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Let's take a listen. Faunrey O'Connor was a 20th century writer, best known for her short stories. She also wrote a couple of novels.
Her most commonly anthologized short story is A Good Man is Hard to Find. People who've only read one thing by Faunrey O'Connor tend to have read that story. And it's a shocking story.
It's a story about a family that is making the trip from Georgia to Florida, and they have a car accident and run into a serial killer named The Misfit. And that serial killer, well, kills everybody. And it's shocking stuff.
That kind of shocking violence is actually quite common in Faunrey O'Connor's stories. For that reason, she's often misunderstood. She once said, Many of my ardent admirers will be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realize that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics. She saw herself as writing to a post-Christian audience, for whom baptism, for instance, didn't really mean anything. And the way she framed her use of shocking things like, say, murder in these stories, well, here's what she said. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it.
When you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock. To the heart of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. And so her stories that are so shocking are really a way of shouting, a way of drawing large and startling figures for people who otherwise can't see what it is that she's trying to show. She says, The devil is always an appropriate subject for my kind of comedy because he's always accomplishing ends other than his own, which is a really helpful way of understanding what she's up to in her stories. And another place says that her stories are about the workings of grace and territory largely held by the devil. And so she's famous for the sort of freakish, grotesque characters in her stories.
But you know how a magician gets your attention with what he's doing with one hand, and then it's the other hand that's really doing the real work? That's what she's doing in these stories insofar as it's the freaks that get your attention. But the real action of these stories is a character who seems pretty respectable, who thinks he or she already knows how the world works, thinks he or she understands their place in the world and their status before God, you know, the self-righteous and the self-assured and those who are wise in the ways of the world. And then through the freakishness, through perhaps the violence, God gets their attention and shows them that they aren't who they think they are. And so that moment of violence in Flannery O'Connor's stories is actually an offer of grace. Now, some of the characters receive that grace and some don't. So mercy in Flannery O'Connor's stories chases people down.
And it is possibly terrible. And yet, because we're so blind to the workings of mercy and grace in the world, sometimes we have to be shocked into seeing it. I feel that the grotesque quality of my own work is intensified by the fact that I'm both a Southern and a Catholic writer. It's standard for the Catholic writer to say that he is not a Catholic writer, but a writer who happens to be a Catholic.
This is a formula that has its uses. But I often wish that Cardinal Spellman had said it instead of Mr. Graham Greene. Then we would have heard no more about it. I've always been more tempted to say that I'm not a Southern writer, but a writer who happens to be a Southerner.
However, I feel that both of these are evasions and that they stop discussions that they ought to begin. The Southern writer can't escape the image of the South that has built up a life of its own in his senses any more than the Catholic can escape the indelible marks that the sacraments put on his soul. The Southern sense of place is usually as unadjustable as the believing Catholic sense of right and wrong. Flannery Conner is very much associated with her region, and not just her region, really, with her state of Georgia. She was born in 1925 in Savannah, Georgia, spent most of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia.
But her life started there in Lafayette Square in Savannah, Georgia. Just around the corner was the Catholic hospital where she was born that had a wing named for John Flannery, her ancestor for whom she was named. Her real name, by the way, is Mary Flannery O'Connor. She took the name Flannery O'Connor when she left home and became a writer.
She felt like the name Flannery O'Connor was a better writerly name than Mary Flannery O'Connor. But in her early life, a very Catholic existence. And then she moved to Milledgeville, Georgia later. It was a place where she was exposed to very different varieties of Christianity. Milledgeville, by the way, is a fascinating place. It's where the state hospital for the mentally insane was. It's where Reformatory was.
Sometimes the boys would escape from the Reformatory. As they were running away, they might run across part of her property. And you've been listening to Jonathan Rogers tell the story of one of America's great writers, Flannery O'Connor. And my goodness, what she said about a sense of place and also her faith. A sense of place is as unreplaceable as a sense of right and wrong. Her discussing how being a southerner and a Catholic were simply unreplaceable in her writing.
And also what she said about mercy, chasing people down in her stories, which indeed it does, sometimes for the good and sometimes not. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of Flannery O'Connor, here on Our American Stories. This is Lee Habib, host of Our American Stories. Every day, we set out to tell the stories of Americans, past and present, from small towns to big cities, and from all walks of life doing extraordinary things. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our shows are free to listen to, but they're not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and make a donation to keep the stories coming.
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Try Greenlight risk-free today at greenlight.com slash iHeart. And we continue with our American stories, and with the story of Flannery O'Connor, told by Jonathan Rogers, who's the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor. Let's pick up where we last left off. Mary Flannery was an odd child, but when she was a little girl, she was a little girl. She was the same age almost all her life. She was a grown-up when she was a child. It became time to become a teenager. She didn't really want to be a teenager.
She just kind of skipped straight to adulthood. Her father, Edward, came down with lupus when Flannery O'Connor was a teenager. And this was a time when there was really no treatment for lupus. Lupus is an autoimmune disorder. In Latin, it means the wolf.
It's almost like you're being devoured from inside. And he died relatively quickly. He died when Flannery O'Connor was 15 years old. She went to college at age 17, finished before she was 20. And from there, she went to the University of Iowa, realized she didn't want to be in the journalism school. So she went to the office of Paul Engle, who was running the writer's workshop. And she said, My name is Flannery O'Connor. I'm not a journalist.
Can I come to the writer's workshop? But her Georgia accent was so thick that he couldn't understand her. And he said, What'd you say? She said, My name is Flannery O'Connor.
I am not a journalist. Can I come to the writer's workshop? He finally had to ask her to write it down because her accent was so thick. But also, in spite of the fact that she had a very thick Georgia accent, her prose was very clear, very beautiful.
And he did accept her into the Iowa writer's workshop. And she was kind of a superstar there. About the time she was finished in the first draft of Wise Blood, she started feeling some real pain in her hands. And as it turns out, that was the first stirrings of lupus, the disease that had killed her father. And when she came home for Christmas on the train trip, she came down with a fever that turned out to be the beginnings of lupus that would never leave her for the rest of her life. So she lived the rest of her life with a very painful disease that would eventually kill her at the age of 39. She once said, I've never been anywhere but sick. But illness is a country as instructive as a trip to Europe, in that the suffering that she lived with for the rest of her life really did shape her work and her understanding of how grace works in the world.
There were treatments, but they were a little crude. And at one point she said, the disease and the treatment are running neck and neck to see which one's going to kill me. And yet she learned to see that suffering as a blessing. I think one time she said, with one eye squinted, I can see it as a blessing. And so she was on crutches for much of her adult life, probably as a result of the large doses of prednisone and other corticosteroids that she took.
It may not have been lupus itself that damaged her hips and joints so much as the treatment. She spent the rest of her life in Milledgeville, Georgia, under the care of her mother. She once said she came kicking and screaming back to Georgia. But as she settled in and accepted those limits that God had put on her life, that's where she really blossomed as a writer. Her sense of calling was incredibly strong from very early in her career.
Her prayer journals from when she was 20 years old were published in 2017, I think it was. And they make it clear how this very young woman saw her work as a writer as a calling from God just as surely as if she had been called to be a nun. She lived on a dairy farm. And her mother took care of her, took care of the dairy farm, and created space for Flannery Conner to really do work that the mother didn't really understand. Her mother wasn't an especially bookish person. She was a very business-minded woman who didn't really love the story she was writing but loved her daughter.
But one of many remarkable things about Flannery Conner's life is it was so regular. She got up at 6 in the morning, and she said, She got up at 6 in the morning, and she said her prayers. And at 7 in the morning, she and her mother got in the car and went to the Catholic church there in Milledgeville and went to Mass every morning. And then she would come home from Mass, and she would sit at her desk and write these wild stories about street preachers and false prophets and moonshiners and mass murderers and these crazy stories and then go have lunch at the tea room. She did not look like the kind of person who would be writing the kind of stories she was writing. She was a reader of Thomas Aquinas.
Most nights, she read 20 minutes from his Summa Theologiae. Maybe it's not obvious from her stories, but she was a person of great joy, a person who saw the world as ultimately comic rather than tragic. And that may be something that's not obvious, that her vision was a comic vision, a vision that saw ultimately a broken world where people hurt one another.
But ultimately, yes, it's broken, and yet it's the only place where grace does its work. In 19th-century American writing, there was a good deal of grotesque literature which came from the frontier and was supposed to be funny. But our present grotesque heroes, if they are comic, are at least not primarily so. They seem to carry an invisible burden that fanaticism is a reproach, not merely an eccentricity. I think they are figures that come about from the kind of vision peculiar to the writer who is concerned with the larger stretch of reality than can be accounted for by a naturalistic view of the world. You can call it prophetic vision because this kind of writer is the kind of realist the prophet is.
He's a realist of distances. This broken world is where grace intervenes. And so there are lots of storytellers, especially storytellers in a Southern context, who are using the language of Christianity. In other words, Flannery Conner spoke of the American South as being not exactly Christian, but Christ-haunted. And you certainly get that in somebody like Faulkner whose characters talk about God.
But that God language is not a reflection of either their own faith or the faith of the author. God talk is an aspect of Southern culture, whether that's cultural Christianity or actual devotion. Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it's because we are still able to recognize one.
To be able to recognize a freak, you'd have to have some conception of the whole man. And in the South, the general conception of man is still theological. Now, that is a big statement, and it's dangerous to make it. Almost anything you affirm on the subject of Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. I'm sure some poll takers would come along and get up a table to prove that the South doesn't believe anything at all. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it's quite safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-hearted.
The Southerner who isn't convinced of it is very much afraid that he may have been found in the image and likeness of God. And ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it's when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our sensual displacement that he attains some depth in literature. All this is changing, of course.
The ghost is being exorcised. In 20 years, the Southern writer may be writing about men in grey flannel suits, and they have lost his ability to see that these gentlemen are even greater freaks than what we're writing about now. And you've been listening to Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor, and you've been listening to Flannery O'Connor herself. And my goodness, what she said about the South.
The South is most certainly Christ-centered, she said, but it is also most certainly Christ-haunted. And so many other remarkable things she described in her own voice, and we love doing this here on Our American Stories, bringing the great voices from the grave directly to you in their own words, uncensored by us, and shaping the stories that you hear. Graduating at an early age from college, her father, who had died from lupus, she discovers soon that she has this dreaded disease as well, but in the end, it informs everything about her life. She accepted the limits God put on her life. That prayer journal in 2017, by the way, it doesn't get much better. She saw her writing as a calling from God.
When we come back, more of this remarkable story, the story of Flannery O'Connor continues here on Our American Stories. There's nothing like sinking into luxury. Anabay sofas combine ultimate comfort and design at an affordable price. Anabay has designed the only fully machine washable sofa from top to bottom. The stain-resistant performance fabric slipcovers and cloud-like frame duvet can go straight into your wash, perfect for anyone with kids, pets, or anyone who loves an easy-to-clean, spotless sofa. With a modular design and changeable slipcovers, you can customize your sofa to fit any space and style, whether you need a single chair, love seat, or a luxuriously large sectional, Anabay has you covered. Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home. Sofas start at just $699, and right now, you can shop up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Shop now at washablesofas.com. Add a little... to your life.
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Get started risk-free at greenlight.com slash iHeart. And we continue with our American stories and with Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy. Let's pick up where we last left off. And so it's easy for people to miss. There's lots of God talk in Flannery O'Connor.
It's unavoidable. But I think sometimes people miss that she meant it. You know, this was not just her using the language of the Christ-haunted South.
Let's put it this way. In both Wise Blood and The Violent Beared Away, we have these prophetic figures, people who are literally street preachers and folk prophets who are possibly insane. And who, by the way, are very Protestant, not Catholic. And it's easy to see these possibly insane people using all this God talk, this Christian language, and think that she is somehow satirizing or mocking their faith. There's a character named Old Tarwater.
He semi-kidnaps a couple of his relatives and baptizes them without their parents' consent. Just nutty behavior. On the other hand, there are very sensible, modern schoolteacher types. And Flannery O'Connor at one point says, the reader will probably associate with the schoolteacher. She said, but Old Tarwater speaks for me. The funny thing about Flannery O'Connor, it's not just that everybody misunderstood her. It's that they misunderstood her in their own way. She got a letter from a woman in Boston who said, I'm a Catholic, and I don't see how anybody can even have such thoughts. And it was just shocked by what she was seeing in there. And Flannery O'Connor said she wrote her a letter back that could have been signed off on by the bishop.
It was so orthodox, and so that they were big friends now. On the other hand, the literati, let's say, misunderstood her because they really loved what she was writing, but they thought she was such a harsh critic of the religious. I've found that at most universities, a storyteller is tolerated as long as some abstract statement can be wrung out of him.
He's out to find himself reduced to making comments about his own stories or other people's. And the process leaves him very much like the handsome hero Poe's story. The one who, before he went to bed at night, removed his wooden arm and his wooden leg and his teeth and his boss box and his wig and his glass eye.
What was left of him was not impressive. And the truth is, she was a critic of American Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, but she was as critical as she was because she really loved the faith. Even though she was a devout Catholic, it was surprising how open she was and how generous she was in some ways to varieties of Christianity that she just couldn't buy. And so some of the more idiosyncratic forms of Protestantism, the phrase wise blood is the title of her first novel, the whole idea of wise blood is there are people whose religious practice is completely confused.
In her view, many Protestants were completely confused in their religious practice and in their theology. And yet their heart pumped a wise blood that was wiser than their religious practice was. And the main character of wise blood, a fellow named Hazel Motz, was always trying to get away from Jesus who haunted him, swinging from tree to tree like a monkey chasing him through the jungle. And he tried to find every way he could to escape Jesus from sin to not sinning. In other words, sometimes he would behave himself hoping that he then wouldn't need Jesus. And sometimes he would sin in order to get away from Jesus, but what he couldn't do was ever get away from Jesus because he had wise blood. And something interesting she said about Hazel Motz was that her non-believing readers, many of them thought his integrity lay in his trying to escape from Jesus.
And she says, to me, his integrity was the fact that he was unable to escape from Jesus. Flannery Conner's relationship to that misinterpretation was sort of odd. Like, she didn't spend much time explaining herself. Sometimes she did. In her letter, she makes it clear that she gets frustrated by the ways that she's misinterpreted. But strangely enough, what she didn't do was write in such a way that she wouldn't be misunderstood next time.
She believed that the confusion that her stories generated was part of the point. And I think a decent comparison would be Jesus' parables. Jesus could have made those parables clearer if he had wanted to. He could have made them less offensive, but he chose to make them offensive. He chose to put the reader in a position to say, either I'm wrong about this or God's wrong about this. We've heard the parables so much that we know what to think about them.
But could you imagine being the people who first experienced those? The original audience for those would have a really hard time making sense of why it is that the older brother is the bad guy in the story of the prodigal son. The older brother worked really hard to keep his nose clean. He worked really hard to stay out of trouble. And yet, it's the wild child who receives grace in that story. And I hope the older brother eventually received grace, but he wasn't in a position to receive it in that parable.
The Good Samaritan. Jesus could have had anybody he wanted to be the good guy in that story. And he chose to make it the person who was the most reviled by his audience. And so Jesus wasn't accidentally making us uncomfortable.
That was on purpose. That's why Flannery O'Connor was willing to be misunderstood and was not willing to write stories that were more easily digestible. A good many people believe, of course, that Southern writing tends to the grotesque, not because we are still able to recognize freaks, but because in the South there's so many more freaks to recognize.
I just don't take that up. Still others seem to have decided that if you write about freaks, you do so on account of your great compassion. It's considered an absolute necessity these days for writers to have compassion. Compassion is a word that sounds good in anybody's mouth, which no book jacket can do without. It's a quality that no one can put his finger on in any exact critical sense.
And so the word is always safe for anybody to use. Thomas Mann has said that the grotesque is a true anti-bourgeois style. But I think that the kind of hazy compassion demanded of the writer now makes it difficult for him to be anti-anything.
Certainly when the grotesque has a legitimate reason for being, it will be used in a way that gives to the intellectual and moral judgments implicit in it the ascendancy over feeling. And you've been listening to Jonathan Rogers. He's the author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor. And remarkably, we're listening to Flannery O'Connor herself and her talking about the misconceptions many had about her. And in the end, the fact that she didn't really give it much thought, because in the end, as she so deeply understood, much of Jesus's efforts were not understood. And not understood even by people themselves who heard the stories.
I think of the Good Samaritan and think, my goodness, the person that's the good guy is the bad guy. And why did Jesus give this Good Samaritan this special place in the story when it was a person reviled by the people of their day? And why was the kid who ran off and spent all the money sought after and chased by the Father, while the son who stayed behind and did all the hard work and kept the line and was the good son, ended up not receiving the grace of the Father, the mercy of the Father, and their hard stories to grapple with?
The great parables of Jesus, he made no fuss about it. In fact, he was clear about how hard these stories would be for man to grapple with. And my goodness, the stories of Flannery O'Connor, well, they're not simple. And the complexity in them and how grace works in them is confounding to readers, many still today.
When we come back, more of this remarkable story of one of America's great writers, Flannery O'Connor, here on Our American Stories. Let's be real. Life happens. Kids spill. Pets shed.
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Let's pick up where we last left off. For O'Connor, the big sins, I put that in quotation marks, maybe the seven deadly sins, were symptoms of a deeper sin that goes bone deep. Greed and lust and racism and gluttony, all those sins make an appearance in O'Connor's work. And yet the greatest threat to the human soul is a self-sufficiency and a self-righteousness that takes many, many forms. And on the one hand, there is religious self-righteousness that's dangerous insofar as it keeps us from receiving the grace that's offered to us, a rescue that has to come from outside us and not from within us. And so any kind of orthodoxy that gives a person confidence in their own ability to justify themselves, religious orthodoxy or progressive social justice orthodoxy, she saw as very dangerous.
And she saw it as dangerous for other people and dangerous for herself. I've discovered that any fiction that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque. In which case, it's going to be called realistic. When my fiction first began to receive some attention, it was generally considered to have come out of that mythical entity, the School of Southern Degeneracy. Every time I heard about the School of Southern Degeneracy, I felt like Burr Rabbit stuck on the top, ain't it? I think the social sciences have cast a dreary bite on the public approach to fiction.
If you write about people who don't always wear shoes, someone is bound to think that you consider shoes important. Anyway, if you have once got rid of a label like the School of Southern Degeneracy, you accept the label grotesque with better grace. Essentially, any writer who produces stories that can be called grotesque does so because he has that kind of a talent. But I believe that in addition, there are reasons that intensify the grotesque quality of some writing in these times. She spoke of racial bigotry as one of the most haunting problems of the American South. And yet, she didn't see it as the deepest problem because there are deeper sins of which racism is only the manifestation. And those deeper sins are not specifically Southern. It's sins that we all deal with as human beings. And that's what she's always drawing us back to in her stories.
We've got deep problems, racism among them, but there are deeper problems in that. And we have no hope of working those problems out on our own without the action of grace in the world. And that grace may have to come to us in very brutal ways because we don't have eyes to see and we don't have ears to hear.
To the hard of hearing, you shout, to the almost blind, you draw large and startling figures. And so maybe we need stories like Flannery O'Connor's to wake us up to a reality that on the one hand is devastating to realize that we aren't who we thought we were and on the other hand is hopeful because we don't have to be who we thought we were because God is at work, because God offers us the terrible speed of mercy. People often ask me where to start reading Flannery O'Connor.
And I think a really great place to start reading her is the story called Revelation. So in Revelation, we have a woman named Ruby Turpin who is outlandishly self-righteous, outlandishly smug, who spends her idle minutes making hierarchies of where people belong, judging them by what kind of shoes they wear, for instance. But however she judges them, she always ends up at the top of the ladder. And so she's very thankful that she is not Black, for instance. She's very thankful that she's not white trash.
She's very thankful that she's got just enough and knows what to do with it and is respectable without being too rich because even when she puts the people on a social scale, she's still glad that she's not higher on the social scale because then she would be too something. And she's in a doctor's office silently judging everybody around her and making small talk with one or two of the other people when a girl across the way throws a textbook at her and hits her in the head and then chokes her and says, go back to where you came from, you old warthog. So that's her moment of violence. That's her shocking moment. It's something that wakes her up. Somehow she understands that that strange girl, that freakish girl in the doctor's office, is speaking for God. And so Ruby Turpin goes home, and she begins to question God out loud. And you get the impression maybe this is the first time she's ever been perfectly honest with God even though she thinks of herself as a religious person. And she says, why do you talk to me that way? How can I be a hog and me both?
If I'm not good enough, I'm paraphrasing, but if I'm not good enough, if what you want is white trash, why don't you go get yourself some white trash then? And instead of being punished for that kind of honesty and that kind of questioning for God, she's rewarded with a vision at the end of the story. And as she looks into the sunset over her hog farm, the clouds of the sunset begin to look like a bridge from Earth to heaven. And she sees all the people that she has judged as inferior to herself walking across that bridge into heaven. And she sees the white trash clean for the first time, and she sees black people that she's looked down on walking joyfully into heaven. And she sees, I'm quoting here, battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And then at the end of the procession, she sees people like her. Bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once, and those who like herself and Claude, her husband, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. She leaned forward to observe them closer.
They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key, yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away. It was in that vision that she saw that the people that she had put down had a place in the Kingdom of God, too, and that she also had a place in the Kingdom of God. But it wasn't going to be at the head of the troop. It was going to be the end. And it wasn't going to be her virtues that got her in.
Those had to be burned away, too. That's how all of Flannery O'Connor's stories work. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Jonathan Rogers, author of The Terrible Speed of Mercy, a spiritual biography of Flannery O'Connor and those audio clips from Flannery O'Connor reveal so much about this misunderstood author and deeply loved author at the very same time, hearing her words about herself, about the world, about being Southern, and so many other things. I've never been anywhere but sick, Flannery O'Connor said about her bouts with Lupus and growing up with a father who had Lupus and died when she was just 15. She lost her father to the same disease that would take her life at the early age of 39. But it informed her life, in the end, that sickness. And it actually made her, in very many ways, the writer she would become. I love what Rogers had to say about sin and the symptoms and that racism was a symptom of a deeper sin. And Flannery wrote about racism, my goodness, and the geranium.
It's just perfect. And even in Revelation, the story that Rogers was telling folks about, in which the protagonist, Ruby Turpin, finds out the hard way who God is in that doctor's office. And it jolts her into a sense of her own self-righteousness. For the first time, she senses who she really is in God's kingdom and where she falls. And it jolts her. And in the end, it can jolt all of us. What she really had an intolerance for were the self-sufficient and the self-righteous. The self-sufficient progressives, the modern progressives trying to fix and solve the problems of mankind and the self-righteous, well, characters like Ruby Turpin, characters like any Christians who can judge others and somehow put themselves always above the fray as somehow better and more spiritually right and more spiritually ordered than the rest of the freaks around us, as if we don't have problems ourselves. And always at the center of everything is God's mercy always offered, as Jonathan Rogers put it, at the terrible speed of mercy.
The story of Flannery O'Connor here on Our American Stories. Behind every successful business is a vision. Bringing it to life takes more than effort. It takes the right financial foundation and support. That's where Chase for Business comes in.
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