Milledgeville — Why are there no peacocks at Andalusia?

Yes, peacock images adorn the walls of Flannery O'Connor's former home. There are peacock feathers in vases in the first-floor hallway of the 1850s-era farmhouse, and in the gift shop, set up in a back room, one can buy a silky shawl with multicolored images of the noisy fowl.

W.A. Bridges Jr./AJC (ENLARGE)
Andalusia is the Baldwin County farm where Flannery O'Connor spent the final 13 years of her life after receiving a diagnosis of lupus.
(ENLARGE)
Flannery O'Connor wrote most of her stories and both of her novels in the front parlor at Andalusia that was turned into a bedroom for her.
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RELATED: • Photos: O'Connor's legacy lives in struggling museum

But no living, breathing, screaming peacocks strut about the Milledgeville farm where O'Connor wrote most of her work, a farm that is now a museum devoted to her life.

The reason: Craig Amason, the only full-time employee of the Andalusia Foundation, has his hands full with other responsibilities: keeping the propane tank filled, trying to stop the roof from leaking and running after the school groups who come to visit.

"The last [peacock] was here in the late '80s," said Amason, who heads the organization devoted to telling the story of the unassuming, reclusive woman who was perhaps Georgia's most distinguished author (and a dedicated breeder of peafowl). "We've thought of bringing them back, but I'd like to get some more help before I do that."

No great loss. Though their bloodcurdling screams might make the farm more authentic, the absence of the peacocks certainly makes it more peaceful.

"I tell my friends, who like to read, to bring a book and come and sit here, and read all day," said Mary Barbara Tate, a board member of the Andalusia Foundation, swaying gently in one of the high-backed Brumby-style rockers on the front porch of the farmhouse. "They hardly ever do," she lamented, before her attention turned to a young woman in the front yard, taking photographs of the house and grounds. "Who is that?"

She is Erika Scott, 28, a literary pilgrim from New York City who has loved O'Connor and her "completely dark sense of humor" since high school, and has stopped by for the afternoon. Scott is on a tour of the homes of her favorite writers, which will include F. Scott Fitgerald's place in Alabama.

"It's enlightening to see the walls that they looked at, to see where they ate breakfast and sat with their friends and talked," said the visitor, her cat's-eye spectacles looking like a modern-day version of O'Connor's own pointy eyewear.

Scott is delighted to see the furnishings — the simple, single bed with the blue coverlet, the vintage Hotpoint refrigerator that O'Connor bought for her mother when she sold the television rights to "The Life You Save May Be Your Own."

She is even more delighted to discover that Tate, 76, a native of nearby Toomsboro, was friends with O'Connor and participated in one of O'Connor's reading groups, which met right here at Andalusia. Tate recounts that O'Connor, indeed, considered herself a comic writer. Once, when reading a draft of a new story out loud to the group, she broke into such hearty whoops of merriment that she could barely complete the narration.

'By bus or by buzzard'

Andalusia attracts about 225 visitors a month, Amason said, but getting here is a challenge. The property, on the outskirts of Milledgeville, is about two hours from Atlanta and 45 minutes from the nearest Interstate highway. O'Connor encouraged visits from her Atlanta friends, including scholar Bill Sessions and regular letter-writer Betty Hester, while admitting the lack of easy access. "Flannery used to say 'You can get here by bus or by buzzard,' " Amason said.

What modern-day visitors find is a world eerily unchanged by the intervening 44 years.

Born in Savannah, O'Connor would come up to Baldwin County during the summers to play at her Uncle Bernard Cline's farm, which he called "Sorrel" until she suggested the name change to "Andalusia." When she was 13, her family moved to downtown Milledgeville, to an attractive plantation-style mansion with Ionian columns and a perforated brick fence.

Young Mary Flannery O'Connor attended Georgia State College for Women, also in Milledgeville, before earning a master's of fine art at the University of Iowa.

After living for a time with Robert and Sally Fitzgerald in Connecticut (Sally Fitzgerald would later figure significantly in the world of O'Connor scholarship), O'Connor received a diagnosis of lupus, the same disease that killed her father.

The writer moved back to Milledgeville to live her final 13 years with her mother, Regina Cline O'Connor, but they set up housekeeping at the Cline family farm, Andalusia, because the steep stairs of the house in town would have been impossible to climb.

They turned a front parlor into O'Connor's bedroom. There the 26-year-old, who used crutches to walk, typed most of her stories and both of her novels on a manual typewriter, corresponded with her friends and tended to a growing flock of geese, ducks and peafowl.

O'Connor died in 1964 at age 39. Her mother lived to be 99. Though Regina O'Connor continued to run the farm as a business, first as a dairy operation, then raising beef cattle, she moved back to town and never lived in the house again. She died in 1995.

When the family gave the house to the foundation in 2003, it came complete with the furnishings that were there when Flannery O'Connor was living, right down to the Niagara starch on the kitchen shelves. The Andalusia Foundation, with an annual operating budget of $130,000, has raised more than $100,000 to stabilize the structure and the outbuildings on the 540-acre farm, but the missing paint and cracked plaster walls indicate there is still much to do.

Amason estimates that complete restoration of the house would require $1.5 million. Larger plans, which include the construction of a visitors center, a paved driveway and, perhaps, cabins for writers-in-residence, would require an additional $8 million.

"I don't doubt that we'll get it," Tate said.

Following remains active

Today, the thirst for Flanneriana continues unabated. Amason is co-author of the just-published "A Literary Guide to Flannery O'Connor's Georgia" (University of Georgia Press), a tour book of Georgia locales associated with the writer, including the farm, the college and her childhood home.

An annual conference on O'Connor takes place April 2-5, at her Milledgeville alma mater, now called Georgia State College and University.

Last year Emory University unsealed 270-plus letters from O'Connor to her friend and philosophical sounding board Betty Hester. The letters shed light on the spiritual themes that charge many of O'Connor's violent tales and the degree to which her Catholicism directed her writing.

Visitors to her childhood home in Savannah have included movie mogul Jerry Bruckheimer ("Pirates of the Caribbean") and his wife, Linda, who serves on the board that operates the modest house as a museum and who donated money for its preservation.

Amason would like to get some of that Hollywood money. He'd also like to have the kind of traffic enjoyed by the Carl Sandburg museum, Connemara, near Flat Rock, N.C., which sees about 100,000 visitors a year and which serves as a model for Andalusia.

Perhaps it's no accident that the home of the gregarious, guitar-playing Sandburg is more crowded with guests than that of the standoffish, gnomic O'Connor.

Yet there is something entrancing about the atmosphere here on this 19th-century farm, only a few hundred yards from the strip-mall development on U.S. 441, but steeped in quiet. Tate took a priest from Rome on a short tour recently, driving him down a dirt road that she assured him could easily have been trod by a character just like the Misfit from "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

The priest jumped from the car, dug up some red clay from the road and poured it carefully into a Coke can. Then he excitedly took a cellphone photo of the scene, sent it to his colleagues in Rome and called them to chat about his adventure in rapid Italian. He wanted them to know, Tate said, that he was right there. And he had the dirt to prove it.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT O'CONNOR

• Andalusia is open to visitors for self-guided tours Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. and by appointment other days; admission is free; 478-454-4029; www.andalusiafarm.org.

• The 2008 Flannery O'Connor Conference, April 2-5, Georgia State College and University, in Milledgeville, features academic presentations, tours of Milledgeville and Andalusia, and readings by authors including Mary Hood and Allan Gurganus: 478-445-0988; www.gcsu.edu.

• The Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home, 207 E. Charlton St., Savannah, is open for tours weekends, 1-4 p.m.; admission, $5; 912-233-6094; www.flanneryoconnorhome.org.