Ernest Gaines

With the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971, Ernest J. Gaines (b. 15 January 1933) was acknowledged as a major American writer. This landmark novel, which was subsequently made into a television movie starring Cicely Tyson, came at a time when all manner of American discourse was re-evaluating the nation’s practices of African American enslavement. The fictional autobiography of a young girl living in slavery whose personal voice relates the events of Emancipation, Joe Louis defeating Max Schmeling, Jackie Robinson integrating baseball, and the birth of the Civil Rights movement became a microcosm of American history. The intertwining of history with individual stories is a hallmark of Gaines’s writing style. His texts are set in the fictional Bayonne, a reimagining of his Louisiana parish, Pointe Coupée, and all contain characters whose cadences render the traditions and stories of the region, a landscape of bayous, decaying plantations, and tenant farms. Gaines may have been popularly “discovered” with Miss Jane, but he wrote two previous novels, Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), and numerous short stories, five of which were collected in Bloodline (1968). All mine the reservoir of Louisiana’s culture and exemplify narrative techniques that replicate in writing the oral storytelling intrinsic to his native area. Coming from a long line of storytellers or “liars,” and wanting to incorporate their rural Southern worldview and way of telling in his fiction, he imbricates written form with a mosaic of folk materials. A flawless ear for language developed while listening to storytellers as he sat on his Aunt Augusteen’s porch gives his prose a unique rhythm, while research into the marginalized—the recollections of former slaves, the voices of the incarcerated—gives his themes timeless resonances. Gaines’s long career has seen the advent of many literary movements. He lived in San Francisco during that city’s literary renaissance, and wrote during the social upheavals of the Black Arts period, but through it all kept close to his aesthetic vision. His fiction is filled with political nuances and historic moments from enslavement to contemporary civil rights, but all are rendered in intimate terms through characters, each in his or her own way, facing deterministic factors stemming from race and social class. Gaines has a modernist impulse to make it new, and transforms conventions of prose literature, but change is always in service to embracing a social past that is not really past. Though his writing is deeply rooted in the complex hybrid histories of black and white Americans, Cajuns, and Creoles living in a single fictional parish, it is conversant with perpetual questions of humanity and social justice.