Ernest J. Gaines

Gaines, Ernest J. (b. 1933), novelist, short story writer, and teacher. Ernest J. Gaines is among the most widely read and highly respected contemporary authors of African American fiction. Born on a Louisiana plantation, where, at age eight, he worked in the fields cutting sugarcane for fifty cents a day, he experienced the racism of the Deep South firsthand. He was largely raised by a handicapped aunt, whose courage and determination are reflected in the many strong-willed women who appear in his books. At age fifteen Gaines moved to California, joining his mother and stepfather there, because his Louisiana parish had no high school for African Americans. Homesick, he unsuccessfully sought books about the kinds of people he knew in ““the quarters”.” His reading led him to French, Russian, and Anglo-Irish authors who dealt with rural life, and to the novels of William Faulkner, a major literary influence. But the most important influence on his work seems to have been the ““porch talk”,” the oral folk culture in which he was raised.

All of Gaines's fiction is set in Louisiana, with its unique mixture of white, African American, Creole, and Cajun cultures. The conflicts among these groups are central to his books. Like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Gaines's rural St. Raphael Parish, with its principal town of Bayonne, gives his fiction a unifying setting and reinforces his characteristic social realism. That realism is intensified by his extensive use of the speaking voice and by his remarkable ear for the subtle variations in Louisiana dialects. Finding a voice, achieving the power of speech, is both one of Gaines's major themes and one of his most effective artistic devices. The impressive range of first-person narrators he has created is among his finest achievements, one that reflects his profoundly democratic commitment to human dignity. That commitment permeates Gaines's fiction and suggests another of his central themes: the quest for identity in a society scarred by racism.

Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), his first two novels, are stories of thwarted love that focus on the destructive barriers dividing white from African American and African American from Creole. The male protagonist of Catherine Carmier, Jackson Bradley, having fled Louisiana, returns from California and rekindles his earlier love for Catherine, a Creole. Her father, both victim and practitioner of racism, opposes their relationship. Though Catherine loves Jackson, she cannot leave her father, knowing the hostility he faces from the Cajuns who covet his land. Among the most striking features of this book is the brooding silence that afflicts Jackson, who apparently finds much of his past literally unspeakable. This motif of self-imposed silence, of unarticulated anguish, reappears in other of Gaines's novels and is made all the more prominent by his customary emphasis on the speaking voice.

While Catherine Carmier is told from a third-person point of view, Of Love and Dust employs the first-person narration that has become Gaines's hallmark. This novel's narrator is not, however, the book's protagonist. Instead, Jim Kelly tells the story of Marcus Payne, a young African American convicted of murder who is released to the custody of Marshall Herbert, whose Cajun overseer, Sidney Bonbon, aims to break Marcus's spirit. To gain revenge, Marcus initiates an affair with Bonbon's wife, herself neglected by Bonbon in favor of his African American mistress. When Marcus and Louise unexpectedly fall in love, their relationship violates the South's gravest taboo and precipitates Marcus's death. By juxtaposing these two biracial love affairs, Gaines emphasizes the destructiveness of the South's racial codes not only for African Americans but for whites themselves (as he also does in his portrait of Tee Bob in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman). The novel's events alter the narrator's—and the reader's—initial assessment of Marcus, who gradually assumes heroic stature by opposing the ““fate”” decreed by racism.

With the publication of Bloodline (1968), a collection of five diverse first-person narratives, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), his best-known novel, Gaines earned the wide readership and critical acclaim that have attended the remainder of his career. While he has sometimes been criticized for not embracing the tradition of social protest literature represented by Richard Wright's fiction, these two books—and indeed Gaines's total canon—make his political commitments clear. Implicit throughout are a critique of racism and an insistence upon the need for social change. Firmly rooted in the folk culture of the African American community and the oral traditions by which that community has sustained itself, Gaines typically portrays ordinary people whom he endows with heroic potential. His characters achieve dignity despite attempts to oppress them, and they affirm not only themselves as individuals but also the value of family and community, the importance of responsibilities to others.

Like most southern writers, Gaines has a strong sense of history and of the past's continuing impact on the present. Nowhere is that historical sense more evident than in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, for the novel's 110-year-old narrator has lived from slavery into the civil rights struggle of the 1960s. Miss Jane's story is both personal and communal, a ““folk autobiography”,” as Gaines terms it. The qualities she exhibits—pride, resourcefulness, love, honor, and endurance—are those Gaines celebrates throughout his work. Miss Jane is his most memorable character, a tribute to the aunt who raised him. More than any other single book, this novel helped white Americans understand the personal emotions and the historical events that had produced the civil rights revolution.

Gaines's subsequent novel, In My Father's House (1978), proved far less successful. His only book, other than his first, to use third-person narration, it is al his only book set primarily in a town rather than in the countryside. Both A Gathering of Old Men (1983) and Lesson Before Dying (1993), in contrast, reveal an author at the height of his powers. The former, drawing on the popular genre of the detective novel, is particularly effective in creating a sense of community through the fifteen different narrators it employs. The speaking voice dominates this novel, recording both the region's long history of racial injustice and the recognizable improvement in race relations during the 1970s. Gaines old men, in accepting responsibility for the murder of Beau Boutan, affirm not only their capacity to speak but their ability to act. As in other works, so here Gaines augments his plot's dramatic power by limiting the main action to a single day's events. Yet the memories voiced by the community enable the reader to experience the past as well, with all its brutal injustice. Racism persists, of course, but in this novel Gaines ameliorates the African American/Cajun rivalry by having Beau's brother, Gil, refuse to participate in the family's traditional vigilante vengeance. At the same time, Gaines underscores the repressive nature of the past by noting that it took Charlie Biggs, who killed Beau in self-defense, fifty years to assert his manhood.

Whereas In My Father's House and A Gathering of Old Men are set in the 1970s, A Lesson Before Dying is set in 1948, the year the fifteen-year-old Gaines moved to California. Yet this novel clearly functions not only to remind readers of the maltreatment of African Americans in the pre-civil rights South but also to highlight the continuing effects of institutionalized racism. Gaines's predominant theme, the quest for human dignity, recurs in this book when the first-person narrator, Grant Wiggins, a teacher, is compelled by his aunt to aid her best friend's godson, who is awaiting execution for a crime he neither planned nor committed. Jefferson's attorney has attempted to save his client by equating Jefferson's mental development with that of a hog. When Jefferson's godmother pleads with Grant to teach her godson his human identity, Grant grudgingly agrees. Despite Jefferson's initial resistance, he ultimately succeeds, as the journal Jefferson produces testifies, a journal that also attests to America's deplorable failure to provide equal educational opportunities to African Americans—in the present as well as in 1948. Gaines's choice of Jefferson's name serves to suggest the ongoing betrayal of democratic political ideals that racism represents.

Throughout his career, Gaines has sought to make his fiction widely accessible. The clarity and directness of his prose, the array of engaging characters he depicts, and the effective use he makes of the speaking voice all reflect this commitment, as do the humor and compassion that mark his novels. Gaines's books give voice to individuals long silenced by racial oppression. Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), they also articulate fundamental human values that transcend racial differences. His best novels and short stories are likely to remain among the enduring contributions not just to African American but to world literature.

Bibliography

• Jerry H. Bryant, “Ernest J. Gaines: Change, Growth, and History,” Southern Review 10 (Fall 1974): 851–864.
• Charles H. Rowell, ed., Callaloo 3 (May 1978), special Gaines issue. Jack Hicks, In the Singer's Temple, 1981.
• Frank W. Shelton, “In My Father's House: Ernest Gaines after Jane Pittman,” Southern Review 17 (Spring 1981): 340–345.
• Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction, 1985.
• Charles H. Rowell, “The Quarters: Ernest Gaines and the Sense of Place,” Southern Review 21 (Summer 1985): 733–750.
• John F. Callahan, In the Afro-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction, 1988.
• Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton, Porch Talk with
• Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer's Craft, 1990.
• Valerie Melissa Babb, Ernest Gaines, 1991.
• Akiko Ochiai, “So Far Apart: African American Men in A Lesson Before Dying,” Griot 16:1 (Spring 1997): 39–47.
• Charles J. Heglar and Annye L. Refoe, “Aging and the African-American Community: The Case of Ernest J. Gaines,” in Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective, ed. Sara Munston Deats, 1999, pp. 139–147

John Lang

writer; educator

Personal Information

Born Ernest James Gaines, January 15, 1933, in Oscar, LA; son of Manuel (a laborer) and Adrienne J. (Colar) Gaines; married Dianne Saulney (an attorney), May 15, 1993.
Education: Attended Vallejo Junior College; San Francisco State College (now University), B.A., 1957; graduate study at Stanford University, 1958-59.
Military/Wartime Service: U.S. Army, 1953-55.
Memberships: Fellowship of Southern Writers (one of 26 charter members), 1987--.

Career

Author of novels and short stories. Denison University, Granville, OH, writer in residence, 1971; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, writer in residence, 1981; University of Southwestern Louisiana, Lafayette, professor of English and writer in residence, 1983--. Whittier College, visiting professor, 1983, and writer in residence, 1986.

Life's Work

"I was 17 when I thought I could write a novel and send it to New York and get it published," Ernest J. Gaines told Publishers Weekly. Beginning the novel in longhand, Gaines later gained access to a typewriter, which had been rented for him by his mother. Using one finger to type the manuscript-- single spaced on both sides of half sheets of paper that he had cut to resemble a book--the young author was ready to mail his work to New York. "I wrapped it in brown paper, tied a string around it, and sent the thing off," he reminisced. "It came back, of course."

In 1993 Gaines modestly told Essence that he had been "trying to be a writer for 40 years." Drawing from the rich cultural diversity and storytelling traditions of the rural bayou region in which he was raised, Gaines has written six novels and a collection of short stories, one of which was published separately as a children's book. Three of his books and one of his stories have been adapted as television movies.

Unlike many black writers finding their voices in the political and social turbulence of the sixties, Gaines focuses instead on the history and folklore of a more distant past. "A lot happened in those 350 years between the time we left Africa and the fifties and sixties when [black writers] started writing novels about the big-city ghettos," he explained in Essence. "We cannot ignore that rural past or those older people in it. Their stories are the kind I want to write about. I am what I am today because of them."

Gaines was born in Oscar, Louisiana, in 1933, and raised on the River Lake plantation in Point Coupee Parish. The oldest of six children, he was a bright and active child whose attendance at school was limited to the five or six months between the plantation's fall harvest and the spring planting. When he was 15, Gaines joined his mother and stepfather who had moved during World War II to Vallejo, California, across the bay from San Francisco. He found greater educational opportunities there. He also found the door open at the Vallejo public library; the public library in Louisiana had been closed to blacks.

Pulling books off the shelf at random, Gaines quickly decided that he liked fiction best. In the late 1940s, however, there were very few books published by or about blacks, so Gaines was drawn to books about immigrants and peasantry. He read books by American writers John Steinbeck and Willa Cather, as well as the works of the great Russian writers of the nineteenth century. In Ivan Turgenev's portrayals of Russian serfs, Gaines found a parallel to the lives of plantation slaves. At this point, he was inspired to write that first novel he had naively sent to New York.

Another strong force in Gaines's early life was his great- aunt, Augusteen Jefferson. From "Aunt Teen," Gaines learned courage and discipline. Crippled from birth, she could only crawl, not walk; but this did not stop her from taking care of Gaines and his siblings, washing clothes, and even tending a vegetable garden near the house. Augusteen Jefferson was Gaines's model for the 110-year-old title character in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "Anytime someone asks me who had the greatest influence on me as an artist or a man, I say she had," stated Gaines in the Essence interview.

In 1956 one of Gaines's short stories appeared in the San Francisco State magazine. After reading this story, agent Dorothea Oppenheimer took Gaines as a client, then represented him for more than 30 years. By 1957 Gaines had been accepted to Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner creative writing fellowship. He changed his focus from writing short stories to writing novels after a visiting critic from New York told a group of students that a publisher would never even consider a collection of short stories written by an unknown author. The only novel Gaines could think to write was the one he had written in high school, the one that eventually evolved into Catherine Carmier.

Even after Gaines graduated from college and served in the U.S. Army, the plot of his first literary effort--the one he had wrapped in brown paper and mailed to New York when he was 17--had stayed with him. Determined to rewrite this novel and do it justice, Gaines spent five years approaching the story from every angle. Finally, in 1964, Catherine Carmier was published by Atheneum. The novel tells the story of a young black man who returns from California to his native South to visit his family. There he meets and falls in love with a beautiful woman from his old community. Although the book did not sell well, Gaines had found the location and the voice for the novels that were to follow.

In Catherine Carmier, Gaines created an imaginary Louisiana plantation region named Bayonne, a place to which he would return in later fiction. Critics have often compared Gaines's Bayonne to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, and Gaines has acknowledged the influence Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway had on him as a developing writer. After Catherine Carmier Gaines completed another novel, Of Love and Dust, before publishing Bloodline, a collection of short stories. The statement of the New York critic from Gaines's college days seemed to hold true; an unknown writer was not likely to have a collection of short stories published until he had first proved himself as a novelist. From the five stories in Bloodline, "A Long Day in November" was published separately as a children's book in 1971. Another story from the same collection, "The Sky Is Gray," is frequently anthologized.

Gaines earned wide recognition with his third novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was later adapted for an Emmy-winning television movie featuring Cicely Tyson in the title role. The novel's story is told by a 110-year-old first-person narrator. Through the character of Miss Jane Pittman, Gaines relates the history of rural Louisiana blacks from the time of slavery and the Civil War up through the civil rights era. "Never mind that Miss Jane Pittman is fictitious, and that her 'autobiography,' offered up in the form of taped reminiscences, is artifice. The effect is stunning," wrote Josh Greenfeld in Life. Deeming the work "a metaphor of the collective black experience," Jerry H. Bryant further commented in the Iowa Review on Gaines's uncanny rendering of the character of Miss Jane Pittman. Readers "do not think of [him] as her 'creator,'" the reviewer noted, "but as her recording 'editor.'"

With his fourth novel, In My Father's House, Gaines elaborates on another recurring theme in his works--the alienation between father and son. In this novel, 60-year-old Reverend Phillip Martin is confronted by his 28-year-old illegitimate son. This son and two other children were conceived during an extended affair Martin had had 30 years earlier--in the drinking, fighting, womanizing days before he found God. A deeper and more pervasive theme addressed by this novel is one that is also found in Of Love and Dust, Bloodline, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In each of these works, Gaines tackles the issue of manhood for men of color. In a 1978 interview in the New York Times Book Review, Gaines stated: "You must understand that the blacks who were brought here as slaves were prevented from becoming the men that they could be.... A man can speak up, he can do things to protect himself, his home, and his family.... Eventually the blacks started [saying], 'Damn what you think I'm supposed to be--I will be what I ought to be. And if I must die to do it, I'll die' and for a long time they did get killed. Once they stepped over that line there was always that possibility, and quite a few of my characters step over that line."

In A Gathering of Old Men, 17 of Gaines's characters step across the line along with a 30-year-old white heiress of an aged Louisiana plantation as they all plead guilty to the murder of Beau Boutan, an antagonistic member of a Cajun clan. As each man relays a tale that justly serves as a motive for the murder, Boutan comes to represent a white world that has stripped each of them of their dignity and manhood. Elaine Kendall noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that these "individual stories coalesce into a single powerful tale of subjugation, exploitation and humiliation at the hands of landowners"; the men talk about public insults, social and economic discrimination, and various other indignities that they and their families have been forced to endure.

Ten years elapsed between the publication of A Gathering of Old Men and A Lesson Before Dying, a novel in which Gaines returns to the fictional town of Bayonne to confront the issues of racism, dignity, and black manhood. Jonathan Yardley, writing in the Washington Post Book World, described A Lesson Before Dying as "quintessential Gaines ... a fine introduction to his world and his view of it for anyone unfamiliar with his work--and, for those who know that work, a welcome opportunity to return to familiar territory."

Set in rural Louisiana in the late 1940s, A Lesson Before Dying focuses on a young black fieldworker named Jefferson who has been convicted of a murder he did not commit. In an attempt to save Jefferson from a death sentence, his defense attorney portrays the barely literate and slow-minded young man as a dumb animal incapable of planning a murder. Jefferson accepts the lawyer's depiction of him as an animal, which incenses Miss Emma, his elderly godmother. Miss Emma then enlists Grant Wiggins, a schoolteacher, to help Jefferson regain his sense of human dignity so he can die "like a man."

Wiggins must bridge the social distance that separates him from Jefferson in order to accomplish the task set before him. Eventually, the teacher succeeds in forging what Merle Rubin in the Christian Science Monitor called "a small but vital link... [that] puts both men in touch with a power within themselves that no system, however unjust, can ever extinguish."

Critics frequently comment on Gaines's ability to convey through his work the insidious effect of racism--without moralizing. Of A Lesson Before Dying, R. Z. Sheppard wrote in Time: "There is an ominous courtesy between the races. The whites are soft-spoken and patronizing. The blacks reply with exaggerated deference and little eye contact. Few writers have caught this routine indignity as well as Gaines. Fewer still have his dramatic instinct for conveying the malevolence of racism and injustice without the usual accompanying self- righteousness."

In the Washington Post Book World, Jonathan Yardley stated that "one of the many remarkable things about his work, and thus about Gaines himself, is the utter lack of overwrought emotion with which questions of race relations are treated." Carl Senna, writing in the New York Times Book Review, found that although A Lesson Before Dying contains "an atmosphere of pervasively harsh racism, the characters, black and white, are humanly complex and have some redeeming quality."

A Lesson Before Dying reached the Quarterly Black Review of Books and Blackboard bestseller lists and was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for the best American book of fiction published in 1993. In addition to his recent professional triumphs, Gaines found fulfillment in his personal life as well; at the age of 60, he was married for the first time--to a Miami-based assistant district attorney. "I used to think that when I was 60, I'd like to live near a small university," Gaines told Emerge contributor Ruth Laney, "someplace where I could communicate with young people who like to write.... And that was before I ever knew that there would be a woman in my life, or who that woman would be. And now there's Dianne. What frightens me is that so many things are falling into place."

American Western writer Wallace Stegner once asked Gaines to describe his intended audience; Gaines replied that he wrote for no one in particular. Gaines recalled for Publishers Weekly that when Stegner pressed the issue, he eventually answered: "I'd probably say I write for the black youth of the South, to make them aware of who they are. [I also write for] the white youth of the South to make them aware that unless they understand their black neighbors they cannot understand themselves."

Awards

Wallace Stegner fellow, 1957; Joseph Henry Jackson Award, 1959; awards from National Endowment for the Arts, 1967, and Black Academy of Arts and Letters, 1972; Rockefeller grant, 1970; Guggenheim fellow, 1971; fiction gold medal, Commonwealth Club of California, for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, 1972, and A Gathering of Old Men, 1984; literary award from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1987; MacArthur Foundation grant, 1993; the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, awarded in 1994, for A Lesson Before Dying; several honorary degrees.

Works

Writings

• Catherine Carmier, Atheneum, 1964.
• Of Love and Dust, Dial, 1967.
• Bloodline (short stories), Dial, 1968.
• A Long Day in November, Dial, 1971.
• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Dial, 1971.
• In My Father's House, Knopf, 1978.
• A Gathering of Old Men, Knopf, 1983.
• A Lesson Before Dying, Knopf, 1993.
• Works by Gaines that were adapted for television include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, CBS-TV, 1974; The Sky Is Gray, public television, 1980; A Gathering of Old Men, CBS-TV, 1987; and A Lesson Before Dying, Walt Disney Television, in production, 1994.

Further Reading

Books

• Babb, Valerie-Melissa, Ernest Gaines, Twayne, 1991.
• Black Literary Criticism, Gale, 1992.
• Black Writers, Gale, 2nd edition, 1994.
• Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale, Volume 2: American Novelists Since World War II, 1978; Yearbook 1980, 1980; Volume 33: Afro-American Fiction Writers After 1955, 1984.
• Gaudet, Marcia, and Carl Wooton, Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer's Craft, Louisiana State University Press, 1990.

• America, June 2, 1984; August 28, 1993, p. 21.
• Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 28, 1993, p. M-1; April 25, 1993, p. M-10.
• Boston Globe, April 18, 1993, p. B-41.
• Chicago Tribune Book World, October 30, 1983.
• Christian Science Monitor, December 2, 1983; April 13, 1993, p. 13.
• Emerge, May 1994, p. 66.
• Essence, August 1993, p. 52.
• Iowa Review, Winter 1972, p. 106.
• Life, April 30, 1971.
• Los Angeles Times, March 2, 1983; August 30, 1992, p. BR-11.
• Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 1, 1984.
• MELUS, Summer 1984, pp. 59-81.
• Nation, February 5, 1968; April 5, 1971, p. 436; January 14, 1984, p. 22.
• New Republic, December 26, 1983.
• Newsweek, June 16, 1969; May 3, 1971.
• New York Times, July 20, 1978.
• New York Times Book Review, November 19, 1967; May 23, 1971; June 11, 1978, p. 13; October 30, 1983, p. 15; August 8, 1993, p. 21.
• People, April 26, 1993, p. 34.
• Publishers Weekly, March 1, 1993, p. 38.
• Southern Living, September 1993, p. 44.
• Time, May 10, 1971; December 27, 1971; March 29, 1993, p. 65.
• USA Today, March 26, 1993, p. D-4.
• Washington Post, January 13, 1976.
• Washington Post Book World, June 18, 1978, p. E-5; September 21, 1983; March 28, 1993, p. WBK-3.
• Gaines was the subject of the film Louisiana Stories: Ernest Gaines, which aired on WHMM-TV, 1993.

— Debra G. Harroun

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