Southern Oddities // Samantha Tedder

     Southern media seems to continuously have this them around the oddballs of life. Take Forest Gump, for example, or Troop Zero. Forest is different than those around him, with a big ole southern drawl and a love for chocolates. He's not really like anyone else, and the movie simply follows him through life in the mid-twentieth century. Troop Zero depicts rural Georgia in 1977, following Christmas Flint and her friends. Where a bunch of outcast girls spends their summer becoming birdie scouts to hopefully earn a place on NASA's golden record. Christmas has a strange family life and a fixation on space which presents itself in her efforts to be immortalized on the record. Both of these movies take place in the deep south, communicating to all those outside it a tiny bit about life below the Mason-Dixon. 

    O'Conner does this as well. Her Southern Gothic writing beautifully captures what goes bump down that old dirt road. Our grandma's told us the wives' tales to keep us from going too far on summer days. The feeling you get when you walk past that one abandoned house no one wants to buy on your street. She's captured that feeling so well in her writing. In A Good Man is Hard to Find, we see why you never go down the wrong road. The grandma who thinks of herself above others simply because she is a "lady" finds herself wrong about the directions she has given after manipulating the situation to see an old house. She realizes the place she speaks of is in Tennesee, not in Georgia, where they presently are. This mistake ends up being fatal as the Misfit kills her entire family. No real reason is given for this death. Though I think the story's dialogue tries to communicate some semblance of an explanation. The grandma backtracks on a lot of her beliefs when she realizes her life is at stake. Sadly this is all for not, as the entire family dies at the hands of Misfit's gang. 

    P.S. I commented on Bug Olsen and Josh Naqvi's posts