"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.

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?

Narrative Point of View in "Of Love and Dust"

In an unpublished speech given around 1969 in Marin County, California, Gaines speaks about the plot of Of Love and Dust and about the political milieu of the day. It is one of Gaines's most political speeches that I have read; however, I do not want to get into that aspect for this post. If you would like to see an example of it, there is a copy of another speech given around the same period that deals with the subject of politics, unwritten rules, and the history of racism within the context of Of Love and Dust. For this post, I want to focus briefly on a stylistic element of the novel, one that I have touched on before, the narrative voice. James Kelly narrates the novel, with interspersed second hand accounts thrown in here and there, specifically sections where Aunt Margaret relates to James what transpires between Marcus and Louise at the house. However, even Aunt Margaret cannot see into the bedroom when Louise and Marcus block the door.

Marcus and Louise's relationship starts out as a method of revenge for both of them. Marcus wants revenge on Bonbon for working him half to death and for loving Pauline, thus causing her to ignore him. Marcus decides that to get back at Bonbon he will seduce Louise. Louise wants revenge on Bonbon because he shows more love and affection for Pauline and their two children than he shows her and Tite. Louise continually tries to seduce various men in the quarters, but no one takes her bait until Marcus looks up at the gallery following Pauline's continued rebuffs of his advances.

Gaines has said that he struggles with writing from the omniscient point of view, and to that point, only two of his works use that point of view: Catherine Carmier and In My Father's House. Instead, the first person point of view comes easier to him, and when talking about Of Love and Dust, he mentions that F. Scott Fitzgerald's deployment of it in The Great Gatsby by having Nick Carraway as the narrator served as a model for James Kelly in his own novel.  During the unpublished speech mentioned above, Gaines talks about the first person narration in the novel and about the process of writing. He tells his audience that because he could not see inside of Marcus's and Louise's heads, he does not know what caused them to change their minds about one another. Instead, all he knows is that they did. Rather than just seeking revenge, as they initially set out to do, the two fall in love.

But when my two revenge seekers come together, something else happens to them instead. I don't know exactly what caused it. I suppose if I had written the novel from the omnicient [sic] point of view--that is, if I had followed my characters every where they went--even to the bed room, even to the bed--I would be able to explain to you whey they changed so. But since I told the story from another character's point of view, and since he was not allowed to enter the bedroom, he was unable to tell us, both you, the reader, and me, the author, how such a drastic change between my two young characters came about. But I do know this for a fact that after they had been with each other a while, instead of seeking revenge on the other man who had been forced by this society to hurt both of them, they fell in love and made plans to escape from South to North. That is a drastic change, I would admit, from their previous intentions; but nothing more drastic than my overseer's change of hear for the Black woman [Pauline] or the Black woman's change of heart toward my overseer. (5-6) 

This quote is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, it gives us insight into Gaines as a writer and the way that a work of fiction comes into being. He states that he cannot exactly explain why the two fall in love, they just do. Because Aunt Margaret can't see into the bedroom, she does not know what occurs within. All she knows is that she hears loud noises then nothing. Even when the door opens, she only sees feet and naked bodies, nothing more. The path to love for Marcus and Louise is not spelled out for Gaines because he does not delve into their minds; he remains outside looking in, from the community's perspective. Likewise, the reader does not know what happens either because all of the information we get is from Margaret or others in the quarters.

In many ways, the scenes where Aunt Margaret hears Marcus and Louise in the bedroom recall Nick's leaving Daisy and Gatsby alone to reconnect. Unlike Aunt Margaret, Nick does not hear the conversation; he just "walk[s] out the back way . . . and [runs] for a huge black knotted tree" and stands there while the two lovers talk within his house (93). When Nick returns, Daisy and Gatsby do not notice him at first; they sit on opposite ends of the couch stare at one another "as if some question had been asked or was in the air" (94). Nick notes that Gatsby looks different, glowing, and the trio make their way next door to Gatsby's mansion.

The narrative point of view in both novels provides us, as readers, with implied explanations for what occurs. What exactly do Marcus and Louise talk about after they make love? Does the act resemble, as it did in my head, the scene in Invisible Man where IM has sex with the white woman then shames her by writing on her body in lipstick? Or, is it like the scene between Madge and Bob in Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go when Madge tries to get Bob to "rape" her? The sounds Aunt Margaret hears makes me think of these scenes, but I cannot say for sure that anything like the scenes described above happened. What do Louise and Marcus talk about before he jumps out of the window and heads back down the quarter? All Gaines knows, and I know, is that they fall in love. How that happens, we can only speculate. What that says though, it what Gaines's speech resonates with: love is the answer to the problems we experience. Possibly I will write about the rest of Gaines's speech at another point. As for now, what do you think about Gaines not letting us see how Marcus and Louise change their opinions and fall in love? What are some other novels that are similar in this manner?

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.

Crying in "Of Love and Dust"

Back in July, I wrote about the act of crying and manhood in Gaines's works. After rereading Of Love and Dust, I noticed that for all of his vibrato and posturing Marcus cries, and in so doing, he shows his manhood. After coming in from the fields at noon on Saturday, Sidney Bonbon stops Marcus and James as they bring the corn to the crib. Bonbon tells Marcus that the boys who typically unload the corn have taken ill, and that they cannot do it. So, Bonbon orders Marcus to unload the corn after lunch, denying him any rest until the next day. After giving his orders to Marcus, Bonbon glances across the yard, and Marcus stands "trembling" (80). His fists tighten, and James worries that Marcus may do something stupid like jump Bonbon. Instead, Bonbon's ignoring of Marcus leads him to lean against the trailer and start crying: "He cried so deep and fully, his whole body was shaking" (80).

When the pair make it to the store for Marcus to have lunch, he continues to cry, and even refuses to take the food that James offers him. Marcus just sits next to James and cries, tears streaming down his face. James finally gives up after Marcus slaps the food out of his hand and walks away down the quarter. Following this scene, Marcus attempts, one last time, to win over Pauline and fails. He decides, then, to go after Bonbon, the representation, and source, of his suffering on Marshall Plantation. To do this, he concocts a plan to seduce Louise, Bonbon's wife; however, after seducing her, Marcus falls in love and plans to run away with her, to the North. During this whole ordeal, James and the rest of the community in the quarters fears what will happen when, not if, Bonbon finds out about Marcus' plan.

Eventually, Marshall meets with Marcus to discuss a plan that both rid him of Bonbon, who has dirt on Marshall, and allow Marcus to presumably runaway with Louise. During the meeting, Marshall tries to convince Marcus, indirectly, to kill Bonbon; however, Marcus declines to go that far. Marshall changes the subject and looks at the trailers filled with corn next to the crib and tells Marcus that the he can unload them the next day because the kids are still sick. At that moment, Marshall leaves and Marcus remains: "Marcus felt his eyes burning: he was crying" (189). In both instances, Marcus encounters the men who keep him subjugated to their rules and desire. In both cases, Marshall and Bonbon break Marcus and cause him to cry. Marcus, even though he puts up a strong facade, does not shy away from shedding tears. He opens up to James near the end as well. In order for Marcus to succeed, he must be broken, and that occurs with Marshall and Bonbon.

There are other characters who cry throughout the novel, and it plays a large role. Aunt Margaret says that she hears Louise cry while she is with Marcus and she has never heard Louise cry with Bonbon. This is presented as a positive attribute of Louise and Marcus' relationship. As well, Tite and Margaret both cry. What do these instances say about the shedding of tears? What are your thoughts about this subject in Of Love and Dust, other Gaines's novels, or other novels in general? Does crying, as Gaines presents it, show a lack of manhood?

Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.

The Suffocating Dust in Gaines's "Of Love and Dust"

Just as most of his stories and novels, Gaines's Of Love and Dust opens with a sort of journey. Instead of the main protagonist involved in the trek as in James' trip to Bayonne in "The Sky is Gray," James Kelley stands on his porch and sees a truck flying through the quarter kicking up dust everywhere. Gaines' second novel is intricate, and I would argue, his best. I could sit here and write numerous posts about it, and I have already written a couple: "The White Eagle" and "The Great Gatsby and Of Love and Dust." For this post, I just want to look at the opening of Gaines' 1967 novel. The novel begins:

From my gallery I could see that dust coming down the quarter, coming fast, and I thought to myself, "Who in the world would be driving like that?" I got up to go inside until the dust had all settled. But I had just stepped inside the room when I heard the truck stopping there before the gate. I didn't turn around then because I knew the dust was flying all over the place. A minute or so later, when I figured it had settled, I went back. The dust was still flying across the yard, but it wasn't nearly as thick now. I looked toward the road and I saw somebody coming in the gate. It was too dark to tell if he was white or colored. (3)

The word "dust" appears in four of the eight sentences in the opening paragraph of the novel. Granted the word shows up in the title, but four mentions in the first 128 words warrants attention. What does the repetition of this one word mean?

In "Of Snow and Dust," Matthew Spangler speaks about James Joyce's presence in Gaines A Lesson before Dying, something I have mentioned on this blog before. Discussing how "soot," "smoke," "dust", and other elements work to show a character's attitude towards his or her setting, Spangler addresses the opening paragraph. For Spangler, "Gaines's us of dust draws upon American cultural narratives of the wild, rural, pre-settled nation, particularly those associated with the American West and South" (112). Spangler claims Gaines's use of "dust" becomes "a symbol for paralysis and entrapment" (113). With this assertion, I wholeheartedly agree. In the novel,"dust" becomes synonymous with heat, sweat, work, grime, and oppression.

As James walks back down the quarter, he begins to think about the oppressive heat: "It must have been a good hundred. That dust was white as snow, hot as fire. The sun was straight up, so it didn't throw any kind of shadows across the road. You had nothing but hot dust to walk in from the time you left the highway until you got home" (82). The reflection of the sun off of the dust is white enough to blind him, and the heat is so unbearable that when he gets home he will have a hard time being able to relax, as he mentions earlier that he couldn't fall asleep on his bed because of the heat. The dust symbolically smothers and blinds the characters in the same way that the oppressive system that they live within does. The novel is full of characters "sweating," "squinting eyes because of reflections," "dirt caked faces," and "oppressive heat." It would take too long to mention them all.

To conclude, I want to quote a brief passage from the end of the novel. Here, James is relating Sun Brown's account of Marcus's death at the hands of Bonbon. James says, "Then [Sun Brown] saw a car coming toward him--no, he saw the dust. The dust was flying all over the quarter. In front of the dust was a car, coming up the quarter with no lights on" (274).  Sun Brown's account of Bonbon's car speeding through the quarters mirrors James's at the beginning. Before he sees the car, sun Brown sees the dust, flying all of the place; then, he sees the car in front of it. Unlike the opening paragraph, there is not mention of the dust clearing. Here, at the climax of the novel, the dust overcomes Marcus. He cannot escape the rules of the plantation and the Deep South by heading North with Louise. Instead, the suspended dust metaphorically suffocates him while Bonbon literally kills him with a farming implement (a scythe).

Next post I plan to talk about manhood in the novel. What are some other instances in the novel that show the landscape as a symbol of the subjugation in the novel? Are there other instances? What other works, like Joyce and Gaines, use landscape as this type of symbol? Let me know in the comments below.

Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.
Spangler, Matthew. “Of Snow and Dust: The Presence of James Joyce in Ernest Gaines’s ‘A Lesson Before Dying.’” South Atlantic Review 67:1, 2002. 104-128. Print.

The Great Gatsby and Of Love and Dust

Ernest Gaines has made his indebtedness to various authors known throughout the years, and some of these authors have already been discussed on this blog. One author that pops up purely for the influence of style on Gaines' writing is F. Scott Fitzgerald. When listing authors who taught him about writing, Gaines often mentions Fitzgerald. He says that The Great Gatsby is a good novel; however, he also says, "I don't care for Fitzgerald, but I love the structure of Gatsby" (Blake 144). That structure can be seen, partly, in the way that Fitzgerald ends each chapter, something Gaines does in works like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. On another level, Fitzgerald's influence on Gaines can be seen in Of Love and Dust where Jim Kelley narrates the story instead of Marcus. Discussing this decision in 1976, Gaines said, "I needed a guy who could communicate with different people" (Tooker and Hofheins 107). That guy, of course, would become Jim Kelley. Jim could communicate with Bonbon, Aunt Margret, and Marcus; he could navigate those relationships in the same way that Nick could navigate his in Gatsby. "Fitzgerald used Nick," according to Gaines, "because he could communicate both with Gatsby and the real rich" (107). This can be seen in the way that Nick talks with Daisy and Tom and how he speaks with Gatsby.

While the aspect of having a narrator who can communicate with all of the sides involved in the plot appears in both novels, I would go a step further and say that Nick Carraway and Jim Kelley make good narrators because they both admire their subjects, Jay Gatsby and Marcus respectively, and attempt to show the human side of each of them. In the opening pages of The Great Gatsby, Nick states, "No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men" (6-7). Nick, throughout the novel, paints Gatsby as a sympathetic figure. He portrays Gatsby as a man who, while Nick may have "disapproved of him from beginning to end," warrants admiration, and Nick admires Gatsby through the end, even becoming the only person in New York, really, to do anything after George kills Gatsby (162).

Jim, like Nick, disapproves of Marcus' actions and the way he goes about them. Jim tells himself, early in the novel, "One of these days I'm going to stop this, I'm going to stop this; I'm a man like any other man and one of these days I'm going to stop this" (43). Even though Jim thinks this, he doesn't do anything about it. Marcus becomes, in essence, the motivation for Jim to finally act and leave at the end of the novel. Near the end of the novel when Jim tries to catch Marcus before he confronts Bonbon, Jim says, "No, I didn't blame Marcus any more. I admired Marcus. I admired his great courage" (270). For Jim, Marcus becomes an inspiration because he actually stands up to Bonbon and decides to "stop this." Both narrators, Jim and Nick create sympathetic portraits of Marcus and Gatsby. They both allow the reader to see the nuances of each character. If Marcus narrated Of Love and Dust, we would most likely just get "The hell with it, let the world burn; I don't give a damn" (Tooker and Hofheins 107).  



Blake, Jeanie. "Interview with Ernest Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 137-148. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 1995. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. Of Love and Dust. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. Print.
Tooker, Dan and Roger Hofheins, "Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 99-111. Print.


      

The White Eagle

When Gaines started coming back to Louisiana and Baton Rouge to write and research, he would frequent the White Eagle (pictured above) in Port Allen. Seeing that Baton Rouge was a dry town on Sundays, Gaines and his friends would cross the Mississippi River to Port Allen and frequent the rough and tumble White Eagle. In "Mozart and Leadbelly," Gaines writes, "The White Eagle was a rough place, and there were always fights, but I wanted to experience it all. One novel, Of Love and Dust, and a short story, 'Three Men,' came out of my experience at the White Eagle bar" (26-27). 

Of Love and Dust and "Three Men" both focus on an African American character who kills another African American in a barroom fight. The only difference is that Marcus gets bonded out of jail and Procter Lewis doesn't. Gaines talks about the White Eagle in regards to the inspiration for Of Love and Dust by saying: 

I was in a nightclub once where I saw a knife fight between two boys, two blacks, young men, and the fight was stopped before either of them got really hurt. Now, I also know of an incident where a friend of mine got in a fight like that, and he killed a guy. Three guys jumped on him, and he killed one of them. He was sent to prison. He had been working for the white man, and this man could have gotten him out if he wanted to come out, but he said, "I'd rather spend my time because I killed this guy." So, he went to jail; he went to Angola, the state prison in Louisiana, and he spent five years. (Tooker and Hofheins 100)

The friend Gaines mentions, in a way, resembles Procter because he decided to stay in jail and accept his punishment instead of allowing the white man to bond him out. Munford continually tells Procter in "Three Men" to stay in jail because if he allows Roger Medlow to bail him out he'll be right back in the same situation soon. Talking to Procter, Munford tells him that Medlow could bail him out because white men don't care if he killed another African American. So, Munford implores Procter to go to Angola "saying, 'Go fuck yourself, Roger Medlow, I want to be a man, and by God I will be a man. For once in my life I will be a man" (141).

The institution of African Americans being "bonded" out of jail to work on farms and elsewhere occurred throughout the South during the twentieth century. Writing about Of Love and Dust and the institution of "bonding" people out of jail to work, John A Williams says, "One hears stories from time to time of plantations like this, cut off from the rest of the world where slavery--what else can you call it?--still exists." Essentially, that's what the practice was, a new form of slavery. For more information on the practice, see Douglas a. Blackman's Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.

Gaines, Ernest J. "Mozart and Leadbelly." Mozart and Leadbelly. Eds. Marcia Gaudet and Reggie Young. New York: Vintage Books, 2005. 24-32. Print. 

Gaines, Ernest J. "Three Men." Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 119-155. Print. 

Tooker, Dan and Roger Hofheins. "Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 99-111. Print.