Gaines and the Struggle to Become a Writer

1964 cover

Catherine Carmier (1964), on first glance, comes across as a Romeo & Juliet type of story. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Published when Gaines was 31, the novel provides an essential starting point to understand Gaines' work. Catherine Carmier provides readers with the major themes and character types that they will see all the way through Gaines' oeuvre. Mary Ellen Doyle even states, "This last novel [A Lesson before Dying], especially, reminds one--with significant differences--of the first" (203). I will discuss the themes and character types that begin in Catherine Carmier in the next blog post. Here, I want to talk about Gaines' determination to succeed as a writer and to have his first novel published.


When he moved to Vallejo, California in 1948 to be with his mother and his step-father, Gaines entered a library for the first time, by accident. His step-father didn't want him hanging around the street corners, so Gaines went to the YMCA first. There, he laced up a pair of boxing gloves and fought someone who knew how to box. The other pugilist punched Gaines in the mouth, and at that point, Gaines "took the boxing gloves off with the teeth that were not loosened, and went to the library" ("Auntie," 22). The library opened up numerous worlds to Gaines. He read the French and Russian writers who described the peasants in their own countries. He came across other authors as well. However, none of the books they wrote contained his people from Southern Louisiana. Not seeing his people in the novels, Gaines decided he would write about them and the land where they resided, providing them with a voice. Discussing his desire to become an author in "Auntie and the Black Experience in Louisiana," Gaines talks about why he chose to write about the area where he grew up instead of writing about New Orleans or San Francisco. The passes is worth quoting at length:

So I thought that it was about time that I did my own book about that little place that I had come from. After writing in long hand what I thought was a book, I then begged my mother to rent me a typewriter. She did, not because she thought I would become a writer, or that she wanted me to become a writer--she did it to keep me quiet. My step-father made a trip home from the Merchant Marines that summer--the summer of 49--and each time he passed by me pecking at the typewriter, he would say to himself, but loud enough for me to hear: "That boy going crazy there, yeah." My friends wanted me to play softball or football, and when I did not show up to the park, they would come by the house to see what was going on. They laughed when I told them I was writing a book. When I read them a part of what I had written, they said, "No, if you're going to write, write about us here. Lay off that plantation stuff everybody's trying to forget. If you're going to write about the South, at least write about New Orleans." But New Orleans was not my home; I lived a hundred miles from New Orleans. Oscar, in Pointe Coupee Parish, was my home and I had someone there who I would never deny [Aunt Augusteen]. ("Auntie," 22-23)    

With all of this in mind, why write about Oscar, Louisiana and not New Orleans, especially while others like Richard Wright wrote about urban Chicago and James Baldwin wrote about New York? Why drudge up the past when moving forward is what mattered? Why should we concern ourselves with individuals who lived not in the cosmopolitan city of New Orleans but in the farmland of Oscar? We should care because their stories matter. Gaines saw this from the beginning. He did not see the people that he knew in the history books or novels that he read for school. Unless Gaines wrote about them, they would remain nonexistent to the public. They would be buried in the unmarked graves behind Riverlake Plantation and eventually removed in the name of agricultural progress. This, in a nutshell, is why we have Catherine Carmier and Gaines' later works.

Undated Meal List

After completing the novel in 1949, Gaines sent it off to a publisher in New York. He waited to hear what fortunes The Little Stream would bring him so that he could send money back to Louisiana. No fortunes came; instead, the manuscript returned, rejected by the publishing house. Gaines went to the incinerator in the back yard and burned The Little Stream. The novel that originated that summer would not see the light of day until 1964. During the time between the initial rejection and the publication of Catherine Carmier, Gaines attended San Francisco State College, went into the military, and continued writing, even having a few short stories published. He read more and wrote more. After graduating from college in 1957, Gaines gave himself ten years to become a writer. He would write in the morning and work at jobs that he didn't necessarily like in the afternoons. He survived on around $175 a month.


Even though Catherine Carmier appeared in 1964 and won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Prize, it did not sell well. Gaines didn't receive some independence to write until he garnered a small book contract in 1966. Part of the novel's lackluster sales had to do with movement towards a more militant stance regarding African American literature. While some argue that Gaines lacks the "militant" angle, it can be seen in his writing and interviews. In 1975, he told Tom Carter that the last thing Southern whites wanted to see was humanity in African Americans: "I knew the way to show that humanity was to do something positive. Some guys get angry and go to a punching bag. As they're jabbing at it they're developing their muscles; they're getting sharper. I try to use the anger in a positive way, to create a lasting punch, one that will have a longer effect than just screaming or calling somebody an MF or son of a bitch" (84).

As some African American authors such as Amiri Baraka saw literature as purely protest, eschewing style for content, Gaines saw that style as well as substance needs to be considered. As he heard about the violence during the 1960s, especially in the South, Gaines said, "I would sit at my desk until I had written the perfect page" because through writing the perfect page "I would show the Bull Connors and the Faubeses, and the Wallaces and the Thurmans that I could do anything with those twenty six letters that they could, and I could do it better than any of them could" ("Auntie," 26). By taking this stance, Gaines inspired other writers, among them Alice Walker. In a 1969 letter housed in the Ernest J. Gaines Center, Walker discusses the influence of Gaines' short story "The Sky is Gray" and his use of dialect on her writing. She also mentions that after reading Of Love and Dust and Bloodline from noon till six in the morning she is "only sorry not to have Catherine Carmier to read now." Later, in a 1971 letter to Dial Press after the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, she writes a postscript, "If ever Catherine Carmier is re-issued (the only Gaines fiction I haven't read), I hope I will be one of the very first to know." Even in 1971, Walker could not find a copy of the novel. Later, it would be reissued, translated, and widely available a people throughout the world recognized Gaines work.

Carter, Tom. "Ernest Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 80-85. Print.

Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Print.

Gaines, Ernest J. "Auntie and the Black Experience in Louisiana." Louisiana Tapestry: The Ethnic Weave of St. Landry Parish. Eds. Vaughn B. Baker and Jean T. Kreamer. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, 1983. 20-29. Print.