Gaines's "In My Father's House" and the Changing Times

Unfortunately, Gaines's 1978 novel In My Father's House is not one of his works that gets read very often in the classroom. In light of recent events throughout our country from Ferguson to Baltimore, In My Father's House should be read with an eye reflecting back on what happened during the Civil Rights Movement and with an eye towards what has occurred since then. The novel focuses on the "generational gaps" between fathers and sons created by the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial oppression in the United States over that past four hundred years. This is something Gaines mentions throughout his oeuvre, and it shows up in A Lesson Before Dying when Matthew Antoine talks to Grant about teaching the children in the quarters: "You'll see that it'll take more than five and a half months to wipe away--peel--scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past 300 years" (64).

In My Father's House begin with Etienne/Robert X returning to St. Adrienne to confront his absent father turned Civil Rights leader Philip Martin. Initially, the narrative focuses on the mysterious character of Etienne who arrives in town on a rainy night during the winter. Once there, his behavior causes the community to question who he is, why he is there, and why he acts the way he does. They find out that his appearance in St. Adrienne has to do with Philip Martin. Martin is Etienne's father, in name only. Etienne comes to St. Adrienne to kill Martin because he feels that Martin has neglected him, his siblings, and his mother. After this revelation, the narrative shifts to focus on Martin and his struggles to mend the gap between Etienne and himself as he struggles to confront his past and maintain his leadership of the movement in St. Adrienne. While this is only a brief summary of the novel, it provides you with an indication of the novel's focus on mending the gaps created by the abominable institution of slavery in this country.

The novel shows, as does other post-Civil Rights novels by Gaines, that the strides made during the mid-twentieth century in regards to voting rights and other actions caused a shift in the forms of subjugation from legally sanctioned Jim Crow to other forms of containment. Billy, a young man that Martin picks up while driving around Baton Rouge, expresses these thoughts in his discussions with Martin. Billy explains that even though strides have been made in regards to Civil Rights things remain the same, if not worse. Speaking on this, he tells Martin,

Niggers can vote. Vote for what? Voting can't fill your belly when you hungry. Another nigger sit up there in the capital. Doing what? Another one go up to Washington. For what? They put another couple on television to broadcast news--them the changes you talking about? I'm talking about changes that keep white men from coming into South Baton Rouge and shooting down our people. If it happen, we pick up guns, we pick up torches, and we hit back. That's the changes I want to see. (163-164)

Billy embodies the feelings, I would argue, of the Black Power and Black Arts Movements. Even with strides in regards to things like voting rights, the situation remained the same. According to Billy, there may be some "token" African Americans in government and on television, but that does not accomplish anything according to Billy. He goes on to speak about the changes occurring in regards to agriculture and how those changes affect the people's relationship with the hegemonic system that works to keep them down. He says, "Go over all this place--empty fields, empty houses, empty roads. Where the people used to be--nothing. Machines. Every time they build another machine that takes work from the people, they hire another hundred cops to keep the people quiet" (168). Since they cannot work the land, the African American population Billy speaks of either left or remained struggled to find employment. While the sharecropping system worked to maintain control of the community, with that gone, what remained? For Billy, "cops" became the system's answer to maintaining "quiet."

Billy vocally espouses his beliefs, but in A Gathering of Old Men, the same ideas provide an undercurrent at the end of the novel. As the men wait at Marshall Plantation for Fix to arrive and lynch someone, the old men do not get the opportunity to stand up to him. Instead, they confront Luke Will, a new representation of racism and subjugation that contrasts with Gil and Cal in the novel. Discussing the anticlimactic nature of the novel, Gaines told Mary Ellen Doyle in 1983, "So Fix's kind of vigilante vengeance is dying out, but there will be the new Luke Will type. The Luke Wills are in the police department. Fix is seventy or eighty and can't shoot straight, but Luke will do it for him" (168-169). The "separate but equal" segregation of Fix and Jim Crow may not exist anymore, and because of this, Luke Will's form of subjugation does.

I could not help but think about recent events while reading In My Father's House, specifically when reading Billy and Philip's conversation in the car. Gaines's post-Civil Rights novels deals with these issues, sometimes subtly and sometimes overtly. In light of the incidents that have been occurring throughout the nation, we need to read Gaines in conversation with them because he provides us with insight into how the events in northern, urban cities affect people in southern, rural places like St. Raphael Parish. What are your thoughts? What are other aspects of Gaines are relevant to recent events? Share in the comments below and make sure you check out and add to the Baltimore Syllabus for resources regarding the events in Baltimore.

Doyle, Mary Ellen, S.C.N. "A MELUS Interview: Ernest J. Gaines--'Other Things to Write About.'" Conversations withe Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 149-171. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. In My Father's House. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. Print.

       

 

New Items in the Collection and Marginalia

On Tuesday, I wrote about Sister Mary Ellen Doyle's involvement in the Selma to Montgomery marches in 1965 and how they impacted her life and career. Recently, the center received items from Sister Doyle to add to the Ernest J. Gaines collection here at UL Lafayette. Today, I would like to take a moment to highlight some of the items and to discuss their importance to the collection. sister Doyle sent newspaper articles, scholarly journal articles, and reviews about Gaines and his work. Along with these items, she also donated correspondence between Gaines and herself, her collection of Gaines novels, and lectures that she delivered on Gaines at various occasions.

We just received the items a couple of days ago, so I have not had the chance to scour through in full yet. However, I did notice a couple of things that I would like to share with you today. For one, all of Sister Doyle's books contain detailed marginalia. What do I mean by this? On the first couple of pages, she briefly summarizes each chapter in the novel and then summarizes key points. Throughout the chapters, she makes notes and underlines important texts. Why she would care about her marginalia? I recall visiting an exhibition of books from Thomas Jefferson's library once. There, in each of the books that were on display, I could see his marginalia notes. He wrote in his books. He conversed with the books. We have to remember that books, even though they are inanimate objects and we read them, typically, in solitude, are not solitary experiences. When we read, we interact with the author. Marginalia allows for a conversation to occur, and it also provides a space for notes and ideas to be remembered. Perusing Jefferson's marginalia provides us with insight into Jefferson's mind and also into how he interacted with the text he was reading at the time. Jefferson's marginalia even allowed scholars to denote books that were sitting in a special collection in Washington University for 131 years as books that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson. For another article on why marginalia is important, see "Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margin"; it discusses marginalia by Mark Twain in a book about how to turn a profit in publishing books.


Back to Sister Doyle's marginalia for a moment. One of the first things I did when I received the books was flip through the to see her copious notes. While doing this, I lighted upon a couple of pages and topics that I have written about in the blog. Low and behold, on the pages were Sister Doyle's notes. Sometimes they agreed with what I though, sometimes not. However, they always provided me with more insight not only to Gaines's writing but also to Sister Doyle as a scholar and writer herself. The images provide two examples of Sister Doyle's marginalia. The first is from Of Love and Dust. Here, she speaks about the symbolism of the dust in the novel, something I posted on recently. In the margin, Sister Doyle writes, "Dust like white lyncher, symbol of white power Marcus can't fight, also of lifeless, dry existence he must endure at Hebert's." Sister Doyle's notes here summarize, succinctly, the symbol of dust within the novel, and they also make me think about the line that she has underlined in the final paragraph: "That dust was white as snow, hot as fire." The comparison of the dust to "white" snow is unmistakable, and I think that Sister Doyle's insight here helps to make that abundantly clear.

I also opened A Lesson before Dying and looked at the very last page, curious to see what Sister Doyle would write on the final lines of the book. Here, Grant has just heard about Jefferson's execution, and Paul gives him Jefferson's diary. The novel ends with three simple words, "I was crying." Again, I have written about this before, so I was curious to see what her thoughts were on the final line. Specifically, her initial thoughts before she transferred them into a longer piece. In regards to the last line of the novel, she writes, "He [Grant] finally has his break-through. In beginning, he only made the children cry." Her notes here make me reexamine what I initially thought about Grant crying at the end of the novel. I do see it as a "break-through," but I did not necessarily relate his crying here to his actions earlier where he made the children in the school cry. The other note is about style and form as well as themes. She writes, "Poignancy of ending from its beauty and understatement. But clear implication that he will be a different sort of teacher now, with hope for his students." This simple note provides us with insight into Grant's transformation, but it also causes us to look at Gaines's style and form in the novel, and specifically how he uses it at the end.

With this post, I wanted to highlight the importance of writing in books. I write in books to remember thoughts and to converse with the author. I always tell my students to write in the margins, but most of them still don't. We view books as something sacred that should not be tampered with. That's not the case. What do you think about marginalia? Is it something that is important? Or, is it something we shouldn't care about at all?

Sister Mary Ellen Doyle and the Selma-Montgomery Marches in 1965

Sister Mary Ellen Doyle
in Montgomery in 1965

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches that took place in Alabama to protest segregation and discrimination in regards to voting rights. The marches serve as a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights Movement, and one person who has written extensively on the work of Ernest J. Gaines traces her involvement in fighting for the rights of those who are subjugated back to that event. In 1965, Sister Mary Ellen Doyle, SCN (Sisters of Charity of Nazareth) boarded a plane in Chicago for Montgomery where she, and others from Notre Dame, would take place in the protest. One of the things that sparked Sister Doyle's desire to take part in the march arose from a student group at Notre Dame inviting Alabama Governor George Wallace to speak at the university. Upon arriving in Montgomery, Sister Doyle recalls seeing the Confederate Flag flying above the capital as she approached it. While there, she heard Dr. Martin Luther King speak; even though she could not recall the exact words that he said, she had the strong feeling that she belonged there, at that moment and time. I believe the speech she heard is How Long, Not Long which King delivered on March 25, 1965.


Thinking about her life growing up in the Chicago suburbs, she recalled that the only African Americans she saw were workers: maids, gardeners, and live-in servants. None of them resided in her River Forest neighborhood. Pre-Brown V. Board of Education,  when she began teaching Owensboro, KY, Sister Doyle began to notice the injustices of segregation more. She encountered African American children who had difficulty reading, partly because they could not get a library card to go to the public library. For Christmas, Sister Doyle asked her parents for money so she could buy books for the children. Even after the monumental decision in 1954 to desegregate public schools, she still noticed that parents did not want their children mixing with African American students.

Almost eleven years later, Sister Doyle took part in the Civil Rights marches in Montgomery, AL. There, Doyle experienced racism first hand. As she marched in response to the subjugation and oppression that white Southerners perpetuated on the African American community, Sister Doyle recalls encountering crowds as she drove to the airport with others who made the trip to Alabama with her. She was scared for her life, especially since the KKK recently murdered Viola Liuzzo a white mother of five while she drove marchers to the airport. On her way out of Alabama, she recalls seeing headlines on papers negatively portraying the events, calling the marchers hostile and speaking of those like Sister Doyle as invaders. However, in places like Chicago, the headlines read more favorably.  

The events in Alabama shaped Sister Doyle's life, and they inspired her to use her teaching skills to enact social change. In the 1960s and 1970s, she began incorporating African American literature into her American literature courses. When she first started to write about Ernest Gaines, Sister Doyle recalls, "I think [Gaines] was a little flabbergasted at first. . . . 'Where did this white nun come from with all this interest in my writing?'" (A9) For Sister Doyle, her activism, and her involvement in the Selma to Montgomery marches shaped her life. It opened up her eyes to the racism that existed, and it also provided her with insight into the multicultural nation that America is and to what it could be. Her career worked towards fulfilling this vision of a multicultural society where everyone exists together.

I would just like to leave with a quote from Sister Doyle's Voices from the Quarters. Here, she is speaking about A Gathering of Old Men, and she links Gaines and King together in their ideas of finding ones voice and standing up against oppression. She writes,

The victory of Gaines's old men, like that of their race, occurs first in a change within their own minds, a new way of seeing themselves and their people, as well as the white race in all its historic power, benevolent and brutal. Transformed vision, as King and Gaines imply, releases the voice, enables speech and action, a 'stand' for justice. All this makes real social change possible if both races can see and hear themselves and each other as individuals and as a community. (176) 

For Sister Doyle, the history that I read about in books like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman or in history books did not occur in the distant past. In fact, some of the events occurred during her lifetime, and Gaines's, and she recalls them as catalysts for her life's path. That is why speaking and listening to people like her and Ernest Gaines is important. They are individuals who not only researched history and literature, they lived it, just as we are living it now.

The article in the Kentucky Standard about Sister Doyle can be found on their website. The photos her are credited to Kacie Goode on the Kentucky Standard's site.

Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Print.
Goode, Kacie. "Putting principles to practice: SCN shares about Civil Rights Movement, involvement in Selma-Montgomery march." Kentucky Standard [Bardstown] 15 Feb. 2015: A1, A9. Print.