Everything That Rises Must Converge

First published in 1961 at the height of the civil rights movement, “Everything That Rises Must Converge” explores the themes of The Complexity of Morality, Generational Conflict, and the associations between Class, Appearance, and Reality. The story takes place in an unnamed Southern town that has recently been desegregated. By 1961, the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education ruled that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, Rosa Parks’s arrest had inspired the Montgomery bus boycott, and sit-ins were happening across the country to protest segregated seating at lunch counters. However, desegregation and the concept of equal rights were still met with staunch resistance from white communities across the South. “Everything That Rises Must Converge” centers on the tension between a white mother and son who claim to be on opposite sides of the desegregation debate: the college-educated Julian and his elderly mother, a woman who believes Black people “should rise […] but on their own side of the fence” (186). Through this conflict between Julian and his mother, O’Connor explores the larger cultural changes playing out across the South.

The mother and son are at odds with one another due to their differing beliefs, moral codes, and the generational divide between them. Their conflict generally stems from the discord between the mother’s racism and bigotry and Julian’s self-proclaimed intellectualism and support for desegregation. As the descendant of a once-prosperous white Southern family, Julian’s mother places a high value on lineage, manners, and physical appearances, believing these attributes constitute the essence of a person. She continues to see herself as occupying a place of status in society, even though she and Julian live in relative poverty. Their neighborhood was “fashionable […] forty years ago” (184), and Julian’s mother is tight enough on money that she considers returning the new hat she bought so that she has money to pay the bills. On the other hand, Julian prides himself on being “free of prejudice and unafraid to face facts” (189). He sees his mother as occupying her own fantasy while he lives in reality. However, both Julian and his mother are complex, morally ambiguous characters. Neither is wholly good or bad, and Julian soon reveals his biases and, therefore, the hypocrisy of many white people, even those who are outwardly progressive.

For all his opposition to his mother’s racism and classism, Julian and his mother are much more alike than he realizes. They are both guilty of pride and baseless feelings of superiority, and they are also both markedly out of touch with reality. Julian struggles to adapt to the changing South just as much as his mother. He believes he is unbiased and, therefore, better than his mother, but this belief makes him unaware of his own prejudices. He has no Black friends despite occasionally trying to start a conversation with “some of the better types” (191), and his desire to associate with the well-dressed Black man on the bus is motivated mainly by his goal of antagonizing his mother and proving his intelligence and open-mindedness. On the bus, Julian decides to interact with the Black man to infuriate his mother, but he cannot figure out how to talk to him. His fantasies involve instrumentalizing Black people—even using a Black girlfriend to provoke his mother—but he cannot relate to this man as a person. Even though Julian is a generation removed from slavery and has never experienced the Old South firsthand, the romanticized vision of his family’s plantation still haunts him. He feels resentful that he could not grow up in affluence like his mother, a subtle suggestion that he agrees with her sentiment that things were “better off” (186) when slavery existed. In all, Julian’s particular brand of racism is insidious because he is so convinced it doesn’t exist. His mother, who insists, “I know who I am” (185), is more honest and sincere. She is racist and condescending, but she acts with genuine innocence and good intentions while Julian fools himself into thinking he is better than her.

The title “Everything That Rises Must Converge” is taken from an essay called “Omega Point” by French philosopher and priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which refers to a point in the future when the universe converges and reaches a state of unification. The title lends a certain sense of inevitability to “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” foreshadowing the explosive climax. This idea of convergence and unification also has multiple implications for the story. On the one hand, there is the idea of rising up associated with the civil rights movement and the convergence of Black and white people following desegregation. The bus, in particular, is a place of convergence; it is full of people from all walks of life, races, and classes. When they reach their stop, Julian, his mother, Carver, and Carver’s mother all rise and converge. They get off the bus together, and the story reaches its climax with the physical altercation between Julian’s and Carver’s mothers. The conflict causes Julian’s mother’s blood pressure to rise, leading to a medical emergency.

The story has an open ending, leaving the reader unsure of Julian’s mother’s fate. What is clear is that the lesson Julian is so eager to impart, that “[t]he old manners are obsolete and [his mother’s] graciousness is not worth a damn” (196), is too much for the elderly woman to bear. It wrecks her worldview, and she reverts to a childlike state of confusion, asking for her grandfather and her childhood nurse to take her home. Her manners and graciousness are so integral to who she is that this lesson damages her sense of identity. However, his mother’s attack also forces Julian out of his fantasy world. Perhaps because he feels responsible for his mother’s crisis, or perhaps because he too realizes that the Old South is truly dead, he is left on the cusp of “his entry into the world of guilt and sorrow” (197).