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INITIATION AND ITS TRAVESTY IN THE RIVER BY FLANNERY O’CONNOR
When Mrs. Connin holds him up to be baptized by the preacher, he repeats
his chosen name in a loud jaunty voice, but when he tries to make a joke of it
in the crook of the preacher’s arm, saying “My name is Bevvvuuuul,” letting
“the tip of his tongue slide across his mouth,”” he is surprised to see that
the preacher doesn’t smile. So far, he had only been picked up by adults for
the sake of joking. Now that he sees something serious is going to happen,
he quickly adds a lie to the joke: “My mother named me that.”'?
“Have you ever been Baptized?” the preacher asked.
“What’s that?” he murmured.
“If I Baptize you,” the preacher said, “you'll be able to go to the Kingdom of Christ.
You'll be washed in the river of suffering, son, and you'll go by the deep river of life.
Do you want that?”
“Yes,” the child said, and thought, I won’t go back to the apartment then, I’ll go
under the river.
“You won't be the same again,” the preacher said. “You'll count.”*
Then the preacher turns him upside down and holds him under the water
while saying the words of baptism. The shock of the gesture makes the boy
silent, and the next day, after experiencing that at the apartment he doesn’t
“count” (in the evening, the parents make mocking remarks about what
happened to him during the day, and he sleeps in his wet clothes and wakes
up to see the ruins of a party and his parents in an exhausted sleep), he makes
a peanut butter sandwich for himself, eats it, carefully rubs the contents of
an ashtray into the carpet, takes a bus token and half a pack of “life savers”
candies from his mother’s purse, and starts on his fateful journey.
The careless parents are far from being “evil”: they simply take the boy to be
a part of their belongings, and they think that they provide for him as best as
they can: he has a lot of toys (as soon as he destroys them, he gets new ones),
there is food in the fridge, they often take him to restaurants, and if they have
no time for him, his care is a problem to be solved. They try to turn his whims
into jokes, perhaps in the hope that through humour, all the anomalies of
their lives can be dissolved. In their sleep, they, too, are vulnerable, exposed
to the horrible surprise of losing their “belonging.” The boy leaves the house
behind without taking anything except the candies (the “life savers” will
prove useful against the candy-stick of Mr. Paradise) and lets his feet guide
him back to the river.
Richard Giannone also observes that the child’s half-conscious drive toward
the Kingdom of Christ happens through a series of gestures: it is hands and
2 Tbid., 167.
B Ibid.
* Ibid., 168.
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