Revelation
RevelationThe story “Revelation” first introduces itself as a negative outlook on the Southerners way of life. The characters [Mrs. Turpin, “the pleasant lady,” the “white trash,” and the disturbed/silent Mary Grace] speak of African Americans as being a lower class and useful only when manual labor is involved. Later, however, the story twist into a belief that some people are worthy of God’s (and everyone else’s) praise simply because of their classification in the eyes of the people surrounding their everyday lives. After her alteration with Mary Grace, Mrs. Turpin learns that those who are last shall be first, and that all people are equal in the eyes of God.
The story opens with Ruby Turpin entering a doctor’s waiting room with her husband Claud who has been kicked by a cow. As she and Claud wait, she takes hard stock of the other people in the room. There was some white trash, a “red- headed youngish woman” who was not white trash, just common, a well-dressed, pleasant looking lady, and her daughter, an ill-mannered ugly girl in Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks who was reading a book titled Human Development. Listening to the Gospel song playing on the radio in the background, Mrs. Turpin’s “heart rose. He [Jesus] had not made her a nigger or white trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything” (443). Moments later, agreeing with the pleasant lady in regard to her ugly tempered daughter that “‘It never hurt anyone to smile,’” Mrs. Turpin notes, “If it’s one thing I am, . . .it’s grateful” (445). Suddenly the book that Mary Grace was reading “struck her directly over her left eye” (445). In order to subdue the ugly girl, the nurse, doctor, and mother pin her to the floor. Transfixed by the girl’s eyes focused on her, Mrs. Turpin asks what the girl had to say to her, waiting, as O’Connor says, “as for a...
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