Gaines, Ernest J. 1933–

Ernest J. Gaines 1933–

Writer, educator

At a Glance…

Made His Mark with Miss Jane

Themes of Black Pride and Civil Rights

Award-Winning Novel of the ’90s

Conveying the Legacy of Racism

Selected writings

Sources

“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 bom in Oscar, Louisiana, in 1933, and raised on the River Lake plantation in Point Coupée 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

At a Glance…

Bom 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.

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. Military service: US. Army, 1953-55.

Member: Fellowship of Southern Writers (one of 26 charter members), 1987—.

Selected 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, Com monwealth 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.

Addresses: Office —Department of English, University of Southwestern Louisiana, East University Ave., Lafayette, LA 70504.

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.

Made His Mark with Miss Jane

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.”

Themes of Black Pride and Civil Rights

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.”

Award-Winning Novel of the ’90s

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.”

Conveying the Legacy of Racism

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.”

Selected 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.

Sources

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.

Periodicals

America, June 2, 1984; August 28, 1993, p. 21.

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, March 28, 1993, p. M-l; April 25, 1993, p. Monday-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. Netusiueefc, 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