Farewell Blog Post

Today, we are going to do something a little different. At the end of the month, Dr. Matthew Teutsch, the Interim Director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center, will say goodbye to us and move on to other endeavors. Before he leaves, we thought it would be a good idea to ask his about his time here, what Gaines means to him, and why Gaines's work is important today. Make sure to keep an eye out for Dr. Teutsch's own blog, Interminable Rambling, which he plans to start in August. As we get closer, we will let you know more about it. 

How long have you been at the Ernest J. Gaines Center?

I have been at the center for a total of three and a half years. I started as a graduate assistant in January 2012. At that time, I finishing up my comprehensive exams for my PhD program and starting to focus on the dissertation. As the graduate assistant, I worked on organizing archival materials, creating lists of scholarship on Gaines, leading tours of the center, conducting lectures, and other tasks. In April of 2014, after the director of the center took a new job, I became the Interim Director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center. Since then, I have, among other things, acquired new items for the collection, organized the 50^th anniversary celebration for Catherine Carmier, worked with NEA Big Read recipients, hosted a concert by Irvin Mayfield, and lectured to classes across the nation. 

What was your first encounter with Ernest J. Gaines?

That depends, do you mean with his writing or with him specifically? With his writing, I picked up A Gathering of Old Men about ten years ago. I read it because I knew Gaines is from Louisiana, and that appealed to me. Afterwards, I thought, “Is this it?” It didn’t really do a lot for me then. I read A Lesson before Dying after that. The story moved me; however, I kind of felt the same way, “Is this it?” I’m not sure what I was expecting—Dante, Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Ellison, or something else. Who knows what I thought.

When I picked him up again, around my PhD coursework, I started to reread Gaines, and I really examined him closer when I started working at the center as a graduate assistant. Then, I realized that Gaines writes what I like to call “deceptively easy” texts. He is very accessible, and for that reason, he has both a popular and academic audience. In this way, Gaines recalls one of his inspirations, Ernest Hemingway, who placed 10% on the surface of the text and another 90% underneath (the iceberg theory). Digging through the surface, we see that Gaines does a lot more than it may appear at first. For me, this keeps me coming back because like any good piece of art each time I come back I see something entirely new and enlightening.

My first encounter with Gaines specifically, I think, came at the cemetery beautification in 2009. There, I worked in the cemetery, which in and of itself provides a very unique perspective on Gaines and his writing. He came out there in his golf cart, and I, as most people would be, approached him tentatively. I don’t recall much from the first meeting, but I do know that I discovered ways to speak with him. For me, I talked about sports, and as time went on, I began to loosen up. Eventually, I realized that for all of his fame, Gaines is a person just like me. He likes his Olde Tyme shrimp po-boys and sitting around and talking. Things I like to do as well.   

Once I got past the initial awe of being in his presence, conversation became easier. We would speak about baseball, literature, or food. Hearing stories about Juan Marichal or Hank Aaron always made my day. Hearing him talk about literature, his own writing and that of others, always taught me something new. Hearing him speak about shrimp po-boys, well, just made me hungry. 

What has Gaines taught you?

Gaines has taught me a lot of things. Specifically, he has solidified my thoughts regarding art and the multitudinous ingredients that go into the creation of a piece of literature, a painting, a song, or anything. Gaines speaks about Vincent Van Gogh inspiring him. He speaks about Modest Mussorgsky. He speaks about William Faulkner. All of these influences, and more, had a part in the finished project, whether they appear noticeable or not. For me, the interconnections between all of these things and Gaines's work highlights that life, and art, does not exist in an insular bubble. Everyone, and everything, converses together in one way or another. Today, we need conversation and dialogue on numerous issues, and to me, Gaines provides an avenue to begin some of those conversations.

Along with highlighting the interrelatedness of art, Gaines has also taught me history. He has shown me the lives of individuals (African American, white, Cajun, & Creole) in Louisiana. When most people think bout Louisiana, the "exotic" New Orleans comes to mind. Gaines, unlike many other authors who write about Louisiana, does not focus on New Orleans; in fact, the city rarely appear sin his works, and no action takes place there. Instead, Gaines focuses on the lives of rural Louisianians,  similar to the ways Arna Bontemps does in regards to the central Louisiana region. Gaines writes about a people who do not, as the editor in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman points out, "Do not appear in the history books." I would not have known about people like Miss Jane, Copper Laurent, Mathu, Lou Dimes, Candy Marshall, Grant Wiggins, Tee Bob Samson, or others without Gaines's work.

What is Gaines’s importance?

With everything going on in the nation today, I feel that Gaines's work serves a specific purpose. Reading Gaines, it becomes easy to separate the contemporary from the past that Gaines presents. For instance, A Lesson before Dying takes place in 1948, so a reader can look at the novel and say, "That's a terrible story, but it's in the past. Today we don't have to worry about someone like Jefferson experiencing the same trials and tribulations." However, if we look at what has occurred recently, this sentiment does not hold a lot of water. Was Trayvon Martin like Jefferson? I think Gaines shows us that even though slavery ended, "officially," in 1865 and Jim Crow ended during the 1960s, we still have a long way to go.

Gaines's importance comes from the fact that he does not shy away from showing that the "rules," these unwritten laws that work to keep wealthy whites in power and African Americans, and I would even argue poor whites (think Sydney Bonbon and Gil Boutan), in subjugation still exist. They may not appear on the books, but they remain. Matthew Antoine, Grant's former teacher, tells him that no matter how hard Grant tries he cannot scrape away three hundred years of slavery and hate when teaching his students. The students exist in the shadow of the past, and until we confront that past, head on, we will continue the cycle.

Do you have any final thoughts about your time at the center? 

The Ernest J. Gaines Center has been a part of my life for the past three years. I never would've thought, when I first picked up Gaines's work, that I would have the opportunity to work at the center and to explore his works in the ways that I have done over the past couple of years. Looking back, I think my time can be summed up by Aunt Clo's description of Aunt Fe in "Just Like a Tree." The story, told from multiple points of view, tells about the last night Aunt Fe spends in the quarters before her family moves her North. Every section carries the narrative forward, except for Aunt Clo's. Her section poetically compares Aunt Fe to a tree being "jecked" out of the ground and dragged to the North. After removing the tree from the ground, one looks into the hole created and sees the taproot remaining. For me, the center is that taproot. I may leave, but a part of me will always be a part of this place.

  

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.