Hera’s Birds

I can’t think about peacocks without thinking about Flannery O’Connor, who raised them at Andalusia, her farm on US 441 between Milledgeville and Lake Sinclair.

She wrote an essay about her peafowl, published under two different titles, originally “Living with a Peacock,” then “King of the Birds.”

Here are a couple of my favorite quotes from the essay (please excuse my laziness in not correcting the internal quotes to single quotation marks), which is linked below as it was published in 1961, courtesy of PBS.org:

“I am used to hearing this group chorus as the peacock swings around, “Oh, look at his underwear!” This “underwear” is a stiff gray tail, raised to support the larger one, and beneath it a puff of black feathers that would be suitable for some really regal woman — a Cleopatra or a Clytemnestra — to use to powder her nose.”

“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.”

There’s another exceptional description embedded in a delightful anecdote, but I’ll leave that for you to discover in O’Connor’s essay. However, I can’t resist quoting the last line of it: “I bet that rascal could outrun a bus.”

In 2009, peafowl were brought back to Andalusia again, by a donation from Col. Charles Ennis of Milledgeville, and a public poll named the cock Manley Pointer, although Bruce Gentry, editor of The Flannery O’Connor Review, thought Obadiah Elihue Parker would have been more appropriate. Two peahens also received official monikers, detailed in the obituary article linked below. The obituary is of Manley Pointer, who perished during a hard freeze several years later, despite attempts to keep the aviary warm.

At his funeral at Andalusia, mourners sang “I’ll Fly Away” and received one of his tail feathers.

Andalusia is now the Flannery O’Connor museum. Go.

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Perhaps I’ve cheated by including quotes from Flannery O’Connor’s spectacular essay, but, like I said earlier, when anyone mentions peacocks, my first thought is “Flannery.” My second thought is “Hera.” Those were feathers that were his eyes, Hera saw to that.