Hicks, Granville. “Sounds of Soul.” Saturday Review (17 August 1968): 19-20.

[In the following review of Bloodline, Hicks praises the author's characterization and his ear for common speech while finding fault with some of the conclusions to the stories.]

Ernest J. Gaines, author of two novels, Catherine Carmier and Of Love and Dust, has now published a collection of short stories, Bloodline. All five of the stories concern Negroes in the South—probably in Gaines's native Louisiana. In the first story, “A Long Day in November,” a five-year-old boy presents a domestic comedy that is no comedy to him. In “The Sky Is Gray” it is an eight-year-old who describes his journey to a nearby city to have a tooth pulled; the high point is the encounter between the boy's proud mother and a white woman whose tact matches her generosity. In “Three Men” a young roughneck tells what he learned during a night in jail. In the title story an aging servant describes the conflict between a young Negro and his white uncle. In “Just Like a Tree” a number of voices describe a kind of farewell party for an old woman who has been Aunt Fe to the whole community.

In the first story there are no white characters, nor is race conflict involved in any way. In the second the only important white character is the kindly old lady, but we are constantly being made aware of discrimination, and in the dentist's waiting room an argument takes place between an old preacher and a young militant. The three men in jail in the third story are all Negroes, but their jailer is a bullying, tough-talking white man and what they have to say about their lives exhibits the condition of their race. In the title story the plantation owner and his brother's bastard are both proud men, but the conflict is more than personal, for young Copper insists that what he demands for himself he demands for all Negroes. “But I'll be back. We'll be back, Uncle. And I'll take my share. I won't beg for it, I won't ask for it; I'll take it. I'll take it or I'll bathe this whole plantation in blood.” There are militant voices in the last story as well, but the theme is the pathos of the old. “Just like a tree that's planted 'side the river,” Aunt Fe will not be moved. Gaines knows as well as anyone the intensity and the importance of the Negroes' struggle against white oppression, but he also knows that there are other subjects worth writing about.

Each of these stories, it may be noted, is told in the first person, though in the fifth there are several “I's” and not just one. It is not surprising that Gaines likes the first person, for he uses colloquial language effectively and has a strong feeling for the rhythms of speech. For example, the boy in “The Sky Is Gray” tells how his mother beat him when he refused to kill two redbirds he and his brother had trapped: “I'm still young—I ain't no more than eight; but I know now; I know why I had to do it. (They was so little, though. They was so little. I 'member how I picked the feathers off them and cleaned them and helt them over the fire. Then we all ate them. Ain't had but a little bitty piece each, but we all had a little bitty piece, and everybody just looked at me 'cause they was so proud.) Suppose she had to go away like Daddy went away? Then who was go'n look after us? They had to be somebody left to carry on.”

In “Bloodline” Frank Laurent, the plantation owner, sends for his nephew, who has come home after a long absence. When Copper says he will not enter the house by the back door, Laurent orders several men to go and get him, but Copper drives them away. Laurent explains to Felix, the narrator, that if he did let Copper come in by the front door, the white men of the neighborhood would lynch the young Negro. “Even if they didn't lynch him,” he goes on, “I wouldn't let him come in through that front door. Neither him, nor you, nor her over there [Amalia, a servant and Copper's maternal aunt]. And to me she is only the second woman I've had the good fortune of knowing whom I can call a lady. But she happens to be black, Felix, and because she's black she'll never enter this house through that door. Not while I'm alive. Because, you see, Felix, I didn't write the rules. I came and found them, and I shall die and leave them. They will be changed, of course; they will be changed, and soon, I hope. But I will not be the one to change them.”

In “Just Like a Tree,” as I have said, we move into the consciousness of one person after another—as in Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. First there is a boy named Chuckkie, who is riding to Aunt Fe's with his father and mother and grandmother. He is mostly interested in a lazy mule, but he knows why his grandmother, sitting in her rocking chair in the back of the wagon, keeps saying, “Poor soul, poor soul.” His father is also concerned with the mule, but his mother expresses her own grief and reports the grief of others. She talks with Louise, and watches Louise's new husband: “He kiss her on the other ear. A nigger do all that front o' public got something to hide.” It is because Louise's husband insists on leaving the neighborhood that Aunt Fe must be moved, and we discover that behind all this lies a bombing outrage. An old white woman pays tribute to Aunt Fe, and there is a militant young man, but Chuckkie's grandmother, Aunt Lou, has the last word, and she is the one who best understands Aunt Fe's feelings.

The situation is beautifully developed, but the ending seems to me forced, for Aunt Fe tells Aunt Lou that she will die rather than move, and she dies then and there. Gaines has trouble in winding up other stories. In “A Long Day in November,” after the boy narrator's father has burned his automobile in order to persuade the boy's mother to return to him, she compels him to give her a good beating—“Because I don't want you to be the laughingstock of the plantation.” This may be sound psychology, but Gaines doesn't quite bring it off. And in “The Sky Is Gray” the mother's pride seems to be carried a little too far when she rebukes the boy for turning up his coat collar in the rain, saying, “You not a bum. You a man.”

I first came across “The Sky Is Gray” in American Negro Short Stories, edited by John H. Clarke (SR, Jan. 14, 1967), and “A Long Day in November” in Langston Hughes's The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, and I was impressed by both. In spite of my reservations about the endings, they are strong stories, and so are the others in the collection. Gaines knows how to create living characters and to set them against a rich and vivid background. Now, if I ever get a chance, I want to read his two novels. If they are anywhere near as good as the stories, he is one of the young writers—he was born in 1933—who will help to form the American literature of the future.