Alice Walker on Flannery O'Connor

"It was for her description of Southern white women that I appreciated her work at first, because when she set her pen to them not a whiff of magnolia hovered in the air (and the tree itself might never have been planted), and yes, I could say, yes, these white folks without the magnolia . . . and these black folks without melons and superior racial patience, these are like Southerners that I know . . . . That she retained a certain distance (only, however, in her later, mature work) from the inner workings of her black characters seems to me all to her credit, since, by deliberately limiting her treatment of them to cover their observable demeanor and actions, she leaves them free, in the reader's imagination, to inhabit another land-scape, another life ....This is a kind of grace many writers do not have when dealing with representatives of an oppressed people within a story, and their insistence on knowing everything. . . has burdened us with more stereotypes than we can ever hope to shed."

from in "Beyond the Peacock" from:

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose