Claire Manes on Teaching Gaines' Work in the Ernest J. Gaines Center

As an adjunct instructor at ULL, I have had the good fortune to teach  Gaines “on site” in the Ernest J. Gaines Center.  Gaines words, works, and photography as well as Karen Bourque’s stained glass portal (shown above) to the center create an ambiance connecting me and my students to Ernest Gaines in a way that no textbook alone can accomplish.  Gaines comes alive in the center that bears his name.

I am a teacher who invites students to find points of contact between their own lives and the literature they read.  Teaching any of Ernest Gaines works offers opportunities for that. While Gaines’ rural Jim Crow south is unfamiliar to most of my students, his characters face universal struggles that readers and non-readers alike can understand.

My introduction to Gaines in the classroom came after a young man in his mid to late twenties related an epiphany he had in middle school while reading  “The Sky Is Gray” for the first time.  The dialog between the minister and the young college student gave my student the necessary freedom to question and challenge authority, too.  It was an “aha moment” that still stirred him some fifteen years later. The young college man tells the preacher: 

"I'm not mad at the world. I'm questioning the world. I'm questioning it with cold logic, sir. What do words like Freedom, Liberty, God, White, Colored mean? I want to know. That's why you are sending us to school, to read and to ask questions. And because we ask these questions, you call us mad. No sir, it is not us who are mad." (97)

This interchange is one of many in the story that offers students the opportunity to reflect on an overarching question in Gaines’ work, “What does it mean to be a man, a person of dignity and integrity?”  My male students resonate with young James’ initiation into manhood; my female students can identify with the challenge of teaching a young boy to be a man and all of us can relate to the “tug of war” between James’ mother, Octavia, and the shop keeper, Helena, at the story’s end.  Both women feel their personal worth and dignity challenged.  The shop keeper wants to give Octavia extra salt meat, but James’ mother refuses charity and demands only the meat she can afford.  At a standoff, James and his mother begin to leave the shop when the Helena calls them back.  James relates, “Me and Mama stop again and look at her.  The old lady takes the meat out of the bag and unwraps it and cuts ‘bout half of it off.  Then she wraps it up again, puts it back in the bag, and gives the bag to Mama.  Mama lays the quarter on the counter saying, “Your kindness will never be forgotten” (117).

This theme of finding and maintaining one’s dignity suffuses Gaines' work.  Jefferson, Mr. Wiggins. and deputy Paul recognize the same struggle  in A Lesson before Dying.  Catherine Carmier written fifty years ago this year is Gaines’ earliest novel. It, too, examines this same issue as Jackson, feeling misplaced in Louisiana and California, wrestles with finding his place in life.  Miss Jane Pittman Gaines’ iconic old lady whose voice takes over the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman walks through a century fraught with hatred and abuse but she walks with her head held high and maintains such integrity and humanity that there are those who have been convinced that she is a real, historical woman.

    

Last page of draft entitled "The Big Gray Sky"

 I try to have my students find points of contact between their own lives and the literature that they read.  Gaines offers that.  Both my students and I gain insight into the universality of our lives when we relate to single mothers raising sons to maturity, men and women maintaining dignity despite enduring brutal and demeaning treatment. This universality can be seen in Catherine Carmier as well when Jackson thinks about all of the people he met while in California and how their positions were similar to his. He met a Native American from New Mexico, an Asian from Hong Kong, and a white boy from Dayton, Ohio.   

Claire Manes, Ph.D, ( UL Lafayette 2007)  has taught at the elementary, high school, technical college, and university level.  Ernest Gaines’ work has been of importance in her teaching and  personal life.

Gaines, Ernest. “The Sky is Gray.” Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 83-117. Print.