Butterfly in the Typewriter by Cory MacLauchlin Page B

that is likely from this time period. His name appears on this manuscript as Kennedy Toole, which he started using again in print when he became the managing editor of Silver and Blue in his senior year. Told in the voice of an elevator operator who speaks in the downtown New Orleans accent, the narrator tells of a serendipitous event when he accidentally left a lady on the twelfth floor, although she asked for the thirteenth. He feared her reprisals, but because his mistake
resulted in her securing employment, everything ended for the best. Despite the flaws of “Going Up,” it demonstrates Toole’s early interest in capturing the cadence of speech in the commoner of New Orleans.
    These stabs at fiction and satire may have been a warm-up to his watershed moment as an aspiring author. By 1953 the Tooles had moved to 2226 Cambronne Street in a less desirable neighborhood on the edges of Uptown, away from the lush green archways and park spaces. Thelma later explained to reporter Dalt Wonk that they moved in order to be closer to Fortier, but Cambronne was farther away from Fortier than Webster Street was. Most likely, their move had more to do with a decrease in income. And leaving the heart of Uptown was a sacrifice Thelma would have met with bitterness. Perhaps the pressures of home primed Toole for some time away from New Orleans. In Toole’s senior year the Lairds invited Toole on a family visit to an aunt and uncle that lived on a farm in Mississippi. Toole eagerly accepted. In 1954 he and the Lairds piled into their old Studebaker and headed due north to McComb, Mississippi. To the Lairds, there was little novelty in visiting the family farm, but to Toole everything teemed with the uniqueness of country life. The dairy farm and fields of crops offered new scenery. Toole rode on the back of a tractor and, as his best friend watched, eventually took his hand at driving one. It was no Oldsmobile. He struggled to shift the gears of the foreign contraption. Toole’s enthusiasm made him a welcomed visitor. Laird’s aunt Alice loved his company, which was in no small part due to his flattery of her. He commented that she had the look of the Italian actress Anna Magnani.
    The weekend visit soon came to an end, but Toole didn’t want to leave. He had seen another side of life, with different kinds of people. On the way back to New Orleans, he seemed invigorated by the whole experience. They passed road sign after road sign of religious platitudes, messages pleading for the moral sensibility of the passersby, signs that said “Drink and Drive and Burn Alive.” The overt dogma emblazoned on highway signs spoke to the tension between salvation and damnation, between religion and commercialism. Toole looked at Mississippi and its staunch religious conservatism as ripe, literary material. It was not a reflection of his own beliefs. While raised Catholic in a city with deep ties to Catholicism, the Tooles were not avid churchgoers. The parade of wealth made of the religious ceremony in Uptown churches
drove Thelma and her son away from attending mass, so she claimed. Although, she maintained that her son was always “a Christian in the true sense of the word.” But what repulsed Thelma about the Catholic service intrigued Toole when he encountered it in another form in the Baptist church. The highway signs in Mississippi were religious messages blended with advertisements for products such as Burma-Shave shaving cream. And thus pleas to the faithful were simultaneous pleas to the consumer.
    The young observer had seen a different worldview, not necessarily one to which he aspired, but one with significance nonetheless. One of his favorite writers, Flannery O’Connor, had grappled with conflicting messages of religion, but she had not placed it in the scope of a boy coming of age amid familial and social conflict. Somewhere between McComb and New Orleans, driving on a country road at night,