We Mourn the Passing of Ernest Gaines

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We Mourn the Passing of Ernest Gaines
★ AALBC.com eNewsletter


Author Ernest J. Gaines died in his sleep of cardiac arrest at his home in Oscar, Louisiana November 5. He was 86 years old.

Gaines wrote one of my favorite books, A Lesson Before Dying. The novel, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed books on AALBC, tells a story that reveals the power of love expressed through teaching, when wisdom is related not just information. Gaines was probably best known for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman the fictionalized story of a woman who lived long enough to have experienced both the horrors of enslavement and the pride of the Civil Rights Movement.

Gaines’ passing signals the lost of storytellers old enough to have have known formerly enslaved citizens of America, and with his transition we lose an important window into our past. Fortunately Gaines’ literary legacy will remain with us — all we have to do is read.



2019 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence

Now in its 13th year, the Gaines Award honors rising African-American authors, while paying tribute to Gaines, a literary legend who grew up in Louisiana’s Pointe Coupee Parish.

Houston author Bryan Washington’s debut novel, Lot, has won the 2019 Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Lot is a collection of short stories set in various Houston communities, but primarily in the East End, where Washington was raised.




A Lesson Before Dying (1999 TV Movie)
Plot
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• In the 1940s South, an African-American man is wrongly accused of the killing of a white store owner. In his defense, his white attorney equates him with a lowly hog, to indicate that he didn't have the sense to know what he was doing. Nevertheless convicted, he is sentenced to die, but his godmother and the aunt of the local schoolteacher convince the schoolteacher to go to the convicted man's cell each day to try to reaffirm to him that he is not an animal but a man with dignity.

 

[Kzzl]

RIP to our elder.

 

[Duwop]

Nice thread

Rip,

 

[Surprize!]

Ernest J. Gaines, Author of ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,’ Is Dead at 86
By Neil Genzlinger
Nov. 5, 2019

Ernest J. Gaines, Author of ‘The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,’ Is Dead at 86 (Published 2019)

Mr. Gaines chronicled the lives and struggles of black people in the South before the civil rights era; “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” is his best-known work.

www.nytimes.com

Ernest J. Gaines, who wrote of the inner struggle for dignity among Southern black people before the civil rights era in “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” and other acclaimed novels, died on Tuesday at his home in Oscar, La. He was 86.
His death was announced by the University of Louisiana at Lafayette on its website.

Mr. Gaines, who spent his early years on a Louisiana plantation, captured the lives and strivings of those he had grown up with in a time of limited opportunities and oppressive racism. Many of the adults he knew in childhood had little education, giving him an accidental underpinning for his career.

“At an early age I used to write and read letters for them,” he told The Boston Herald in 1999. “In that way I got to learn their stories.”

Those stories lent a genuineness to his fiction. His first novel, “Catherine Carmier,” published in 1964, told the story of a young black man who, much like Mr. Gaines himself, left his home in Louisiana for college in California before returning to the South. It was not exactly a best seller — “I didn’t make a damn cent,” Mr. Gaines told The New York Times in 1978 — but it staked out his geographical and emotional territory.

By the time his second novel, “Of Love and Dust,” came out three years later, he was beginning to gain some attention. “Aside from occasional technical awkwardness,” the novelist Robert Granat wrote of the book in The Times Book Review, “the writing is clean, and Mr. Gaines paints some vivid scenes and fine portraits.”

In February 1969, when James Baldwin wrote a scalding essay in The Times about the difficulties faced by black artists, it was Mr. Gaines’s novel he cited in making a point about film and television.

“In such a system, it makes perfect sense that Hollywood would turn out so ‘liberal’ an abomination as ‘If He Hollers, Let Him Go,’” Mr. Baldwin wrote, referring to a forgettable movie of the day, “while leaving absolutely unnoticed and untouched such a really fine and truthful study of the black-white madness as, for example, Ernest J. Gaines’s ‘Of Love and Dust.’”

It was not long before Hollywood did take notice. In 1971 Mr. Gaines published “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” the sprawling story of the fictional title character’s long life, which begins in slavery and continues into the civil rights era.

The book was a critical smash. Alice Walker, in The Times, called it a “grand, robust, most valuable novel that is impossible to dismiss or to put down.” Three years later CBS made it into a television movie starring Cicely Tyson as the title character. The production, directed by John Korty, won nine Emmy Awards.

Two subsequent books, also widely acclaimed, were made into movies as well: “A Gathering of Old Men” (1983) and “A Lesson Before Dying” (1993).

“A Gathering of Old Men” weaves multiple viewpoints, including those of a group of old black field hands, to tell a tale of subjugation on a Louisiana plantation.

“He uses a couple of dozen narrators,” Jonathan Yardley wrote in his review in The Washington Post, “each of whom he imbues with a voice that is distinct and believable. Not least, he knows how to tell a story, and ‘A Gathering of Old Men’ is a good one.”

“A Lesson Before Dying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, is the story of a young Southern black man’s struggle for dignity as he awaits execution in prison.

Charles R. Larson, reviewing it in The Chicago Tribune, wrote, “This majestic, moving novel is an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives.”

Ernest James Gaines was born on Jan. 15, 1933, on the River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, La. His parents, Manuel and Adrienne Jefferson Gaines, were sharecroppers.

“I attended school about five to five-and-a-half months out of the year,” he said in a video interview on the Ernest J. Gaines Center’s website. “The rest of the time, I had to work in the fields.”

His early life on the plantation gave him the foundation for many of his novels, including “Of Love and Dust,” whose central character is a young black man, accused in a murder, who is “bonded out” to a harsh plantation owner.

“When I brought my young killer to the plantation,” Mr. Gaines said in an interview in “Conversations With Ernest Gaines,” a book edited by John Lowe and published in 1995, “I knew the kind of house he would have to live in; I had lived there 15 years myself. I knew the kind of food he would eat; the same kind that I had eaten. I knew the kind of clothes he would wear, because I had worn the khaki and denim clothes myself. I knew the work he would have to do.”

 

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Mr. Gaines’s father left when he was young, and his mother remarried and moved to California, leaving him in the care of a great-aunt, Augusteen Jefferson. Her “quiet heroism,” he later said, became the model for several of the strong female characters in his novels, including Jane Pittman. Ms. Jefferson could not walk, but she “taught me the importance of standing,” as he wrote in the dedication of “Miss Jane Pittman.” And she was a disciplinarian when necessary.

“She had the strongest pair of arms,” he said. “She could whip hard. I had to go out and break the switch, bring it to her, kneel down, and get my whipping.”

Because she couldn’t walk, many people came to visit Ms. Jefferson at her home. Mr. Gaines listened to their stories and, just as important, the cadences of their speech, absorbing details and yarn-spinning techniques that would be reflected in his books.

Mr. Gaines left Louisiana in 1948 to join his mother and stepfather in Vallejo, Calif. There he was able to do something that was forbidden to him in Louisiana: go to a library. Once he did, he began to discover the great novels — he especially liked Turgenev and the other Russians — but also found they were missing something.

“Many left me with the feeling of disappointment,” he told The Times-Picayune of New Orleans in 1999. “They were not describing my people, my aunt, my brothers or my friends whom I played ball and marbles with. I did not see me.”

Mr. Gaines tried filling that gap while still a teenager, writing a novel and sending it off to a New York publisher. When it was rejected, he burned the manuscript, he said.

After serving in the Army from 1953 to 1955, he enrolled at San Francisco State University, publishing short stores in a literary journal there. That was enough to get him a Wallace Stegner writing fellowship at Stanford University, where he stayed for a year before settling in San Francisco.

He worked an assortment of jobs while continuing to write. He took another pass at the novel he had destroyed as a teenager, but was having trouble with it. Then, in 1962, as he followed the reports about a black man, James Meredith, who was trying to enroll at the all-white University of Mississippi, he had an epiphany.

“I realized then with all the trouble he had to put up with, I must go to Louisiana if I’m going to write my novel,” he told CNN in 2010. “I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.”

He returned to his home state in early 1963 and finished the book, “Catherine Carmier,” six months later. “Miss Jane Pittman,” in 1971, made him famous, and the next year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He became a writer in residence at what is now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 1981. In 2008 the university established the Ernest J. Gaines Center to promote the study of his life and works.

Mr. Gaines was named a MacArthur Fellow — the “genius grant” — in 1993. In 2000 he received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton.

“His body of work has taught us all that the human spirit cannot be contained within the boundaries of race or class,” Mr. Clinton said at the award presentation at the White House.

In 2013 President Barack Obama presented Mr. Gaines with the National Medal of Arts.

Among Mr. Gaines’s other books are “Bloodline” (1968), a collection of five stories; “In My Father’s House” (1978), about a civil-rights leader and a mysterious stranger; and “The Tragedy of Brady Sims” (2017), a novella about a courthouse shooting.
Mr. Gaines married Dianne Saulney, a Miami attorney he had met at a book fair, in 1993.

“In the earlier years I couldn’t take the chance,” Mr. Gaines said, explaining his relatively late-in-life marriage. “I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew if I had a wife and family, I would neglect something. I was afraid it wouldn’t be the writing.”
His wife survives him. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.

Shortly after the turn of this century, the Gaineses were visiting the black cemetery on the grounds of the old plantation where he grew up, where many of his ancestors are buried. They noticed a for-sale sign on a nearby six-acre plot, bought it and built a house there.

They also rebuilt a 1930s-era church where Mr. Gaines had received school lessons, and moved it from one part of the plantation to their new backyard. And they formed an association to preserve and keep up the cemetery, holding an annual beautification day. Mr. Gaines thought it was the least he could do for his ancestors and the others buried there.

“They had nothing,” he told The Times in 2010. “At least here they each have six foot of ground.”

Mr. Gaines knew that whatever storytelling gifts he had came from those people and his upbringing. In the 1978 interview with The Times, he explained that the art wasn’t merely in the tale, but in the shaping of it.

“Content is probably only 40 percent of it, no more than 50 percent, as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “If a book doesn’t have form, then damn, it ain’t no novel. We can go down the block right now and find a guy on the next corner who’ll tell the biggest and truest story you can ever hear. Now, putting that story down on paper so that a million people can read and feel and hear it like you on that street corner, that’s going to take form. That’s writing.”

Mel Watkins contributed reporting.

 

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[Disanthrope]

RIP. Never heard of this brother