“Who do you think you are?”
By Seán Mullan
(From the October - December 2019 issue of VOX)
If I were given the gift of meeting in real life one character from the world of fiction, I would choose the redoubtable Mrs Ruby Turpin. Chances are that you have never heard of her. She is the central character in a fine short story called “Revelation” by Flannery O’Connor. If I might be bold enough to offer advice to the discerning readers of this column, then I recommend that you put your magazine down right now and search online for the text of that story. Nothing you read on the rest of this page will match that experience. For those who choose to continue reading here, be aware of spoilers ahead.
O’Connor wrote “Revelation” shortly before she died at the sadly young age of 39 in 1964. She was a Catholic writer in the Bible belt of the USA in the era when Jim Crow laws of racial discrimination were still in force. Her brilliant short stories are set in that place and time.
“Mrs Turpin believes she has overcome these challenges and done well for herself and she is not shy in telling others about it.”
“Revelation” begins in the waiting room of a doctor’s surgery where Mrs Turpin and her husband Claud have gone to get Claud’s leg seen to. They are hard working middle-aged farmers, living and working in an area and an era when life is tough. But Mrs Turpin believes she has overcome these challenges and done well for herself and she is not shy in telling others about it, including her audience in the crowded waiting room. She is, however, willing to give the Lord some credit also. People with bad dispositions are “more to be pitied that anyone on earth”* but she thanks the Lord that He has blessed her with a good one.
Sitting across the table in the packed room is a girl of 18 or 19 called Mary Grace who is reading a book. She looks up occasionally at Mrs Turpin and scowls. She clearly can’t stand her. Undimmed, Mrs Turpin continues to proclaim the qualities that have made her who she is and how thankful she is to Jesus for making her just as she is.
The book flung by Mary Grace hits Ruby above her eye and is followed up with a serious attempt to throttle her. The others in the room pull Mary off and the doctor rushes in with a sedative injection for the violent girl. A glutton for punishment, Mrs Turpin goes over to her and, with the sedative about to take effect, challenges Mary Grace if she has something to say to her. “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,” comes the whispered reply, before the sedative finally kicks in.
Ruby spends the rest of the day in bewildered conversation with Claud and others about what has happened. Everyone agrees that the girl is deranged. But Ruby believes there is more to it. She is convinced that the Lord has given her a revelation, and she doesn’t like it.
“What do you send me a message like that for?” she whispers fiercely as she hoses down the pigs in the pen with the sun going down. She protests all the good that she has done for all kinds of people. “How am I a hog and me both,” she asks. “How am I saved and from hell too?” She continues with her questions and then with her fury at its peak she roars to the heavens, “Who do you think you are?”
Ruby’s day ends with a second revelation. She looks up from the pigs to see a vision in the sky of a bridge swinging up from the earth to the heavens. On it is “a vast horde of souls.” She recognises in the procession tribes of the various kinds of people she has always helped out, her racial and social inferiors. And bringing up the rear of the procession are the people she recognises as her own tribe, good people like her and Claud.
While the others are “shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs” her tribe march with dignity and respect while singing on key. But she can see “by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.” With the sun gone and the night falling Ruby eventually turns to head for home with the Hallelujahs from the eclectic procession ringing in her ears.
I’ve read this story many times and wonder what draws me back to it. Perhaps it’s the knowledge that there’s quite a lot of Ruby Turpin in me. There’s also the thought that when I get together with others of like mind, we are always in danger of creating little “Turpin Communities” - groups that simply know better than everyone else and only wish that others could see that too.
*All quotes from “Revelation” in “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor” published by Faber and Faber, London, 1990
Seán Mullan has been working in church leadership for many years. He has developed a project in Dublin City Centre called “Third Space”.
