"Dirt" in James Baldwin's "Go Tell It On the Mountain"

Writing about James Baldwin's, Charles Scruggs notes that "[n]o Afro-American writer in modern literature conveys better the sense of menace lying in wait in the urban streets 'outside.' Word such as 'menacing,' 'dreadful,' and 'unspeakable' are Baldwin's choices for describing those streets" (147). Later, Scruggs points out that for Baldwin "[s]mall, intimate spaces" take the place of "sacred space" within the city (147). This is where I would like to spend today's post, on Baldwin's description of those "small, intimate spaces," specifically the apartment of the Grimes family in Go Tell It On The Mountain.

As he wakes out of a bleary sleep on his birthday in 1935, John thinks about whether or not anyone will remember his birthday as he stares at "a yellow stain on the ceiling just above his head" that eventually transforms "into a woman's nakedness" (18). The stain becomes something that causes John to sin, making him feel guilty. The dinginess of the stain makes one think of Bigger Thomas's apartment in Native Son or of Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "Kitchenette Building." For me, the narrator's later descriptions of the apartment and the suffocating dirt that inhabits it. The use of "dirt" reminds me, of course, of Gaines's implementation of "dust" and "dirt" as an oppressive and stifling force in Of Love and Dust. In Baldwin's novel, "dirt" appears in the same way; however, instead of being outside in the fields, the "dirt" becomes a presences within the confines of the small apartment.

John must clean the constricting apartment, dusting and sweeping its interior. The cramped apartment served as a breeding ground for roaches, and it could never become clean. "Dirt was in the walls and floorboards," the narrator says (21). When John begins cleaning, he discovers that no matter how hard he tries, the apartment will never be rid of the "dirt."

Dirt was in every corner, angle, crevice of the monstrous stove, and lived behind it in delirious communion with the corrupted wall. Dirt was in the baseboard that John scrubbed every Saturday, and roughened the cupboard shelves that held the cracked and gleaming dishes. Under this dark weight the walls leaned, under it the ceiling, with a great crack like lightening in its center, sagged. The windows gleamed like beaten gold and silver, but now John saw, in the yellow light, how fine dust veiled their doubtful glory. Dirt crawled in the gray mop hung out of the windows to dry. John thought with shame and horror, yet in angry hardness of heart: He who is filthy, let him be filthy still. (22)

Within this section of a paragraph, "dirt" and "dust" appear four times. "Dirt" occupies the space, causing it to become a disheveled, oppressive space that does not even allow the light from outside to penetrate its darkness. Maintaining its constriction on the apartment, the "dirt" even takes on animalistic characteristics. It "crawled" into the mop and "veiled" the beauty of the light. These words connote something sinister that the "dirt" represents.

Later, the cleaning of the apartment becomes akin to Sisyphus continually rolling the boulder up the hill only to have it pushed back down for all eternity. Sweeping the carpet, "dust rose, clogging [John's] nose and sticking to his sweaty skin, and he felt that should he sweep it forever, the clouds of dust would not diminish, the rug would not be clean" (26). No matter how much John swept and cleaned the rug or the apartment, the dust remained, clogging every crevice and creeping into the implements whose sole purpose was the clean the apartment.

Scruggs views John's cleaning of the apartment as "a metaphor for Gabriel's morally untidy life, and John's pointless labor illustrates the circles of deception and self-deception which surround the father's authority" (151). I agree with Scruggs on this point, but I also see the "dirt" as a physical contagion that entraps not just John and his family but an entire community in a space of subjugation and oppression. It clogs their pours, in much the same way that the "dust" in Gaines's novel swirls, blisteringly around the characters causing them to seek shelter. Unlike Gaines's characters, the Grimeses cannot go inside to escape the "dust"; when they retreat inside, they encounter the "dirt" all around them.


More can, and should be said about this. What are your thoughts? If you recall, during John's passing through at the end of the novel, he feels like his mouth is filled with "dirt" and he can't breathe. What role does "dirt" play in this instance? What are some other places within Go Tell It On the Mountain or other Baldwin texts where "dirt" or other elements work as symbols of oppression?

Baldwin, James. Go Tell it On the Mountain. New York: Dell, 1985.
Scruggs, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993. Print.

James Baldwin's "Go Tell It On the Mountain"

Currently, I'm rereading James Baldwin's Go Tell it On the Mountain (1953), and while working on my paper for an upcoming conference, I noticed some things that I would like to talk about briefly here on the blog. I've written about Baldwin and the southern landscape on this blog before. Today, I want to expand upon that to a certain extent by looking at Florence and Deborah in Baldwin's first novel. Trudier Harris notes that fears of the South “whether manifested in lynching or rape, had a direct impact upon black bodies” (13). For Florence and Deborah, the fear of rape is what drives them, one to leave the South, and the other to become subjected to the power of Gabriel Grimes. 


Farah Jasmine Griffin, in "Who Set You Flowin'?: The African-American Migration Narrative, talks about Florence's decision to migrate North while only touching briefly on Deborah and her non-movement. Griffin notes that in order to better understand what caused individuals to migrate to the North, especially females, we need to pay attention to the non-economic motives. For Florence, this motive included the fear that she would be raped by her "master." At home, Florence's place within the family can be seen as nothing more than tenuous because she must give up her self for Gabriel's success. Gabriel becomes the one that their mother dotes on, pushing Florence to the side. The sexism she experiences at home only exacerbates what possibly awaits her at her job in the white man's house.

When she was twenty-six years old in 1900, Florence decided to leave for New York. As she worked as a "cook and serving-girl" in a white home, "her master proposed that she become his concubine" (emphasis added 75). At that moment. Florence chose to escape. She bought a train ticket for New York and left the very next day. One important aspect to note in the above quote is that Baldwin uses the term "master" for Florence's employer. This event occurred 35 years after the Civil War, but he still chooses that term here. Griffin astutely notes that "Baldwin uses this term to denote that the South from which Florence flees is the same South as that which enslaved her mother" (38). The only impetus for Florence escaping is the threat of sexual exploitation by her master, not the death of a family member by violence or monetary desires.  

Florence's friend Deborah actually experiences sexual trauma at the hands of white southerners, but she does not leave as a result. At sixteen, Deborah "had been taken away into the fields the night before by many white men, where they did things to her to make her cry and bleed" (69). After Deborah's father confronts the whites, they beat him and left him for dead. From that moment on, no one in the community would touch Deborah because they viewed her as unclean and a harlot. These experiences caused Deborah to believe that all men were only after her for her body, nothing more. She turned to the Lord, and eventually, after Gabriel's conversion, she marries the supposed man of God. Their relationship involved Deborah praising Gabriel, Gabriel accepting the praise, and not much more. In essence, Gabriel begins to lord over her with his power that purportedly came from God. Unlike Florence, though, Deborah stays in the South with Gabriel, never attempting to escape.

Along with Florence and Deborah, another woman experiences sexual exploitation. Esther, the woman who works with Gabriel and has an affair with him while he is married to Deborah, chooses to flee the South after her encounter with Gabriel leaves her pregnant. While Florence's and Deborah's instances of sexual subjugation occurred at the hands of white men, Esther's happened at the hands of an African American. The congress between Esther and Gabriel is consensual; however, once Gabriel finds out that Esther is pregnant and that she wants to leave, his power begins to show. He tries to reason that she is not pregnant and that she is just being naive, but Esther stands firm and starts to batter Gabriel's pride. She tells him that he needs to give her money so she can leave, or she will go through town telling everyone about "the Lord's anointed" and his actions. Gabriel acquiesces, and he steals the money Deborah had saved and gives it to Esther.

What makes Esther interesting is the fact that like Florence and Deborah she encounters sexual subjugation. Unlike Florence and Deborah, though, she experiences it not at the hands of whites but at the hands of an African American man. Along with this aspect, the results of her encounter with Gabriel mirror what happens with Florence. Even though Florence does not physically get raped, the mere thought of it causes her to migrate. The consensual congress of Esther and Gabriel causes her to flee because of the resulting pregnancy.

I'm not sure what to entirely make of this right now, but it's something that I noticed. What are your thoughts on this? Share them below.

Baldwin, James. Go Tell it On the Mountain. New York: Dell, 1985.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. "Who Set You Flowin'?: The African-American Migration Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Print.        

Arna Bontemps and Ernest Gaines Continued

Arna Bontemps African American Museum

Last Thursday, I wrote about Arna Bontemps' "Why I Returned (A Personal Essay)." How do Bontemps' experiences compare with those of Gaines as a young man. In many ways, they are similar. Gaines left Louisiana at the age of fifteen in 1948. Like Bontemps, Gaines migrated to California; however, unlike Bontemps, Gaines remained in California, settling eventually in San Francisco. It took Gaines a long time to even think about returning to the South or Louisiana. Eventually, he began returning to Louisiana in the early 1960s after James Meredith integrated the University of Mississippi. Unlike Bontemps, Gaines does not talk about the tensions between "folk heritage" and whether or that heritage should be presented in his works. Instead, in interviews, he talks about the conditions in the South, as Bontemps does as well.

Bontemps' father chose to move the family to California after an incident with  men one Saturday evening. Coming home with his pay and presents for his wife. Bontemps' father encountered two drunk white men. One of them, with slurred speech, muttered, "Let's walk over the big nigger" (5). His muscles tensing up, Bontemps' father began calculating all of the possible outcomes of the encounter. Even though he knew the two men didn't pose a threat to him, a number of questions raced through his mind: "Was something brewing? Racial tension again? . . . But was this the time for a showdown? Assuming he could handle the two-on-one, what then?" (5) If he assaulted the men, he would be chased down and become the victim of mob vengeance, regardless of the provocation" (5). After calmly stepping aside, Bontemps' father made his way home. On his walk home, he came to the decision that would change his family's lives forever.

Bontemps' father decided to move his family to California, eventually settling on San Francisco as their home. Bontemps does not mention any personal racial confrontations between himself and whites while he lived in Louisiana, partly because he was only three when he left. Instead, he talks about spending time with his grandmother in the back yard. Upon settling in California, he starts to pick up on the conversations his father has with his mother, grandmother, and others. He says, "I began to pick up comment about the place we had left, comment which had been withheld from young ears while we were still in Louisiana" (6). As he grew, Bontemps picked up in their conversation, and in some ways, I picture him sitting around the house on a Sunday afternoon much like the narrator in Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" who fell asleep listening to his parents and others talk about the South and things that he did not comprehend yet.

Like Bontemps, Gaines moved to California at an early age. Even though he was about ten years older than Bontemps was when he left Louisiana, Gaines does not, very often if at all, mention experiences with racism that he encountered before leaving Louisiana. Just as Bontemps recalls walking with his grandmother in the back yard and picking pecans, Gaines talks about sitting on the porch listening to the older people and writing letters for them. In many ways, Bontemps' and Gaines' decision to focus on the community they grew up in instead of the society that would oppress them says a lot. The community, whether that be familial or literal community, provided each with a form of protection, shielding them from the racism outside. Gaines draws on this in Bloodline where the first story, "A Long Day in November," is told from a six-year-old boy's point of view. The boy experiences life in the quarters, surrounded by those who love him and have his best interests in mind. The second story, "The Sky is Gray," sees the encroachment of the outside world on the community when James and Octavia go to Bayonne.

There is more that could be said here. Perhaps I will have one more post on Bontemps and Gaines. Specifically, I want to think about Bontemps' "A Summer Tragedy" and Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. What other authors have similar narratives to those of Bontemps and Gaines, leaving the South and either returning or not? Let me know in the comments below.

Bontemps, Arna. The Old South: "A Summer Tragedy" and Other Stories of the Thirties. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973. Print.

The Short Story and Ernest Gaines Syllabus

Last post, I talked about the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Center Summer Teaching Institute. With that in mind, I want to take the time in this blog post to do something a little different. Instead of writing a critical post, I would like to use today's entry to present you with a possible syllabus for teaching Gaines' works either in a secondary or post-secondary setting. When available, I have provided links to the stories below.

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The Short Story and Ernest Gaines

Objective:

This course will examine various authors from around the world and how they influenced the writing of Ernest J. Gaines in particular. Along with authors that influenced Gaines, the course will also explore contemporaneous authors with Gaines and his work. Through this examination, we will challenge the monolithic view of literature, and in particular African American literature, by showing that authors do not receive their inspiration from a uniformed sources. While the course center on Ernest Gaines, it will provide us with an opportunity to explore other avenues as well: short story structure, peasantry in Russia and the United States, Modernism, the South as a space of memory, and other topics.

Readings (Chronological Order):

Ivan Turgenev A Sportsman's Sketches (1852)
Leo Tolstoy The Death of Ivan Illych (1886)
James Joyce "Ivy Day in the Committee Room" (1914)
Jean Toomer "Blood Burning Mood" and "Avey" (1923)
Ernest Hemingway "Soldier's Home," "Big Two-Hearted River Part 1," and "Big Two Hearted River Part 2" (1925)
William Faulkner "April 7, 1928" (Benjy's section in The Sound and the Fury) (1929)
Richard Wright "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" and "Big Boy Leaves Home" (1938)
Eudora Welty "A Worn Path" (1941)
James Baldwin "The Outing" and "Going to Meet the Man" (1965)
Ernest Gaines Bloodline (1968) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)
Alice Walker "Everyday Use" (1973)
Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers 1967 to Present Ed. Gloria Naylor (1997)
Growing Up in the South: An Anthology of Modern Southern Literature Ed. Suzanne Jones (2003)

Assignments:

• Response papers: These will be in the form of blog posts. I will set up a blog for the class, and you will post your responses there. Each post will require you to answer to my prompt and to respond to other students' responses as well. We will discuss how to do this in a proefssional manner during class. (Teachers, see Shannon Baldino's "The Classroom Blog: Enhancing Critical Thinking, Substantive Discussion, and Appropriate Online Interaction" for a discussion of blogs in the high school classroom.)
• Wiki: Students will be placed into groups of four. Each group will be required to construct a collaborative wiki with ________ components on an author and text that we read in class. 
• Each student must write a paragraph describing the class discussion for that author. For example, if the class discusses narrative voice in Faulkner, the response should talk about narrative voice and what the class said about it. 
• The group must come up with five questions to think about based off of the class discussion or research. 
• The group must construct an annotated bibliography of six sources. The annotations must be 250-500 words and contain a section stating the source's credibility, a summary of the source, a way to use that source in a research project. 
• The group must construct a list of symbols/allusions/or other references in the stories. The number here will vary, but each entry must provide information about where it comes from (especially for an allusion) and what purpose it serves in the context of the story. 
• The group must construct a review of the short story. The review must be between 500-1000 words. Remember, a review is not a summary. Some summary is necessary, but the thrust of the review should be about the story's meaning and importance. 
• The group must construct a creative page. This page can be anything that you desire. For example, it could be a hand drawn map of the setting. It could be sketch of one of the scenes. It could be a Prezi talking about the author and the themes of the story. It could be a video discussion. This page is open to whatever you want to do.   
• Research paper: the paper must explore connections between at least two of the authors discussed in class. For example, you could explore the pastoral in Turgenev and Hemingway. Or, you could explore representations of the South in Wright and Baldwin. The paper must be 8-10 pages. You must use 4-6 secondary sources as well to support your argument.

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What other types of assignments would you require in a class like this? For class discussion, I would incorporate the "fish bowl" activity. The "fish bowl" has worked well for me in the past, especially in my literature classes.  As well, the wiki assignment worked well. After the initial apprehensiveness of students to work together in this way, students created some amazing wikis and creative pages. Plus, the information provided them with a head start on their research papers. The wikis helped to show students that learning and writing are not solitary activities; they require interaction with others.

Regarding the readings above, I chose them because of their relationship to Ernest Gaines. Gaines has stated, at various times, the influence of many of the authors above. Along with his influences, I added contemporaries of Gaines such as Wright, Baldwin, and Walker to show his work in relationship to those he wrote alongside. The two anthologies listed provide short stories by African American writers and Southern writers. There are works in there that could be used to expand upon the themes and topics in the class.

List of previous blog posts that may be of help with the readings in this course:

• "The Two Ernests: Gaines and Hemingway"  
• "Jean Toomer's Cane and Ernest Gaines"
• "James Joyce's 'Ivy Day in the Committee Room'"
• "The Specter of Lynching"
• "Benjy Compson and Sonny"
• "Trees and the Southern Landscape: James Baldwin and Ernest Gaines"
• "Ernest Hemingway's 'Soldier's Home'"
• "Eudora Welty's 'A Worn Path' and Gaines' 'The Sky is Gray'"
• "The Jim Crow South in Welty's 'A Worn Path' and Gaines' 'The Sky is Gray'"

Please provide your insights and suggestions in the comments below. What other texts would you suggest in a class like the one above? What assignments and activities have worked for you in the classroom when teaching literature? If you have a syllabus or reading list you would like to propose, let me know at gainescenter@louisiana.edu.

Trees and the Southern Landscape: James Baldwin and Ernest Gaines

James Baldwin, during an interview with Kenneth Parker immediately after they met with Robert Kennedy in 1963, commented on being a Southerner. At the beginning of the interview, when Parker asks Baldwin about his childhood, Baldwin says, "I am, in all but no technical legal fact, a Southerner. My father was born in the South. My mother was born in the South. And if they had waited like two more seconds, I might have been born in the south." In July, I wrote about pulp novelist Donald Goines and his turn to the South in Swamp Man. For this post, I would just like to speak some about African American authors and their relationship to the South in broad terms. More specifically, I would like to take this opportunity to look at, albeit briefly, at the image of the landscape of the South in regards to Northern writers who turn to the South and Southern writers, such as Gaines, who were born and raised, at least partly in the South.  

Trudier Harris, in The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South, begins her study by commenting on the fact that "[n]o matter where an African American writer is born in the United States, whether it is Boston or New York, or Idaho or California, or Texas or Georgia, or Alabama or Mississippi, he or she feels compelled to confront the American South and all its bloody history in his or her writings" (emphasis in original 1-2). While reading the introduction to Harris' study, I was struck by her discussion of how African American writers, depending on their place of origin, describe the Southern landscape. 

Harris makes a point to note that there is a "duality of attraction and repulsion" in these descriptions. The main aspect of these descriptions that grabbed my attention, though, was the image of trees. Northern writers, like Baldwin, see trees as spaces where black bodies become mutilated and murdered. Harris quotes Baldwin on a trip to Atlanta where he writes, "It was on the outskirts of Atlanta that I first felt how the Southern landscape--the trees, the silence, the liquid heat, and the fact that one always seems to be traveling great distances--seems designed for violence, seems, almost, to demand it. What passions cannot be unleashed on a dark road in a Southern night!" (Nobody Knows My Name 108). To Baldwin, the landscape resembles a foreboding that can unleash itself at any instant upon him because he is black. If someone chose to do something to Baldwin, who would even know? There is a "silence," "a great distance," that creates a space where no one would even know what occurred to him in that "Southern night." 

Later, Baldwin turns to a more specific comment on trees, saying, "Which of us has overcome his past? And the past of a Negro is blood dripping down through leaves, gouged-out eyeballs, the sex torn from its socket and severed with a knife" (Nobody 213).  For Baldwin, a black man traveling South, trees represent physical damage to the black body. This damage, as he succinctly describes, comes in the form of lynchings which mutilate and demolish the body for no other reason than the color of the body's skin. Unlike Baldwin, and others who I have discussed before, trees do not symbolize the fear of physical harm in Gaines' work. Instead, trees represent strength and a unification with nature. 

In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Miss Jane states proudly that she converses with an Oak Tree. While some say she's crazy, she says she's not because that tree has been here for so long. It has seen and heard things that others could never, ever recall. While this is the most prominent mention of a tree in Gaines' work, I would be at fault if I did not mention Gaines' short story "Just Like A Tree." The story, told from multiple points of view. The story appears to be about Aunt Fe (the tree) and her family preparing to move her to the North out of harm's way of violence against civil rights demonstrators. However, Sister Mary Ellen Doyle argues that the story is more about the community. While true, I do not want to discuss that aspect right now. Instead, I want to talk about Gaines referring to Aunt Fe as a tree. 

Aunt Fe is strong like a tree, and her roots dig deep into the soil where she resides. Aunt Glo, one of the narrators, talks about Aunt Fe metaphorically, speaking of her as if she is a tree and someone is "jecking" her out of the ground with a chain tied around her trunk. Even when the tree escapes the confines of the dirt, a "big hole" remains, and deep down in the hole resides a "piece of the taproot" (236). The hole and the remaining taproot point at once towards something lost and also towards something that remains, part of Aunt Fe. She cannot be removed from the South. Part of her will remain. Later, Aunt Glo describes the mover dragging the tree along the paved road. It keeps getting caught on fences and other items, leaving pieces of itself along the journey. When he tree eventually makes it North, no place can be found for it, so the mover just says, "I just stand her up here and a little while and see, and if it don't work out, if she keep getting in he way, I guess we'll just have to take her to the dump" (237). Aunt Fe doesn't make it North. She dies peacefully the night before she is set to depart. In "Just Like A Tree," the tree does not symbolize the dismemberment of black bodies as it does in Baldwin. Instead, it represents strength and history, a indomitable spirit that will maintain even in the face of unequaled oppression and racism.

In regards to the South, Gaines, in 1973, said he would have a hard time moving back permanently because he was not sure what he would do in certain situations. Elsewhere, he has stated that the two most important moments in his life were when he moved to California in 1948 and when he made the decision to start returning to Louisiana for visits and to write in 1963. He even famously says, "My body went to California, but my soul stayed in Louisiana." The South, for Gaines, contains different connotations and feelings than it does for Baldwin. Later, I will explore this topic some more, but for now, if you have any comments you would like to add, please share them below. The video below is of Mississippi John Hurt singing "I Shall Not Be Moved," the "old Negro spiritual" that provides the epigraph for "Just Like A Tree."      

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dial, 1961. Print. 
Gaines, Ernest. "Just Like A Tree." Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. Print.  Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2009. Print. 

    

The Purpose of Writing

In the last post, I spoke, briefly, about "white privilege" and society's "rules." Today, I would like to continue that conversation some, focusing more on why Gaines, and others, chose to write. During the same class period I spoke about last post, we read Judith Ortez Cofer's "Myth of the Latin Woman." Cofer speaks about her encounters with individuals in England and in the United States and how they project their stereotypical images of Latin women upon her. In one instance, a man confronts her on a bus and begins to sing a song from West Side Story, At a reading in Florida, a white woman sitting at a table "mistook" Cofer for a waitress and asked her for a cup of coffee. When Cofer took the stage and read, the white woman could only duck her head and avoid eye contact with Cofer; she ultimately raised her eyes, causing Cofer to says, "when I willed her to look up at me, it was my victory, and she graciously allowed me to punish her with my full attention." Cofer's desire, through her writing, is to call attention to the stereotypes that many hold about Latin women and to change those perceptions by reaching one individual at a time.

Cofer concludes the essay with a poignant paragraph that talks about her desires to counter the misrepresentations she faces everyday. She ultimately argues that education and her parents gave her the opportunity to face these stereotypes and "books and art have saved [her] from the harsher forms of ethnic and racial prejudice that many of [her] Hispanic companeras have had to endure." Cofer continues by simply stating, "My personal goal in my public life is to try to replace the old pervasive stereotypes and myths about Latinas with a much more interesting set of realities. Every time I give a reading, I hope the stories I tell, the dreams and the fears I examine in my work, can achieve some universal truth which will get my audience past the particulars of my skin color, my accent, or my clothes." Essentially, Cofer uses her writing to enlighten others about her life and the lives of Latinas.

Many authors write for the same reason, to counter stereotypes and confront "white privilege." As part of "The Power of the Word" post back in July, I quoted James Baldwin who said, "You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive." Books have the power to illuminate the realities of this world and to create empathy and understanding among readers. This is something that Gaines does in his writing as well. In 1986, he told Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton that is he was pressed to say who he writes for he would say, "I write for the black youth of the South. And if there were two groups, I'd say I write for the black and white youth of the South. Those are the people I would write for" (215). For the "black youth," he writes to show them that they are somebody, and for the white youth, he writes so that they can understand themselves and their neighbors. He concludes by intoning, "So that's what I'd want: the white kids to understand what the black kid is, and the black kid to understand who he is" (216). Essentially, Gaines wants to show the "universal truth" of human existence that Cofer voices in her essay.

Even looking at The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, we can see this drive in Gaines to write about those who may eventually be forgotten or who have be oppressed. When the teacher comes to speak with Miss Jane, Mary asks him why he wants to speak with Miss Jane. The unnamed editor tells her, "I teach history. . . . I'm sure her life's story can help explain things to my students" (v). Still confronting the teacher, Mary asks him what is wrong with the history books the students already have. He simply says, "Miss Jane is not in them" (v). He wants his students to see Miss Jane, her struggles and her joys, her survival. The on;y way to do this is for him to speak with her and transcribe what she says for his students to read. Her story will allow them to live together and see the "universal truth" of human existence.

In the short speech pictured above, Gaines ends by stating why someone should read about Miss Jane. He says:

 To anyone who might ask why should I read about someone who did not fight war, make laws, marry a great politician or Statesman or writer, or doctor, I would say read about Miss Jane because she survived with strength, dignity, love and respect for men, God, Nature, baseball, and vanilla ice cream, during the most demanding hundred years of American history.

There are numerous authors who espouse these same sentiments. In the comments below, tell me who some of the authors are that have inspired you to see the world in a different manner?  For a great piece on the power of books, see the video below of Malcom Mitchell, UGA wide receiver, and the book club he participates in.

   

Gaines, Ernest J. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. Print.
Gaudet, Marcia and Carol Wooton. "An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 200-216. Print.

The Response to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

The Ernest J. Gaines Center's archives contain numerous letters of praise for the The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). Authors and activists such as James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Jesse Jackson, James Allen McPherson, and John A. Williams. Baldwin wrote to Gaines saying, "I think you are an extraordinary artist indeed and Jane Pittman is a most moving, most beautiful, most truthful book." James Allen McPherson claims that Gaines' novel fulfilled Richard Wright's 1945 prophecy. Wright stated, "There is a great novel yet to be written about the Negro in the South; just a simple, straight, easy, great novel telling how they live and how they die; what they see and how they feel each day; what they do in the winter, spring, summer, and fall. Just a novel telling of the quiet ritual of their lives. Such a book is really needed." McPherson says The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is this book because it presents a rich folk character in the oral tradition with a respect for ancestors and their wisdom. Carrying the thought of ancestors further, Alice Walker wrote, "My reaction to Mr. Gaines's work is unusually emotional. For example, it has become quite ordinary for me, in the middle of reading one of his extraordinary paragraphs, to suddenly stop and thank our ancestors, Mr. Gaines's and mine, that Mr. Gaines exists."

All of the laudatory comments above referred to the novel. These do not include the multitudes of reviews, letters, and other items housed within the archives relate to the film version. While many praise the film, some have comments that congratulate Gaines on the film but point out its differences from the novel. Overall, though, these letters express the overall importance of the film in 1974. I discussed this briefly in a previous post, but I will let the letters and reviews speak for themselves here. Bill Decker, an agent at the Dial Press who published the novel, wrote to Gaines and says that he and his wife thoroughly enjoyed the film and expected it, based on advanced reviews, to be as good as the book. However, he laments "that  millions of people who saw the film will never really get to know Miss Jane, your Miss Jane." Even with this caveat, Decker concluded the letter stating that "it is going to do a lot of good." What that good is, Decker did not say, but it could be assumed that he is referring to race relations. Donna Schrader, another employee at the Dial Press, wrote that she spoke with an African American mother of three after the film's debut. The mother said her children, even the seven year old, watched the entire movie. She went on to describe seeing the Adam Clayton Powell exhibit at the Adam Clayton Powell Memorial Library  and overhearing visitors say, "Wait till the children see this. Wait till the children see this." To Schrader, that is the same thought she had after seeing the film. The following generations need to understand what came before, the struggles and the joys, and this is partly what Gaines' novel and the film version provided, a history that did not appear in the textbooks students read in schools but one that focused on "his people." 

The film, which won nine Emmys, showed that the nation was prepared for stories on television that centered around African American characters. It also, as mentioned in the previous post, made some realize the long enduring oppression that African Americans have experienced in this country. While a work of art can't undo 400 years of racism, it can highlight the problems and cause some to reevaluate their previous thoughts in regards to race. Gaines even says as much in a newspaper article about his visits to the set during filming. Gaines describes speaking with "an elderly white man" at lunch. The man knew the area, and looking around at the tables, he noticed the people eating. After introducing Gaines to his son, who worked on the film, the man simply said, "This is going to be a great picture. . . . I know it. Just look at what's happening here. Look at the people sitting and eating together, working together, talking. You think this could have happened 25 years ago? No, things changed." Gaines ends the article there, voicing the change that can occur through art. Forty years after the film, there are still problems, but works like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman can, and have, in some small way, provide individuals with the information needed to reevaluate their positions in relation to those problems, hopefully causing people to look for solutions instead of perpetuating the problems.  
        

The Power of the Word

A few years ago, I taught at an "alternative" school in rural North Louisiana. I've grown to dislike the term "alternative," but that is what it was. While there, I continually dreaded going to work, for various reasons. However, I grew to understand, even more than I already did, that my role as a teacher involves much more than just presenting students with facts and figures. It involves helping students navigate the paths laid out before them. This isn't always easy, especially if I never had to navigate the same paths myself; however, that is where books come in. Books, specifically fiction, provide an escape from reality and also a connection with it. They provide opportunities to learn about the world around you and maps to help you navigate that world. 

Words have power. In a 1983 interview, Gaines said, "I love words, I love looking at words, I love those 26 letters. In my writing, I try to develop character. That way I can learn something about your own character from reading. Millions of people have read Miss Jane or seen the movie, and whether they know it or not, I think that little old lady has done something to their lives" (New Wings, January 1983). In fact, after the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, news outlets and others kept asking to interview Miss Jane. Gaines' character became a "real" person to the readers. They connected with her in a way that made her come out of the graveyard and live. 

Now, back to that school in North Louisiana. I brought books from home to the school, and one of those books was Gaines' A Lesson before Dying. Looking at most of the students there, I could see that they wanted something. What that something was, I don't know. One student in particular, a student who thought deeply, provided the others with a sort of compass for the period he was there. At some point, I gave him a copy of A Lesson before Dying. Soon after, I asked him if he had read it. He said he was really enjoying it.  The next day, however, he received a second infraction then left the school. for good If a student had multiple infractions, he or she would be removed from the school and expelled for the year.I don't know what effect, if any, Gaines' book had on this young man. I'd like to think that it had some effect, but I can't be sure.

Teaching can be both a rewarding and heartbreaking endeavor at the same time. I've experienced both of these poles on numerous occasions. While I don't know what happened with the student at the school in North Louisiana, I do know what happened to a student I taught in college. A group of middle school student from Shreveport came to the center. The students were taking the day to visit three universities in Louisiana and UL Lafayette was one of them. While touring the center, one of the chaperons approached me and asked if I remembered her. I told her I didn't. She went on to inform me that I had taught he in her freshman composition class at UL Monroe. In that class, I asked the students what there major was and why. Hers was pharmacy. After seeing her writing, I asked her if she ever thought about going in to English as a major. She said she remembers thinking at the time, "This guy doesn't know me. Why would he suggest that?" The next semester, she changed her major to English. Now, she has her MA in English, teaches at the university, and  may pursue her PhD. Even though it was a writing class and not a literature class that affected her, I would say that the overall idea of words as power holds true.    

I'll conclude with this quote from James Baldwin on books, and I would add writing as well. I think it encapsulates the way I feel about them and the way we should view them. "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."