Our Lady of the Peafowl

I haven’t yet made a pilgrimage to Flannery O’Connor’s home Andalusia, but now I’m tempted more than ever to use my frequent flier miles on a plane straight to Savannah. Why? Because the peafowl have returned. Not Flannery’s flock, the last of which died in the late '80s, but three new ones. They even have a posh aviary to keep them safe from predators. Read the whole story here.

O’Connor famously raised her peafowl with swans, chickens, pheasants, quail, turkeys, geese, mallards, and Japanese and Polish bantams at Andalusia starting in 1952. In short, she liked winged things. But, as she wrote in the September 1961 issue of Holiday, she “felt a lack” until bringing peafowl into her fold. She says she has “no short or reasonable answer” for her fascination with them. “My frenzy said: I want so many of them that every time I go out the door I’ll run into one.”

Peafowl turn up in her letters and stories frequently. In one letter she notes a peacock who snatched visitors’ cigarettes and chewed them up. Apparently, it should have lived on a tobacco plantation. And in her story “The Displaced Person,” the priest, looking upon a peacock’s spread tail, utters, “Christ will come like that.” And in “King of the Birds,” she writes:

When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent. … I have never known a strutting peacock to budge a fraction of an inch for a truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way.

In fact, O’Connor had a peacock named “Limpy.” It had only one foot, the left, for the right had been lobbed off by a mowing machine.