DUKES FANS:
ERNEST J. GAINES: January 15,
1933-November 5, 2019
Sometimes
you got to hurt something to help something. Sometimes you have to plow under
one thing in order for something else to grow.” Ernest J.
Gaines, A Gathering of Old Men
“Ain't
we all been hurt by slavery?”
Ernest J. Gaines; Interviews with Ernest
J. Gaines
Sometime
in the1970’s I was haunting the literature stacks at the Parkway Main Branch
of the Free Library of Philadelphia like I did on a regular basis. I had always
been a reader, but my high school experiences combined with the times in which
we lived made me an insatiable and voracious reader, and I spent a great deal
of time at libraries. I was reading everything: beat and modern poetry, revisionist
histories of the United States, Russian and African writers, books about Blacks
in the American West, and tons of poetry and novels by Black authors. In the
literature section that day I stumbled across a book that would become one of my
guidelines for the next decade:Interviews with Black Authors, by John O’Brien.
This book contained interviews with several of my favorite authors at the
time-Ralph Ellison who wrote Invisible Man, Robert Hayden, whose poem,
Frederick Douglass haunts me to this day, and Al Young, whose touching
coming of age and music novel, Snakes, I learned about from a Nat
Hentoff column in the Village Voice. There were a bunch of other authors with
whom I was not familiar, and over time I read all of the interviews, and I
went on to read books by the people whose interviews intrigued me the most.That
is how I discovered such wonderful and creative
writers as Ishmael Reed, John Wideman and Alice Walker. And it is how I became acquainted
with a Louisiana born writer by the name of Ernest J. Gaines.
Gaines’ interview immediately captured me
for two reasons. One was because he talked about capturing the sounds, dialect,
time, and feel of the places in which his writing was set. I had read a little
William Faulkner by then, and I knew what Faulkner was doing with Yoknapatawpha county in his novels. Gaines acknowledged
being influenced by Faulkner, but he also said that he knew that all the people
who Faulkner portrayed were not like people he knew in real life on Southern plantations.
He also did not see them in the Russian peasant novels he loved by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky,
so he decided he would portray them as he knew them. Gaines also talked about his Louisiana plantation
setting he used in most of his novels almost as if it was a character focusing, for example, on the role dust
played in one of his novels, And he talked about how his characters related to
struggles between the past and the present, how many of them were trying to define what it meant to be a
man, and the various meanings death could have in not only his novels, but in
real life. WOW! All of this was heady stuff for a young, urban Black boy in the 1970's, on the
edge of “manhood,“ trying to play the blues, exploring his cultural past,
loving history, and looking at all of this in different ways. I had to read this man.
I
read Catherine Carmier first and got acquainted with how Gaines
could
capture the dialect and sounds of characters-almost so I could hear them
as I
read the conversations. I could see how he could hint at themes and
meaning without
necessarily making it obvious. I was also impressed by how he could
present
emotions in such a quietly intense way and how he could make the
ordinary lives
of so many of his characters feel real and compelling. I don't think i
had ever at that
point really identified with and really appreciated a female character
in a
novel before, but Catharine really affected me. This was a wonderful
revelation that awakened me to new insights in reading. I was hooked.
From there I read The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and I then had to read everything he wrote. His characters, ideas, setting, plots and quietly stated themes would sit with me for days after I finished reading one of his works. Some of his books, including, A Lesson Before Dying and A Gathering of Old Men, I read several times, getting something new out of each reading. Ernest Gaines became one of my favorite writers, and he taught me and awakened me to so much.
From there I read The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and I then had to read everything he wrote. His characters, ideas, setting, plots and quietly stated themes would sit with me for days after I finished reading one of his works. Some of his books, including, A Lesson Before Dying and A Gathering of Old Men, I read several times, getting something new out of each reading. Ernest Gaines became one of my favorite writers, and he taught me and awakened me to so much.
The Autobiography of Miss
Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson Before Dying were
each made into powerful films. If you are not familiar with Gaines' work but are
reluctant to jump right into reading a new author, I would recommend seeing those films.
They are incredibly powerful, well-acted and well-directed (although I do have one
little problem with a scene in Miss Jane Pittman.) I will see those
films over the next week or two, and I may go back and re-read one or more of
his books. Ernest J. Gaines wanted to bring the world he grew up in and knew to life in
a full and meaningful way. He did that and much, much more.
(Here are a few websites about
Ernest J. Gaines: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ernest-J-Gaines
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