"Judgment Day" Summary

Tanner, an elderly man uprooted from the Deep South, lives with his daughter and her husband in a walk-up apartment in New York City. He hates living there. Tanner is planning to go back to his hometown in the Deep South where he had been living as a squatter on a wealthy Negro doctor's land, with his companion of thirty years, an old Negro named Coleman. He secretly pins his name and address under his coat lapel and includes a note to Coleman with burial instructions in case he dies before he gets home.

Through the use of flashbacks, O'Connor shows the reader how the old man's transfer to New York City evolved and how pitiful his existence had been in the South in a crumbling shack. He never takes his black hat off and wants to be ready...