May 1999

Main Street, Downtown Milledgeville. Photo courtesy of Milledgeville MainStreet/The Downtown Development Authority

Here are three stories excerpted from Baldwin High School's Everybody Has a Story to Tell: Stories from Flannery O'Connor's Milledgeville. The Chief's Story by Chief Eugene Ellis as told to Albert Turnell That Wit of Flannery's by Harriet Kidd as told to Kim Hollinshead The Tractor that Ran Over the Displaced Person by Mr. Tiny Ivey as told to Geoffrey Grimes

Milledgeville, Georgia, is a place full of stories, many of which inspired author Flannery O'Connor, the town's most famous past resident. The students at Baldwin High School in Milledgeville are continuing in O'Connor's tradition, thanks to Milken Educator Sandra Worsham and Festival for Youth.

"Marion Stembridge was a banker and a loan shark. He was paranoid too. His wife used to prepare their meals, and she said that he used to switch their plates because he thought she was trying to poison him."

It's a great beginning for a story, the kind of beginning a skillful fiction writer might use to arrest a reader's attention. A loan shark. Paranoia. Poison. All the makings of an intriguing tale. But this is not a work of fiction; there really once was a paranoid loan shark named Marion Stembridge. And the man telling the story, Eugene Ellis, is not a writer by trade, but a retired chief of police in a small Georgia town called Milledgeville.

There are many such stories in Milledgeville, which is home to a college, a state mental institution and five prisons. Milledgeville is also part of the South, a region known throughout the world for its long tradition of storytelling—and its storytellers: Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers and Pat Conroy, among others.

Author Flannery O'Connor. Photo courtesy of The Flannery O'Connor Collection, Russell Library, Georgia College & State University, Milledgeville, Georgia.

And for many years, Milledgeville itself was the hometown of one of America's most distinctive literary voices, Flannery O'Connor, whose fiction (two novels—Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away—and thirty-one short stories, including "A Good Man Is Hard to Find") was no doubt influenced by the stories she heard all around her from the people in her community.

Unfortunately, the stories that people like Eugene Ellis have to tell are often never heard because, unlike Flannery O'Connor, the residents of Milledgeville are not professional writers. They are the men and women you see walking down the street, standing in line in the post office, buying flowers at the florist's or getting their hair cut at the barber shop. To look at them, you would never know the amazing stories they have to tell. The only way to find out is to ask. And then listen.

Recently, a group of high school students in Milledgeville did just that.

The Baldwin High School story booth. Photo courtesy of Sandra Worsham.

Under the direction of their teacher Sandra Worsham (GA '92) and with the help of the Milken Family Foundation Festival for Youth Community Service Program, the students at Baldwin High School in Milledgeville interviewed dozens of town residents, collecting story after colorful story, recording the interviews on tape and transcribing them into word processors. Those stories have been assembled in a book called Everybody Has a Story to Tell: Stories from Flannery O'Connor's Milledgeville, copies of which will be sold to raise money for two local youth organizations: the Boys & Girls Club and Big Brothers Big Sisters.

Worsham, who was recently inducted into the Georgia Teachers Hall of Fame by the Georgia Association of Educators, developed the project as a way "to bring the community and the school together through publications." Using tape recorders purchased by the Festival for Youth program and wearing Festival for Youth T-shirts, Worsham's students set up booths at a local library fair and at a crafts fair, soliciting stories from the attendees. They also conducted interviews in people's living rooms, learning to be house guests as well as interviewers.

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