Stylistic Elements in Bontemps's "Black Thunder"

1968 Beacon Press Edition

At the beginning of February, I did a few posts on Arna Bontemps and his relation to Ernest J. Gaines. Today, I want to look at another one of Bontemps's works, Black Thunder (1936), and briefly examine how it relates to Gaines's A Lesson before Dying stylistically. Black Thunder tells the story of a failed slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser in Virginia in 1800. It chronicles the lead up to the revolt, the revolt itself, and Gabriel's capture and execution. When it appeared in 1936, the novel received favorable reviews; however, it did not garner much in regards to sales. In the introduction to the 1968 edition, Bontemps argues that "the theme of self-assertion by black men whose endurance strained to the breaking point was not one that readers of fiction were prepared to contemplate at the time" (xv). Gabriel's "self-assertion," and his survival with dignity even in the face of capture and execution, can be seen, thematically, in relation to Jefferson's "awakening" in A Lesson before Dying and his own "self-assertion" as a man at the end of that novel. I do not wish to explore this element today; instead, I want to briefly look at section right before the rebellion.

The final chapter in Book One "Jacobins," shows Criddle, Ditcher, a mulatto boy, Mingo, Blue, Old Catfish Primus, and Juba preparing to follow Gabriel and overtake Richmond. The chapter only constitutes about four pages, and each of the characters mentioned above gets his or her own little section within the chapter. They do not appear in the space; the third person omniscient narrator moves from one character to another showing each one's preparations. Criddle's movements begin the chapter. He enters Marse Prosser's stable at night, and no one pays any attention to him. He finds a loose board in the floor then removes a "hand-made cutlass" and begins to sharpen it. Next, Ditcher can be seen leaving his cabin and speaking with the moon and a neighbor about the upcoming events. Close to morning, a mulatto boy fishes by the creek and converses with his "mammy" about the upcoming rebellion. The free African American Mingo thinks about his position as a "free" man who owns his own business. However, his wife and children remain slaves. He locks up his shop and thinks back to his wife being whipped mercilessly. After working in the fields, Blue speaks with his mule and contemplates his impending freedom, daydreaming about "riding in a public stagecoach with a cigar in his mouth" and drinking freely in a tavern (79). Next, Old Catfish Primus speaks with another man about conjure and protection for the rebellion. Primus gives the man a "fighting 'hand'" (79). Juba, Gabriel's lover, concludes the chapter. She prepares Araby for the ride to come; Gabriel enters, checks to see if everything is ready, then leaves to prepare for the night ahead.

Gabriel Prosser

The above chapter reminds me a lot of chapter 30 in A Lesson before Dying. There, Gaines changes the point of view from first person (Garnt and Jefferson's Diary) to third person. The chapter details the entrance of Gruesome Gertie into Bayonne for Jefferson's execution. It chronicles citizens reactions to the truck entering town, the chair being removed from the truck, and the chair being set up. There are sections from the Sheriff and Paul, as well as sections from ordinary African American and white citizens. Some shopping in stores and some working in the courthouse. While the novel focuses on Grant's perspective, the shift in chapter 30 allows for a broadened view of how the community relates to the events surrounding Jefferson's execution. For me, this chapter has always been interesting because in the midst of Grant's narrative we see into the heads of others, not through Grant's eyes but through a detached narrator's perspective.

When I read that chapter in Black Thunder, I could not help but recall chapter 30 in Gaines's book. Both let us, as readers, see into the heads of characters as events unfold around them. This is nothing new, of course. What makes it unique, to me, is the fact that Gaines's novel switches its point of view for only one chapter, near the end, and that Bontemps's, while told in third person, takes the time to highlight character's thoughts and preparations for the upcoming rebellion.

For the next post, I want to look at another unique characteristic I picked up on in Black Thunder. As I said earlier, the novel is told from the third person perspective, but the narrator periodically moves in to characters' minds and shows how they think and perceive the events. This technique, which employs stream of consciousness, reminds me of some sections of Toomer's Cane.  

Do you see these stylistic elements in other modernist texts? In other texts in general? What are some examples? Let us know in the comments below.

Bontemps, Arna. Black Thunder. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. Print.

Reflections of the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute

Last week, the Ernest J. Gaines Center, in conjunction with the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH), hosted the Second Annual Ernest J. Gaines Summer Teaching Institute. In June 2014, the center hosted the inaugural institute with four participants from area schools. This year, the institute included nine participants from area schools and universities. One participant even came from Texas to take part. Participants read four of Gaines's works during the week: Bloodline, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson before Dying. Each day, participants heard from the center's staff and two Gaines scholars who are also Gaines scholars: Marcia Gaudet and Darrell Bourque. Participants also had the opportunity, each day, to look at items from the collection and to work on lesson plans that would incorporate their discussion and items from the collection into their lesson plans. These lesson plans will be available on the LEH's website soon. Midway through the institute, on Wednesday, the participants had the opportunity to head out to Oscar and New Roads, LA. There, they sat with Gaines in his house, explored the cemetery and the church, and had the opportunity to eat with Gaines at local restaurant.

Overall, the institute provided lively discussion not just on Gaines's works but also on how to incorporate those works, and the themes he discusses, into the middle and high school classroom as well the university classroom. These discussions arose when the group thought about the importance of Gaines's work in relation to the recent incidents involving African American men and women in the news today. During the discussions, one of the questions that came up felt extremely important. A participant, who taught Gaines in her classroom last year, mentioned that her class was predominately African American. While teaching Gaines, white students in her class asked her why they were reading about the African American experience and used the term "reverse racism" to express how they felt. This anecdote reminded me of my own experiences teaching African American literature in the university classroom. Once, when teaching Langston Hughes, I had a student approach me after class to inquire, and to complain, about why we were reading so much African American literature. Truth be told, Hughes and others were a small part of the class.

What my encounter with that student and the participant's story showed me was that when people come face-to-face with the realities of their situation and place within society they either recognize it and work to make society better from their position or they completely reject the idea that they come from a position of driveler and claim that everyone has a chance at the American Dream. When talking about how to help students who reject the image they see in the mirror, we thought about approaching a text like Gaines through another angle. Gaines recognizes that while the African American experience is unique there are others in the world who have suffered for various reasons as well based on ethnicity or class. He writes about this in "A Very Big Order: Reconstructing Identity" and in Catherine Carmier. With that in mind, a teacher could have students think about Gaines's influences and how they affected his own writing. Russian, Irish, and American writers influenced Gaines. Turgenev, Tolstoy, Joyce, Steinbeck, Cather, and others wrote about the lower classes, and the peasants in their societies. When Gaines read those works, he saw similarities between the people he knew and the ones the other authors wrote about. What he did not see, though, was his own people, the African American community he grew up in rural Louisiana.

Another way to possibly approach Gaines's work, or other African American texts, with students who want to push back because they claim we reside within a post-racial society is to incorporate music. Historically, people viewed punk music as an "other," a subculture of outsiders. Having students enter into Gaines's work through a music that others ostracized and that created a community for its listeners is a way to think about how to help students understand the universality to Gaines's works. Bands like The Descendents, NOFX, Rancid, Reagan Youth, Misfits, Black Flag, Minor Threat, etc. would be good places to look. There are other ways to address students' reluctance to reading authors like Gaines, but these are just a couple we thought of.

Many other discussions took place during the week, but the one above is what really stuck out to me because it is something that I have thought about, especially when teaching Gaines in the region that he writes about. Doing that creates a whole new group of reactions to Gaines and his work. What are your thoughts on getting reluctant students, who feel you are representing one group too much, to understand that we need to read African American, Asian, Chicano, and other literature? How do you respond? I would like to know because this is something I think we all deal with at one point or another in the classroom, or in community talks, and it is something that needs to be addressed.

Aunt Clo in Ernest J. Gaines's "Just Like a Tree"

Ernest J. Gaines's "Just Like a Tree" concludes his short story collection Bloodline (1968).  It originally appeared in the Sewanne Review, and it tells the story of a gathering of people in the quarters as the say goodbye to the ninety-nine year old fixture Aunt Fe as her daughter and son-in-law plan to take her away to the North so she will not have to endure anything like the recent bombing that occurred in the quarters. Readers do not hear directly from Aunt Fe in the story, even though the story is essentially about her. Instead, multiple narrators from young to old tell the events of the gathering, similar to Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, which Gaines says served as influence, along with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, for the story.

Today, I would just like to focus on one section of the story, Aunt Clo's. All of the narrators in the story focus on the events occurring in the room, moving to the past and looking to the future periodically. Aunt Clo, unlike the other narrators, does not provide any action that necessarily moves the narrative forward; her section is more philosophical and metaphorical, talking about Aunt Fe as a tree that is currently being uprooted and dragged reluctantly from her home. The section recalls, in many ways, Miss Jane Pittman's musings on the oak tree she speaks with in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. More similarities exist between Aunt Fe and Miss Jane. One interviewer even asked Gaines about their similar characteristics. Gaines replied that when he started Pittman he realized it was too much like Aunt Fe because others told the story, not allowing Jane to speak for herself. He said, "I've got the same characters telling the same thing. All I've done with Aunt Fe is that instead of her dying, I tell everything that happened before she died" (49-50). Looking at each work closely, similarities appear, but that is not my entire focus here.

Aunt Clo compares Aunt Fe to a tree that has a chain wrapped around it then someone is just a "jecking and jecking, and then shifting the chain little bit and jecking and jecking in some direction, and then shifting it some mo' and jecking and jecking in that direction" trying to wrestle the roots out of the ground so it can be moved (235). When the person extricates the tree from the ground, a big hole remains with a "piece of the taproot still way down in it--a piece you won't never get out no matter if you dig till doomsday" (236). The taproot grows deep, and removing it becomes difficult. Aunt Fe's daughter and son-in-law plan to take her away, to the North, but her roots run deep. Aunt Fe becomes like others who have left. They leave holes behind, but the taproot remains. Aunt Clo continues by explaining that once the tree leaves, two holes remain: "You get a big hole in the ground, sir; and you get another big hole in the air where the lovely branches been all these years. Yes, sir, that's what you get. The holes, sir, the holes. Two holes, sir, you can't never fill no matter how hard you try" (236). The holes, of course, represent what Aunt Fe will leave behind. She will not physically be in the quarters anymore, and the people who loved her will not see her again.

While the holes appear, the taproot remains. When the trees gets dragged to the North, Aunt Clo says that the person taking the tree has to find a space for it. She says, "You look in this corner and you look in that corner, but no corner is good. She kin o'stand in the was no matter where you set her. So finally, sir, you say, 'I just stand her up a little while and see, and if it don't work out, if she keep getting in the way, I guess we'll just have to take her to the dump'" (237). This quote, which ends Aunt Clo's section, is full of themes that I do not have time to explore in this post. The tree, like Aunt Fe, becomes a representation of the past, and specifically the South, that upon entering the North must be done away with or placed in a corner. Gaines speaks about this in his own experiences when he went to California in "A Very Big Order: Reconstructing Identity" and James, a Northerner, exemplifies it in his section in "Just Like A Tree."

At the end of the story, everyone has left Aunt Fe's house and Aunt Lou helps her get ready for bed. As she watched Aunt Fe, Aunt Lou notices "her making some kind o' jecking motion there, but I feel she crying 'cause this her last night here, and 'cause she got to leave ever'thing behind" (249). Important here is the word "jecking." Aunt Clo uses the word repeatedly in her section while she describes the tree being removed from the ground and transported North. Here, Aunt Lou uses it to describe Aunt Fe before she goes to bed, and ultimately dies. This key word links the image Aunt Clo speaks about with Aunt Fe. Unlike the tree, whose taproot remains, Aunt Fe doesn't leave in the end. She goes to bed and passes away in her sleep.

No matter how hard someone tries to relinquish the past, it remains. This in not necessarily a bad thing. The past is important, all of its tribulations and triumphs. When speaking about his grandmother's death, Gaines talks about the fact that "all she talked about was the South" (50). His grandmother maintained her insurance payments so she could be buried back home in the South because that mattered to her. Gaines continues,

When she died, there were no arguments as far as I was concerned that Momma was coming back to the place where she grew up. And there were other people in the family who said, "Well she's dead now, does it matter?" But to me it mattered and to her it mattered. She never did say, 'Send my body back home' or anything like that. We never did talk about death like that, but we knew. She'd say, "I'd like to be buried there" you know, but she never said "Send my body there." She'd just say "I'd like to be buried home." (52)

Even though his grandmother passed well after the story first appeared, Gaines's comments here reflect Aunt Clo's description of Aunt Fe. As well, they describe his thoughts regarding the continual pull of Louisiana and the South to his own writing and life.

What do you think of "Just Like A Tree"? Let us know in the comments below.

Gaines, Ernest J. "Just Like A tree." Bloodline. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976. 221-249. Print.
Ingram, Forrest and Barbara Steinberg. "On the Verge: An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines." Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed. John Lowe. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995. 39-55. Print.

Victor Séjour's “Le Mulâtre”

The March 1837 edition of Cyrille Bisette's La Revue des Colonies included one of the first pieces of fiction by an African American author, Victor Séjour's “Le Mulâtre” ("The Mulatto"). Séjour's story was not the first fiction written by an African American; that distinction, as far as I can tell, goes to the anonymous author S. who wrote "Theresa—A Haytien Tale" which appeared in four installments from January 18 through February 15, 1828, in John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish's Freedom's Journal. Today, I would just like to talk a little about Séjour's story. If you would like to read "Theresa" follow the links above the first and last installments. The middle installments can be found by following the Freedom's Journal link.



Born to a free man of color from Santo Domingo and a free mulatto woman of New Orleans in 1817, Séjour lived within a society where free people of color, like himself and his parents, could prosper. While they were able to prosper, they did not have all of the same rights as whites, but they also did not face all of the oppression that slaves did as well. Louisiana provided a unique space in the antebellum period. That space created the distinctions that we start to see in Gaines's works where there are four distinct groups of people: whites, blacks, Cajuns, and Creoles. Because of his parentage, Séjour received a good education, and like many other children of free people of color in the city, he left New Orleans at the age of nineteen to continue his education in Paris. There, he launched his literary career and ran in the same circles as Alexandre Dumas and Bisette. It was in Paris, at the age twenty, where Séjour's "The Mulatto" initially appeared. The story is extremely graphic for 1837, going much further in its descriptions of slavery and the liscenteous nature of slave owners towards female slaves than say Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (1843), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), or even William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853). In fact, I can not think of anything as graphic in regards to slavery as "The Mulatto" until 1861 with the publication of Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Perhaps the graphic nature of the story can be attributed to the fact, as the writer of the head note in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature puts it, that Paris provided Séjour  with a space where he could be "unhampered by the racial proscriptions of the antebellum South" (286).

Taking place in Saint Domingue, "The Mulatto" tells the story of Georges and his life in slavery. His father, Alfred, is also his master. Alfred purchased Laïsa at a slave auction and later raped her, thus producing Georges. Laïsa never told Georges who his father was, and on her deathbed, she presented Georges with a pouch that contained his father's portrait. She also made Georges promise that he would not open the pouch until his twenty-fifth year. One night, thieves broke into Alfred's house and attempted to rob him. Alfred believed that Georges orchestrated the incident, but in fact Georges took a bullet in order to protect his master. Even with his protection of Alfred, Georges could not escape his master's predilections for his wife Zelia. When Zelia refused Alfred's advances and caused him to fall down stairs injuring himself, he condemned her to die, and even though Georges pleaded with Alfred to let her go, Zeila perished at the end of a rope. Zelia's death prompted Georges to seek revenge. He poisoned Alfred's wife before eventually beheading Alfred and killing himself soon afterwards. 

The above summary shows that Séjour's story can be grouped together with other tragic mulatto stories of the antebellum period. For me, what sets it apart is the descriptive nature of the narrative and also the psychological insight it provides to the slave-owner's mindset. Along with these aspects, the frame of the story is important. The story is set up with a frame story around the main narrative. The unnamed, white narrator sits down to listen to the story of his friend Georges from an "old negro" named Antoine. The entire narrative, except for the first few paragraphs, are completely told by Antoine. This method can be seen in later works of the nineteenth century such as Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories and Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman (1899) where Uncle Remus and Uncle Julius provide the narration respectively. I do not want to talk about this aspect, but I did want to mention it. For more information about the framing, see the article by Ed Piacentio below.

For me, Séjour's graphic descriptions of slavery are important because of the time that the story first appeared. When desribing the auction house, Antoine says that there are three groups in the one room of the building that "resembles a temple": one group "purchases negroes; that is, free men who have been torn from their country by ruse or by force, and who have become, by violence, the goods, the property of their fellow men" (288). This description does not appear much different than others of the period, and Antoine continues by describing the scene of families being torn apart. When twenty-one-year-old Alfred approaches a young Sengalese woman and starts to bid on her, the auctioneer "ran his shameless hands over the ample and half-naked form of the beautiful African" (288). Alfred then asks the auctioneer if the slave is "guaranteed," and the auctioneer responds with "As pure as the morning dew" (288). Georges mother has not been violated when Alfred purchases her.

Antoine tells his friend that "Alfred may have been a decent man, humane and loyal with his equals, but you can be certain he was a hard, cruel man toward his slaves. I won't tell you everything he did in order to possess Laïsa; for in the end she was virtually raped" (290). "Virtually raped" would not appear in Child's "The Quadroons," the conquest there is implied.  Séjour's story, however, blatantly lays out what Alfred does to Laïsa. After Laïsa dies, Georges marries Zelia, and Alfred tries to conquer Zelia while Georges recovers from the gunshot wound he receives while protecting his master. During his visits to Georges, Alfred "became enamored by Zelia," Georges young mulatto wife (292).  Zelia continually refuses Alfred's advances, and Alfred becomes so frustrated that he condemns her to hang. During Zelia's shunning of Alfred, images of women being part of a harem appear. This same type of imagery pops up in Child's "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" as well. Antoine says, Alfred thought of himself as "the despot, the Bey, the Sultan of the Antilles" (293). To Alfred, Zelia and Laïsa serve as nothing more than commodities for his own purposes. In many ways, this recalls Jimmy Caya discussions with Tee Bob over what he should do about Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. 

The story concludes with Georges getting revenge for his wife's death. Remember, Georges does not know that Alfred is his father. Georges first poisons Alfred's wife then proceeds to behead his own father. As he swings the ax forward, Alfred exclaims, "Strike executioner . . . strike  . . . after poisoning [my wife], you might as well kill your own fa--" (299). Alfred cannot finish the last syllable before the ax severs his head from his body: "The ax fell, and Alfred's head rolled across the floor, but, as it rolled, the head distinctly pronounced the final syllable, 'ther . . . '" (299). Piacentio makes an excellent point about Alfred's head being lopped off. He writes, The word "father" is severed, broken in two, a reminder that in a slave society normal paternal connections could not exist with slave children. Georges's action results in two children, one mulatto (his son) and the other white (Alfred and his wife's son), being orphaned. For both the slave boy and the free white boy of "The Mulatto," family is destroyed." The institution of slavery did not just destroy George's family, but it also destroyed Alfred's, not providing him with the opportunity to acknowledge his own son.

More could be said here, of course. If you would like more insight into Séjour and the story, see:

O'Neill, Charles Edward. Séjour: Parisian Playwright from Louisiana. Lafayette: UL Press, 1995. Print.
Piacentio, Ed. "Seeds of Rebellion in Plantation Fiction:Victor Séjour's 'The Mulatto.'" Southernscapes, 2007. Web. 
Séjour, Victor. "The Mulatto." The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: Norton, 1996. 286-299. Print.

More on Tim Gautreaux and Education

In the previous post, I wrote about education in Tim Gautreaux's short story "Welding With Children." Today, I want to write about education as it appears in two of his stories from Welding With Children: "Misuse of Light" and "Resistance." Lengthy discussions of education do not appear in either one of these stories, but the mention does serve some importance. When asked about whether or not he thought education separates Cajuns from a traditional way of life, thus homogenizing them, Gautreaux responded:

Yeah, I think so. Because, and that’s the way with just about anybody who is raised [among] the lower-middle class or blue-collar people and becomes educated, begins making money, begins to prosper, begins to move in the popular culture. [You] begin to feel that your plainer beginnings are something you should leave behind. And I think that’s sad. You begin to lose all sense of history and all sense of the past, and then you lose the sense of the importance of present things. (69)

The separation from the values and practices of the past can be seen in Gaines's works, as I have stated multiple times. In "Misuse of Light" and "Resistance" "formal" education at the university level becomes something unobtainable and honestly not needed. Again, I wrote about this with "Welding With Children."

In "Misuse of Light," Mel DeSoto works in a camera store in New Orleans and develops film. One day, a young woman comes in trying to sell her grandfather's photography equipment. Mel purchases the equipment and eventually develops the film. He discovers images on the film that appear to be a mystery, and the story traces Mel's search for the true meaning behind the photographs.

At the beginning of the story, as Mel cleans the newly acquired camera, the narrator informs us that Mel attended Tulane for a short time, much like the grandfather did at LSU for a semester in "Welding With Children." Like the grandfather, Mel experienced resistance at Tulane: "his work was not promising, and his professor would write on his project, sometimes on the photographs themselves, 'Misuse of light'" (22). Mel's professor at Tulane did not see his potential, and even his boss, Mr. Weinstein, views Mel's predilection to develop old photos from cameras the shop buys as ludicrous and nosy. Mel, on the other hand, sees the photos as art. Eventually, the continual disapproval of him viewing the photos as art, or as a mystery that needs to be solved, gets to him and whenever Mel buys a camera at the shop that contains film he dumps the film in the trash without developing it.

In regards to education, the story presents arguments about what constitutes art. For Mel, the images that he develops can be viewed as "artistic," but Mr. Weinstein sees the smudged, blurry prints as Mel being nosy. Like his professor at Tulane, Mr. Weinstein questions whether or not Mel actually knows what he is talking about and whether or not he can actually learn anything about true "art." There is no resolution to this quandary in the story; instead, the focus becomes the story behind the photograph. In this instance, the "art" of the photo tells a true, realistic story. For me, this reminds me of the comment, I believe by Sterling Brown, that fiction (or art) is based in 98-99% reality. The photograph, even though it is a facsimile of reality, becomes an "artistic" representation of the reality and the story being portrayed. Mel recognizes the "artistic" quality of the picture he discovers, unlike Mr. Weinstein, and I would argue, his professor at Tulane. While he could have learned about "art" in an institutionalized university setting, he learns about "art" and what it means to him on his own.

Like Mel in "Misuse of Light," Alvin Boudreaux in "Resistance" can be seen as an example of education in the workforce instead of in the "hallowed" halls of academia. The story sees Alvin helping his next door neighbor's daughter Carmine with her science fair project. The girl's father rejects the assistance and provides resistance to Alvin's attempts to help. When Carmine begins to explain her idea for a project to Alvin, she starts to worry that Alvin, a retired factory worker, doesn't know anything that can be helpful to her. Alvin tells her that he started his working life as a "millwright at LeBlanc Sugar Mill" and ended up retiring as the "foreman over all the maintenance people" (125). After hearing this, Carmine asks Alvin, "Does that mean you don't know anything about electricity?" (126). Alvin tells her that he worked on motors, and Carmine moves closer and begins to explain in detail how her project will work, telling him about the electrons running through a big cylinder and how resistors will control the flow of electrons. When she is done, Alvin astonishes her by asking her if they have to basically do the "scientific method" to show how the project works.

We do not know how far Alvin went in school, and we do not know if he went to college like Mel either. We can assume that he did not go to college and that he learned what he knows about electricity and resistors at LeBlanc Sugar Mill. Carmine appears amazed that Alvin knows these things, especially considering he did not learn them in school. Unlike Mel, we do not get the impression that others detracted Alvin from his pursuits, and like Mel, we see that Alvin is astute and intelligent even though he did not attend a university.

Doctors and lawyers do not provide the only source of educated individuals in the world, an Gautreaux shows this through his descriptions of characters like Mel, Alvin, and the grandfather in "Welding With Children." The stories do not show the gaps that education produces between the characters and the community, but they do show that "formal" education is not the be-all-end-all when it comes to showing how much knowledge someone maintains in his or her head.

For more of Tim, Gautreaux, check out Margaret Bauer's interview with him at Southern Spaces. Again, what are your thoughts on this topic? Where else do you see education being portrayed in Gautreaux's work? What does that portrayal say about the community and the individual?

Gautreaux, Tim. "Misuse of Light." Welding With Children: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. 21-38. Print. 
Gautreaux, Tim. "Resistance." Welding With Children: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. 121-139. Print.
Hebert-Leiter, Maria. "An Interview With Tim Gautreaux." Carolina Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 66-74. Print. 

Tim Gautreaux's "Welding With Children" and Education

Maria Hebert-Leiter begins her 2005 interview with Louisiana writer Tim Gautreaux with a question about his influences, specifically how William Faulkner and Ernest Gaines, who both write about their very particular "postage stamp of land," inspired him and his construction of Tiger island (Morgan City, LA). Gautreaux responds not by linking himself to Faulkner but by drawing his connections to Gaines, particularly in regards to the way that Gaines writes his dialogue and represents the language of the people he writes about. Gautreaux continues by discussing the fact that when Gaines left Louisiana for California he tried to write about things other than Louisiana, but he kept getting drawn back to Pointe Coupee. Likewise, Gautreaux speaks about every writer having "a certain literary territory. It's the place of his birth, where he grew up, the language that he listened to, the values that were implied, and the everyday commerce of his life" (66-67). Today, I want to talk about a thematic similarity between Gautreaux and Gaines that I saw while reading Welding With Children (1999), a collection of short stories by Gautreaux.

When asked about why he does not write about educated Cajuns such as doctors and lawyers, Gautreaux simply responds in a similar way that Gaines does. He says, "[It goes] back to my raising again, and my territory, because the people I knew were blue-collar people. They were rural people. They were fisherman. They were mechanics. They were dredge-boat operators and tug-boat captains and railroad engineers" (69). Like Gaines, Gautreaux writes about the people he knew growing up, the ones he encountered on a day to day basis. Even though he doesn't write about "educated" Cajun doctors and lawyers, education does appear in his works, and on initially reading Welding With Children, his treatment of education struck me. While reading the collection, I continually saw the role that education plays in the community. Gautreaux highlights the distance of education in relation to the lower-middle-class and/or blue-collar community that a person comes from. In Gaines, that distance is explored between those who go away for an education and return only to find themselves alienated from the community. In Gautreaux's stories, the achievable, yet unachievable, aspects of education take center stage.

The opening story, "Welding With Children," follows a man who takes care of his grandchildren on a Tuesday afternoon. Throughout, the narrator wonders about the children of his four daughters while watching them almost kill themselves by playing with an motor in the yard while he tries to weld. As he looks at his grandchildren in the yard. that narrator begins to think about his educational experiences at Louisiana State University (LSU). He attended LSU for a whole semester while "work[ing] overtime at a sawmill for a year to afford the tuition and show[ing] up in [his] work boots to be taught" (2-3). He thinks about the English 101 class where teachers would sit behind the desk and have the students write for their portfolios, never teaching them anything. He thinks about the algebra teacher who lectured to the ceiling, appearing to not even notice the students in the room. He thinks about the drunken chemistry professor who used a Bunsen burner to warm up a can of Campbell's soup and eat it in class. He thinks about his history professor, who he kind of liked, that dies half-way through the semester "and was replaced by a little porch lizard" (3). He thinks about the other students in the back of a class that him "Uncle Jed." He flunked out, but, as he says, "I got my money's worth learning about people that don't have hearts no bigger than bird shot" (3).

The narrator's experiences at LSU did not teach him anything, and while there, he became the object of ridicule because of his appearance and his social background. Flunking out of college, the narrator became a welder and worked in the community. Later, as his grandkids watch TV, the narrator begins to contemplate running away with them, "away from their mamas, TVs, mildew, their casino-mad grandmother, and Louisiana in general" (12). If he did this, he "could get a job, raise them right, send them to college so they could own sawmills and run car dealerships" like the Fordlysons (12). At that moment, a drop of sweat from a class falls on the narrator's twenty-year-old shoes and he realizes he hasn't had a steady job for a while. He then begins to think if his wife ever had the fantasy of taking his daughters away and starting a new life so she could send them to college. Did the grandkids' mamas have the same fantasy?

Through these reflections, the narrator works through showing that what he, his children, and his grandchildren inhabit is a cycle that cannot be escaped easily. He tried to attend college, but the classes, ridicule, and possibly even the long hours at the sawmill hindered him from completing more than one semester.  The narrator eventually starts to think about other avenues of education, including the Methodist church. At one point, he ponders the fact that his four daughters do not have much religion to speak of. He thought that his wife, LaNelle, would instill religion in them, but she "always worked so much, she just had time to cook, clean, transport, and fuss" (7). The continual need to work to survive not only affected the narrator during his semester at LSU, but it affected his children as well.  

In the next post, I will talk about other instances of education in Gautreaux's collection. For now, what are your thoughts? Who are some other authors who talk about education in a similar manner?

Gautreaux, Tim. "Welding With Children." Welding With Children: Stories. New York: Picador, 1999. 1-19. Print. 
Hebert-Leiter, Maria. "An Interview With Tim Gautreaux." Carolina Quarterly 57.2 (2005): 66-74. Print. 

Solomon Northup's "Twelve Years a Slave" and Steve McQueen's Imagery

I finally, after months of putting it to the side, watched Steve McQueen's adaptation of Twelve Year's A Slave. It took me so long to watch it because I kept telling myself that I had to be in the right mindset to sit through two hours of visual representations of brutality and prejudice. The movie is not something to view for pleasure. It's a visceral experience, much like Schindler's List. It's a film that you see, take in, and reflect upon long after the credits roll. Many people have written about the film version of Solomon Northup's narrative, and I do not wish to necessarily enter in to any of the debates surrounding the relevance or importance of the film. I do think that the film, and Northup's Twelve Years a Slave (1853) are important today because of what they tell and show us about history and because the continuing effects of that history remain with us one hundred and fifty years later.

As I watched Northup's narrative unfold, I could not help but notice the haunting beauty of the landscape that I inhabit here in South Louisiana. Throughout the film, shots of the landscape and of trees--oak, willow, cypress, etc.--covered in Spanish moss appeared. The trees, covered with the flowing Spanish moss, join beauty and horror together in one image. Blowing with the wind, the moss takes on a sort of ghost like quality, and ultimately, the continual shots of oak trees covered in Spanish moss made me think of lynching and the fears facing slaves and African Americans in the South: lynching and rape. The beauty and horror of the trees collide in one of the pivotal scenes in Northup's narrative.

After Solomon fights with Master Tibeats and whips him profusely, Chapin, the overseer, intervenes and removes Tibeats. Tibeats, infuriated at being beaten by a slave, leaves, and Chapin warns Solomon to remain put or he cannot help to protect Solomon from Tibeats when he returns. Upon returning with two horsemen, Tibeats and the men approach Northup with a noose. Northup submits to the men humbly, as he says, and they proceed to bound him tightly and slip the noose over his neck. The men do not hang Northup from a tree in the narrative; Chapin intervenes before they get the chance. Chapin scares Tibeats and the other men off, then he sends Lawson to get Mr. Ford, Solomon's master. While waiting for Mr. Ford to return, no one removes the bindings or the noose from Solomon's body: "All day Chapin walked back and forth upon the stoop, but not once approached me" (68). Solomon goes on to contemplate, "Why [Chapin] did not relieve me--why he suffered me to remain in agony the whole weary day, I never knew" (68). Chapin, and no one else relieves Solomon of his suffering. Mr. Ford, who arrives later, cuts the ropes that bind Solomon and helps him.  

In the film, Tibeats and the men hang Solomon from a large oak tree in front of Mr. Ford's house. The scene, which is above, starts after Tibeats and Chapin have left Solomon alone. What captured me about this scene is the long shot of Solomon hanging from the tree, struggling to maintain his breath and strength. For about thirty seconds, the scene only contains Solomon, the tree, slave quarters on the right, and a partially constructed building on the left. At the thirty second mark, movement occurs as slaves come out of the houses on the right and resume their daily activities. None of the people even approach Solomon for another minute. At that time, a woman comes up to him and offers him a drink of water then moves on. At one minute and forty seconds, the perspective changes and we see Chapin standing on the gallery of the big house staring out at Solomon hanging from the tree. This shot remains for twenty seconds before it returns to an image of the quarters. Over Solomon's left shoulder, a trio of kids chase one another in circles, playing and laughing. At the end of the scene, dusk has settled in and the slaves have returned to their quarters. Mr. Ford rides up on his horse and cuts Solomon down.

The scene juxtaposes a lot of images in the span of three minutes. It shows, for one, the cruelty of the "peculiar institution" which classified Solomon as property, not as a human. It also shows the control that lynching, and abuse, had psychologically on the slave population. When people start to emerge again, no one helps Solomon. Instead, they go on about their business and perform their day-to-day activities. Women carry laundry, men carry hoes, and children play. A similar scene occurs when Solomon confronts Epps over Patsy. When they begin to argue and chase one another, the slaves in the background can be seen dispersing and going inside their quarters. One slave can even be heard telling his child to get inside. The slaves go on with their lives, not ignorant of the punishment Solomon is enduring, but helpless to do anything about it. Solomon's hangings, the whippings, and the sexual overtures all exist as part of the plantation life, and the slaves can only, as one suggests to Solomon earlier, strive to survive.

Along with these images, we also see the big house, not more that twenty feet or so beyond Solomon's hanging body. He looks at the house, and as he gazes upon it, he sees Chapin pacing back and forth on the gallery. Even Chapin, the overseer, does not help Solomon down. Why, because Solomon is Mr. Ford's property? Because he wants Mr. Ford to see what Tibeats did? Solomon even asks these types of questions in his narrative. Countered with Solomon's hanging, limp body, we see the opulent house of his master.  We also see, when the shot returns to the quarters, the unfinished structure that Solomon has been building. These images both show that the things that Mr. Ford, Chapin, and Tibeats have exists because of the slaves they subject to oppression.

There is more that could be said, as usual. If you have seen the movie or read Solomon's narrative, what do you think? What other scenes stick out to you?

For more about the cinematography of this scene, see "Steve McQueen and the Long Take" at Visual Culture Blog. For more about the history of lynching, see "The Specter of Lynching" on this blog. For a good article on this scene, and the things I have been discussing in this post, see John Stauffer's "12 Years Between Life and Death" in American Literary History (26.2).

Northup, Solomon. Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New-York, kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853. Ed. Randy DeCuir. Marksville: Avoyelles Publications, 2013. Print.    

The Clerk and Social Distinctions on Cane River in Saxon's "Children of Strangers"

Yucca (Melrose) Plantation

Last post, I discussed Lyle Saxon's Children of Strangers (1937) and some of the themes that it has in common with Gaines and other texts. Here, I would like to continue that discussion briefly by bringing up some other aspects of the novel that are worth further investigation.

During Christmas, Mr. Randolph, after "the negroes" had all left the commissary, would take "five of the old mulatto men" with him into the back office and pour six glasses (122). The men would sit around, drink, and talk. Each new about the social distinctions in the area, so that is why they performed this yearly ritual in the privacy of the commissary's office. While Mr. Guy and the mulattoes drink in the back room, the clerk (who I believe is never named) begins to think about the relationships on Cane River. It is not clear where the clerk, often referred to as a hill-man, comes from. Since people refer to him as a hill-man, I assume he comes from North Louisiana, East Texas, or possibly Arkansas. The clerk becomes irritated with Mr. Randolph because the man chose to drink with "a damned race of bastards" instead of with him, a man of Mr. Randolph's own race (122). The clerk recalls that, where he is from, no one would tolerate a white man drinking with mulattoes or "negroes." Along with despising the idea that Mr. Randolph would drink with the "bastards," the clerk begins to think about the fact that the Randolphs, instead of treating him as an equal, treat him "just as a servant, like the niggers, in spite of the fact that he ate at the table with the white people" (122-123). Here the distinction between the clerk and the Randolphs is made clear. Instead of saying, "he ate at the table with them," the narrator specifies that the Randolphs are "white" and the clerk is not. Here, the term "white" constitutes a class distinction because the clerk does not own land and is below the white landowners like the Randolphs.

Immediately after this observation, the clerk starts to think about the distinctions on Cane River.

He couldn't understand these distinctions. There were really four classes on Cane River: Mr. Guy and his kind, and then his, the clerk's kind--he knew that Miss Adelaide considered him 'trash'--then there were the mulattoes who looked down upon the black people, and last, at the bottom of the heap, were the negroes themselves. . . And the negroes didn't seem to give a single damn! (123)

In Saxon's novel, the clerk occupies the position that the Cajuns occupy in Gaines' work. He is "white;" however, he is not white. Since he does not own land, and is considered "trash" by some, he cannot reside on the same level as the Randolphs or the Harrises. Instead, he must maintain a space that does not allow him much movement. What makes the clerk's predicament different from the Cajuns' in Gaines' Catherine Carmier is the fact that Mr. Randolph will drink with the mulattoes and he understands the distinctions, unlike the whites and their relationship with Raoul. In Carmier, Bud Grover provided the Cajuns with more land to farm because, as Madame Bayonne tells Jackson, "White is still white. . . [a]nd white still sticks with white" (73). On the other side, Cajuns still reside below aristocratic white landowners. In A Gathering of Old Men, Gil confronts Candy at Marshall Plantation, telling her, "You never liked any of us. Looking at us as if we're a breed below you. But we're not, Candy. We're all made of the same bone, the same blood, the same skin. Your folks had a break, mine didn't, that's all" (122). On this scene, Sister Mary Ellen Doyle asserts, "Gil is moved to turn on Candy and assert Cajun identity vis-à-vis upper-class whites," and in doing so. Gil realizes the equality he has with blacks and others (186). The clerk never challenges Mr. Randolph outright; instead, he only thinks about the inequalities that he experiences and lets them stew within him.

As I am writing these posts, I realize that there is more and more that could be said about Saxon's novel. I may do one more post about it next time because the clerk's actions in regards to the mulatto Nita and Henry Jack's relationship with Mr. Randolph's brother Paul are both worth examining. Until then, remember to leave a comment or question or below.    







Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2002. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. Catherine Carmier. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Print.
Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. Print.
Saxon, Lyle. Children of Strangers. New Orleans: Robert L. Crager & Co., 1948. Print.