SOURCE: "O'Connor's Everything That Rises Must Converge," in The Explicator, Vol. 45, No. 3, Spring, 1987, pp. 51-4.

In the following essay, Hall Petry describes the place of the YWCA in O'Connor's "Everything That Rises Must Converge."

As Patricia Dinneen Maida has pointed out, Flannery O'Connor "does not flood her work with details; she is highly selective—choosing only those aspects that are most revealing." The justice of this observation in regard to "Everything That Rises Must Converge" was confirmed recently by John Ower, who argues persuasively that Julian's mother's having to offer a penny to the little Black boy in lieu of a nickel illustrates the ascendancy of Lincolnesque racial tolerance over Jeffersonian segregation in the South of the Civil Rights Movement. O'Connor's capacity to utilize detail symbolically in "Everything That Rises" is evident even in the destination of Julian's mother: the local "Y." Mentioned no less than five times...