Milledgeville, Ga. — CARMEN ALARCON, a native of Colombia, tore through the farmhouse kitchen as if chasing a misbehaving child about to escape into the warm Georgia evening.
"\o7¡Hola\f7\o7!\f7 I want to talk to you," she yelled, friendly but insistent, as she left my side, flew around the corner and zeroed in on an unseen stranger.
"Tell me about Flannery," she demanded.
I followed closely behind because I had also come to Milledgeville, Georgia's antebellum capital, largely for Flannery -- as in Mary Flannery O'Connor, the internationally acclaimed short-story master who spent her most productive years at Andalusia, the onetime dairy farm where we stood.
But I didn't come just for O'Connor. I also wanted to see Milledgeville -- where Georgia seceded from the Union -- through the eyes of a distinctly Southern writer. I thought seeing the town where she spent her adolescence, attended college and lived most of her adult life might also provide insight into O'Connor's world and work.
For now, though, I was chasing a 30-year-old Colombian through the O'Connors' kitchen and into their parlor.
I found Carmen seated on the couch with Dorrie Neligan, who had been friends with O'Connor's late mother. Regina Cline O'Connor, a widow, lived with and cared for Flannery after the author developed lupus, the chronic auto-immune disease that forced her to return home permanently in 1951. O'Connor died in 1964 at age 39. Neligan remembered her as private and hard to know well.
For a fan, this was not news. But merely being at the farm, an obvious inspiration for the settings of such stories as "A Circle in the Fire," "The Displaced Person" and "Good Country People," had left Carmen quivering with excitement.
She had discovered O'Connor while living in Savannah, Ga., the author's birthplace, and was writing a paper on O'Connor to finish her degree at a Colombian university.
As we walked back to our cars on a warm day last spring, I remarked on her enthusiasm. She stood stock-still and looked intensely into my eyes.
"This is the first time I've come to Andalusia," she said, as if relaying life-and-death information. "Right now, where I'm standing, I'm actually drunk on Flannery O'Connor."
Most visitors to Milledgeville, it is safe to say, do not get drunk on mid-20th century American literary figures.
Old state capital
