Malice Versus Ignorance

My first thought after reading these two short stories was why O’Connor wrote two extremely similar stories. What is the difference between the two? Multiple parallelisms run between the two texts that seem to address the same concerns. Both texts portray New York as an unsettling, unnatural environment. Both Tanner and Old Dudley resent their daughters for taking them away from their homes and treating them as invalids. Both daughters feel more of an obligation to their fathers rather than an altruistic desire to serve them and are married to truck drivers. Tanner and Dudley each feel attached to one black friend back at their homes, but disdain the black Northerners after an attempt to befriend them as inferiors. They feel—and Tanner actually is—abused by them. So why does Tanner deserve to die in the end while Dudley lives? Perhaps the degree of racism each man holds toward the black Northerner contributes to the type of punishment he receives. Tanner believed befriending black people can only stem from dominating them mentally. His way of “handling” a black person was to “show him his brains didn’t have a chance against yours; then he would jump on your back.” Tanner compares them to monkeys who cling to the backs of those they depend on; in my opinion, that kind of comparison is one of the worst kinds of racist thoughts. To consider African Americans an “apelike” being is to consider them, primitive, bestial, and uncivilized. I seethed when Tanner blatantly said that when his friend Coleman “was young he looked like a bear; now that he was old he looked like a monkey” but with himself, “it was the opposite.” I interpreted Tanner’s statement to mean that white people evolved from monkeys, but black people evolved back into monkeys. He uses the philosophy of the advanced intelligence of the white man to poke fun at the New York actor. Calling him “preacher” solidifies the stereotype of black people as simpleminded religious zealots—the same religious zealots who sang gospel chants in as slaves in the plantation South. Recognizing this undercut, the actor eventually employs revenge. Tanner claimed he would escape hell because he “never killed [a black person] but handled them with wits and with luck” but really, he murders the idea of equality, of their humanity, a much deeper sin than the physical. Ironically—and somewhat deservedly?—O’Connor allows the black neighbor to find a distorted justice, but a justice nonetheless. Dudley, then lives, in my opinion, not because he harbors malice toward the black race, but because he, plainly, is stupid. The geranium—according to Google search—symbolizes stupidity and folly, and Dudley focuses his entire elderly existence in New York on whether his neighbor sets out the geranium in the sun. Dudley centers himself around himself, living in his own bubble existence of fishing and pseudo possum hunting. His friend Rabie found the outdated stories of a visit to Atlanta most intriguing about Dudley. Dudley exalts his name; he is a dud. We feel pity for his embarrassment, then when his African American neighbor abuses him by helping him up the stairs. O’Connor allows Dudley to live because he is too ignorant to realize the truths of racial equality. But then, I beg the question: Is it better to live in ignorance than not at all? Is it just that Dudley lives?