who goes on the family road trip to florida a good man is hard to find
A Good Man Is Hard to Find (short story) A man named Bailey intends to take his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation, but his mother, (referred to as "the grandmother" in the story) wants him to drive to East Tennessee, where the grandmother has friends ("connections"). She argues that his children, John Wesley and June Star, have never been to East Tennessee, and she shows him a news article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution about an escaped murderer who calls himself The Misfit last seen in Florida. The next day, the grandmother wakes up early to hide her cat, Pitty Sing, in a basket on the floor in the back of the car. She is worried that the cat would die while they were gone. Bailey finds her sitting in the car, dressed in her best clothes and an ostentatious hat; she says that if she should die in an accident along the road, she wants people to see her corpse and know she was refined and "a lady." The Grandmother talks continuously during the trip, trying to engage her two rude grandchildren in games and telling them jokes and a story, about which June Star makes disdainful comments. She recalls her youth in the Old South, reminiscing about her courtships and how much better everything was in her time, when children were respectful and people "did right then." When the family stops at an old diner outside of Timothy for lunch, she talks to the owner, Red Sammy, about The Misfit. He and the grandmother agree that things were much better in the past and that the world at present is degenerate; she concurs with Sammy's remark that "a good man is hard to find."