Ernest J. Gaines
(b. 1933)
Ernest J. Gaines was born in Pointe Coupee Parish on
“The Quarters” of River Lake Plantation, a few miles from New Roads, Louisiana.
“Until I was fifteen years old,” Gaines recounts, “I had been raised by an
aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson, a lady who had never walked a day in her life,”
but who, as he says in the dedication to The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman, “taught me the importance of standing.” As a boy Gaines worked in the
cane fields “where all my people before me worked.”
In
1948 Gaines left Louisiana to join his mother and stepfather in Vallejo,
California. There, as a teenager, he began to “read all the Southern writers I
could find in the Vallejo library; then I began to read any writer who wrote
about nature or about people who worked the land—anyone who would say something
about dirt and trees, clear streams, and open sky.” After a two-year stint in
the army Gaines took his B.A. degree from San Francisco State College in 1957.
He then won a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford and also
received the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award there in 1959.
Gaines’s
novels and short fiction are set in an imaginary Louisiana that evokes and
re-creates the world of his childhood and the changes he has observed on his
many returns to Louisiana. Although he has a drawer full of San
Francisco-inspired fiction, Gaines’s published work is exclusively about
Louisiana. “I wanted,” he says of his intention as a writer, “to smell that
Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those
Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those
Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana
river. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking to
school on cold days while yellow Louisiana busses passed them by. I wanted to
see on paper those black parents going to work before the sun came up and
coming back home to look after their children after the sun went down. I wanted
to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers left home—not because they
were trifling or shiftless—but because they were tired of putting up with
certain conditions. I wanted to see on paper the small country churches
(schools during the week), and I wanted to hear those simple religious
songs, those simple prayers—that true devotion. (It was Faulkner, I think, who
said that if God were to stay alive in the country, the blacks would have to
keep Him so.) And I wanted to hear that Louisiana dialect—that combination of
English, Creole, Cajun, Black. For me there’s no more beautiful sound
anywhere.”
Through
the act of writing Gaines reexperiences Louisiana. Once there in imagination,
he puts on paper the historical but alterable society which exists in the midst
of nature’s abiding reality. The instrument behind the passage of the spoken
word to the page is the writer’s healing human voice. Like his storytellers,
Gaines breaks down the barriers between his voice and the voices of his
characters. As a writer for his people, Gaines keeps faith with the oral
tradition—a tradition of responsibility and change, and, despite violent
opposition, a tradition of citizenship.
“The
Sky Is Gray” and the other stories in Gaines’s Bloodline mediate two
complementary facts of life: first, that very little changes in his remote
parish between the Civil War and his departure after World War II; and, second,
that even rural Louisiana could not resist the racial upheaval of the 1950s and
1960s. According to Gaines’s speech-driven donnée of fiction, for the writer to
be free, his characters must be free, and an independent, individual voice is
the first test of freedom.
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