley has experienced tender love and friendship with Rabie, whom he nevertheless treats as inferior. He resents his daughter for doing her Christian duty in bringing him into her home, yet there is absolutely no loving, tender relationship between them.

Dudley remembers how geraniums once thrived in the country. He observes how the methodical, mechanical act of putting the plant out and bringing it back in—dutifully—does not help it thrive at all. The careless attitude, in fact, is the cause of its demise.

Grace comes to Dudley through a Black man. The experience of love and kindness creates a crack into which grace seeps. Dudley cannot help but break down.

“Grace comes to us and breaks us, and then we fall back into our old sinful patterns of living.”

But just as he is on the verge of retrieving the plant and giving it the care he always believed it deserved, the deep roots of racism rise up, and the grace seems to disappear.

Is this a despairing end? Maybe. But maybe not. Perhaps grace comes to us and breaks us, and then we fall back into our old sinful patterns of living. Graces are not once and done. They continue to come, and if we can humble ourselves—empty ourselves of old ways of thinking—those graces may begin to remake us into better images of God.