The story opens with Ruby Turpin entering a doctor's waiting room with her husband Claud who has been kicked by a cow. As she and Claud wait, she takes hard stock of the other people in the room. There was some white-trash, a "red- headed youngish woman" who was not white-trash, just common, a well-dressed, pleasant looking lady, and her daughter, an ill-mannered ugly girl in Girl Scout shoes with heavy socks who was reading a book titled Human Development. Listening to the Gospel song playing on the radio in the background, Mrs. Turpin's "heart rose. [Jesus] had not made her a nigger or white-trash or ugly! He had made her herself and given her a little of everything. Jesus, thank you! she said. Thank you thank you thank you!" A few moments later, agreeing with the pleasant lady in regard to her ugly tempered daughter that "'It never hurt anyone to smile,'" Mrs. Turpin notes, "If it's one thing I am, . . .it's grateful. When I think who all I could have been beside myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, 'Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!' . . .'Oh thank you, Jesus, Jesus, thank you!' she cried aloud." Suddenly the book Human Development "struck her directly over her left eye." Nurse, doctor, and mother scramble to subdue the ugly girl. Transfixed by the girl's eyes focused on her, Mrs. Turpin asks "'What you got to say to me?'" waiting, as O'Connor says "as for a revelation." "Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog" [the girl] whispered." Haunted by this command, Ruby Turpin spends the rest of the day in puzzlement and concentration. Finally, while hosing down the hog pen that evening she whispers to God in a fierce voice, "What do you send me a message like that for?" "How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?" If students can understand the answer to this question, they can understand the medieval notion of
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