d the medieval notion of Original Sin. Struggling against therecognition that she shares in the common legacy of humanity, Ruby Turpin wants to knowhow she is like a hog, and why with plenty of white-trash around the message had to cometo her. Challenging God to go on and call her a wart hog from hell, to put the top rung onthe bottom, she yells out "There'll still be a top and a bottom!" Shaking with fury, shedemands of God, "Who do you think you are?" In a final vision, something akin to the great medieval leveling of death and damnationand salvation forces itself upon her. With an ironic humor reminiscent of Chaucer andbeatific purification echoing Dante, O'Connor writes A visionary lights settled in her eyes. She saw the streak [of the setting sun] as a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black niggers in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. 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. She leaned forward to observe them closer. They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.In painful clarity, Ruby Turpin recognizes, as one critic put it, "the inadequacy of herrespectability and the shallowness of her values" (Pepin 26). The vision shows herhow--considered by God no more worthy than white-trash, or n...
