On the Grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and The Mustard Seed in the Heart of The Misfit

In the final scene of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” the grandmother is in a bad way. From the beginning she did not want to go to Florida—O’Connor tells us this in the opening line—and she has been trying the entire trip to keep Florida from coming about.

So when she convinces her son Bailey to turn down an almost-deserted dirt road to…