Flannery O’Connor’s classic Southern Gothic short story “Revelation” tells the story of Mrs. Turpin, an upstanding, self-righteous white woman who sorts people crudely by class and race as she waits with her husband to see a doctor. A young woman across from her throws a book at her and chokes her. Later, at home, she receives a vision of divine judgment in which the “white trash” and others whom she judges stand ahead of her in a line for heaven: “And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right” (Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986], 508). Confidence in our salvation is never a license to judge others as unfit for redemption.
