Southern Louisiana—Cajun Country—Pointe Coupée—New Roads—Oscar—River Lake Plantation—False River—pecan trees and live oaks—fields of sugar cane and cotton—bayous and “parishes”—“galleries” on plantation homes—cabins in “the quarters”: these make the “Place” of Ernest Gaines' fiction. Speakers of French, Cajun patois, or black English—black workers who cut cane and drive the mules that haul it—Cajun overseers who drive the cutters—black children who play in lanes, work like adults, and hide their toothache and hunger—old men who fish and hide their fears and resentful memories—young militants and the old folk who raised them, who both admire and fear them, who tell the oral history that has nourished their dreams and demands—“Creoles of color” who struggle between the whites who despise and displace them and the blacks they despise and will not join—landowners who “possess” all these people yet slowly lose possession in a world of cultural and economic change: these are the “People” who populate Gaines' fictional yet intensely realistic world. To read his books is to enter and learn this world; yet to read with understanding, one must, in some measure, already know it, know this territory, its varied folk, its cultural demands and taboos, know the author and “this Louisiana thing that drives [him]” (Rowell, “This Louisiana Thing” 40). Despite all comparison by critics, Gaines' parish is not the same, in terrain, history or culture, as other parts of the South of modern literature, especially not Faulkner's imagined county; nor is his fictional re-creation of it comparable in content or tone.

I

A geography lesson on the area Gaines has made his own would begin with a map of south-central Louisiana. On East-West Interstate 10 between Baton Rouge and the Atchafalaya River, one would raise an irregular triangle, with New Roads as northern apex. Curving along Route 1 on the western side of the triangle, from New Roads down to the hamlet of Oscar, is the new-moon False River, actually a lake left by the Mississippi when sedimentation and erosion changed its ancient course. Close by Oscar is River Lake Plantation, the heart of the Gaines world, where he himself was born and reared, and which he has re-created, book after book, in all its phases of life.

This triangle, essentially, is Pointe Coupée Parish, renamed St. Raphael in Gaines' fiction to honor his stepfather, Raphael Colar. Baton Rouge retains its name, but many a frustrated reader has searched a Louisiana map for Bayonne or St. Adrienne (the latter named for his mother), which are actually New Roads, the seat of the Parish. The False River, renamed for his brother, has become the St. Charles River of his old men and boy fishers; and River Lake Plantation is surely Marshall's, Hebert's, Sampson's, and every other plantation where his people live out their poverty-stricken yet emotionally rich lives (Rowell, “That Little Territory” 2-3, and numerous Gaines interviews).

What is the character of this land? Who lived on it, and how did they live? One best begins to find an answer by driving out of Baton Rouge, west and north up Route 1 to New Roads. Guidebooks, local manuscripts, and Gaines' stories take reality as one sees the largely flat, dark, fertile soil, the immense pecan and live oak trees hung with Spanish moss, and, if the ride is in summer, feels the intensity of heat which so shapes the moods and even the decisions of many of Gaines' characters.

On the left as one travels appear the extensive fields of cane and cotton; these were the large land grants of the early French settlers, who built the parish's economy first from tobacco and indigo, then cotton and sugar cane, and from related industries at the cotton gins, sugar mills, and saw mills. One sugar mill, on the Alma Plantation, still operates near Oscar. On the driver's right is the False River, wide and lovely, indented by numerous modern piers, inviting the Gaines reader to imagine the Cajuns out in boats, or the disastrous floods recorded as late as 1927, against which the levees were only a partial solution until the modern spillway poured excess water into the Atchafalaya (Lionel Gaines interview; David, ts. 4-5). The shore of the False River is dotted with small stores but mostly is a grassy plot, again inviting imagination of baptisms, Miss Jane fishing, and the gathering for Ned Pittman's sermon. Across the river, one sees the “island,” the land within the moon-curve of the River, settled chiefly by the later French, who received much smaller land grants, and by the Acadians, the tragic French deportees from British Nova Scotia and ancestors of the modern Cajuns (David 2-5). Here is one source of the social stratification which so clearly marks this Louisiana parish, in reality and in fiction, in former and in present times, which is so much a motivating force in Gaines' stories. It is visible in the distinctive types of houses that face the False River or are hidden away at a distance from it.

The most notable of these houses are the large, white, French style plantation homes, with front steps rising to a second floor main entrance and a gallery projecting over the lower rooms where family or servants sought cool and shade to eat or work. These are the “big houses,” the inheritances of Candy Marshall and Frank Laurent and other characters troubled by the heritage they symbolize. River Lake Plantation itself tells the story: in 1803 a U.S. Patent showed its ownership by Antoine Descuirs; by 1823 his purchases had brought it to a length of more than a mile and depth of nearly three miles. About 1845, his daughter Antoinette married Arthur Denis, grandson of French aristocracy, and the house was altered to a larger and more stylish form. A 19th century court record lists these buildings at River Lake: a two-story house, two sheds, a cotton gin and press, blacksmith shop, corn mill, kitchen, hospital, two pigeon houses, four corn houses, thirty “negroe huts,” and some other armory buildings (Tallant 1-3).

More numerous along Route 1 are smaller frame houses, perhaps with an outdoor stairway on the side; these the explorer learns to identify as Cajun architecture and the stairway as leading to the garçonnière, rooms for the boys or the yet unmarried but increasingly independent young men of the family (Rowell, “Territory” 1-2). These have only garden-sized land attached, and are the homes of those who work elsewhere in farming, fishing or small business.

Then if one turns left off the main route and drives down a long lane near a “big house,” one will see the “quarters,” the area where formerly as many as thirty or forty cabins gathered black slaves or tenants into a culturally united community, where now perhaps a dozen old people live out their lives in a few remaining, weatherbeaten shacks, even raising a patch of cotton or cane for memory's sake, along with the flowers and grass plots they try to hold against the weeds encroaching from the empty spaces.

Thadious Davis, quoting Gaines, asserts that his initial writing came less from a concern for character or incident than from his strong sense of this place. It is true that characterization and the moral quality of actions become more prominent in the later works; nevertheless, these too retain the force of that initial desire: “I wanted to smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river” (Davis 1; Gaines 1971 address at Southern U).

II

It is evident that the labor and culture sustained on this land were shaped not only by its soil, its waterways, and its sky, blazing in July and chill in November, but even more by the kinds of people who settled it, from the first French coureurs des bois to the current oil merchants, from the first owners of plantations to the remaining black dwellers in the quarters. Gaines has somehow known them all, depicted most of them; and the traveller in Point Coupée today will meet, in some real way, their ghosts or their living selves.

Gaines' earliest fictional persons appear in story time about 1863, but Pointe Coupée history from its beginnings about 1700 is in his characters' bloodstream. French Canadians were hunting and fishing there in 1708, and the post of Pointe Coupée was established in 1717 northeast of New Roads, in an area now engulfed by the Mississippi (David 1; Curet 4). Since slavery was introduced as early as 1719, the land grantees must have begun almost at once to establish the plantations. By 1860, a census lists 63 “large owners” of 50 or more slaves. These possessors of land and human labor were French, some of them aristocrats or their children. They were Catholic; by 1728 they had a missionary, and by 1738, a church (David 5-6, 8). They infused into southern Louisiana culture elements of language, faith, and lifestyle which have outlasted all competition from later Spanish colonists and, after 1803, American settlers who poured in, bringing several nationalities, the English language, the Episcopal and various Protestant faiths. In Pointe Coupée, the French landowners prevailed. Names such as Poydras, Marioneau, Jarreau, Buonchaud, Patin, and Lebeau far outnumber in the records the Stewarts and Deans (David).

Again, River Lake's line of owners tells the story. In 1893, the aristocratic Denis family sold the entire estate to Purvis Major. He eventually divided it among his three sons, John, George, and Joseph. John and George had the portion with the “big house” on the right of the lane to the quarters; this eventually was divided among their nieces and nephews. Joseph owned the land on the left side of the road and built a home on it; today it is the possession of his granddaughter, Mrs. Madeline Caillet. In her childhood, social stratification was still very obvious. None were very well off, not even these landowners, but the levels were distinct and the codes were definite; the child Madeline could play with the blacks on the plantation but not with the local “poor whites,” i.e. the Cajuns (Caillet and L. Gaines, interviews).

The French plantation owners probably would have fixed the French influence in Louisiana even without the influx of the Acadian population in the 1760's; today, however, the “Cajuns” are the most distinctive cultural group in the Pointe Coupée area, the most apt to be sought by the tourist or the cultural historian. Descendants of refugees, the Cajuns were French but not “quality.” In the 19th century, they were fishers and independent farmers, paysans. Their primary and absolute values were and are religion, family, land, and hard work; education comes after these (Turner, interview). In the twentieth century, when the large plantations were necessarily broken up for lack of heirs or money, the Cajuns became the principal tenants on the large acreage and used their racial connections with the owners to get the best lands “near the front,” i.e. nearer to the False River and farther from the swamp lands “at the back.” With that advantage in the soil, they could produce more, get more profit, then buy modern equipment, and so continue a circle of wanting yet more land, leading to more production and profit (Davis 5; Gaines, most interviews).

Obviously, the losers as the Cajuns advanced were the blacks and the “Creoles of color,” those who had been slaves, then sharecroppers and tenants on small lots. Lionel Gaines shared his memory of the system at Cheri (River Lake):

In Mr. George's time, the black tenants might have a piece of land even near the front, but when he died, Mr. John was not one to see to the land; it was run by an overseer, Mr. Jarreau. He would request a piece of front land from Mr. John and just get it. … They went where they wanted to work; you went where they didn't want to work, toward the back, almost in the woods.

(L. Gaines interview)

Without doubt the relations of blacks and Cajuns are the most distinctive feature of Gaines' fiction, the one that has most often raised either puzzled questions or charges of bias. He has defended his posture toward Cajuns with some effectiveness. He knows well that they are also the victims of caste and an unequal economic structure, trying by hard work and acquisition to shake off the restrictions and deprivations of their own past. Since they cannot fight the owners, the Heberts and Sampsons, they can progress only at the expense of the Creoles and blacks. They are not villains but competitors. Like the blacks, they must see their young people shaking off the old ways and values, leaving the land to go to college and to industry. And if the Cajuns are subjects of anger, symbols of terror, loss, and lynching, yet in the black oral tradition, they are also objects of jokes, of the comic relief that defuses anger (Laney, “Last One” 6-7; Estes, ts. 2; Fitzgerald 333).

Alvin Aubert has said bluntly that the French legacy that so distinguishes Gaines' fiction from that of other Southern black writers is derived from the French settlers' uninhibited sexual alliances with blacks (Contemporary Novelists 483). The resultant society has whites (landowners and Cajuns), blacks, and “Creoles of color”; it also has problems of fair and dark skin unique to Louisiana and more severe than anywhere else in the South (Gaudet and Wooten, “Talking” 235). Gaines, according to Aubert, uses the Creole, not as the old tragic stereotype, but as an archetype, a metaphor of the disunity created in the black community by “sexploitation” (“Mulatto” 69). Michel Fabre also notes that Gaines's Creoles are more comparable to a dying dynasty in Faulkner than to the classic “tragic mulatto.” The latter suffers from being unable to identify in either race; the proud Creoles refuse to do so and maintain an “aristocracy,” a proud sub-culture more refined than that of the Cajuns, who nevertheless systematically displace them (117-118).

Creole “superiority” to blacks is founded on the old Code Noir of 1724, which gave citizenship to “free persons of color”—almost inevitably Creoles, whose various shades of couleur were classified in colonial and antebellum records. These “persons” had the rights of all citizens of French Louisiana except marriage to and legacies from whites; they were privileged as neither they nor any other part-blacks were in any other state. In French, Spanish, and American Louisiana, the Creoles continued to see themselves as a third caste, with customs predicated on separation from both blacks and whites. Certain families and their home places became well known; the Metoyers of Isle Brevelle on the Cane River are probably the source for Gaines' Creole Place and the family of Mary Agnes LeFabre. But the tragedy of Gaines' Creoles, such as the LeFabres or Carmiers, is that any status of their privileged ancestors is long gone; they are simply rural, uneducated sharecroppers and tenants, clinging to empty past forms, refusing to ally themselves socially or politically with blacks. Their daughters are as much barred by their own code from marrying a black (Catherine Carmier and Jackson Bradley) as they are prevented by the white code from marrying a white (Mary Agnes LeFabre and Robert Sampson). They will not recognize change or join the blacks bleeding to win it. “Creole” may, in fact, be used as a badge of security and thus add to the existing resentment and disunity. And so the Creoles are isolated in a community that grows smaller and more strangulating as the South inexorably divides into simple black and white (Davis 7-8; G & W, “Talking” 236).

The Creoles are African and French in origin and Catholic in religion; the blacks who inhabit the quarters and constitute the main body of Gaines' characters are African and Protestant, usually Baptist. They are the descendants of the slaves who built the “big houses”; they are “the people,” who in Gaines' childhood, still planted the cotton and cut the cane, told the stories in the language he absorbed and transmitted, and transformed the quarters from a place to confine and control subservient laborers into a source of political unity, common striving, mutual protection, friendship, folk education and culture, a place to generate leadership and change. These black folk are influenced by the French and Creole legacy around them; they may have French names, use French words amid their own black folk English, and argue about the relative efficacy of Baptist or Catholic prayers. But they are distinctly their own “people,” struggling with their own tensions as they lose land, lose their young, and grapple with the changes forced on them by owners and Cajuns or by their own children whom they have raised to be restless and aware. If the quarters are marked by heat, dust, dying plants, and encroaching weeds, they are also the “ritual ground of communion” (Rowell, “Quarters” 750). In Gaines' fiction, the tragedy is less the confinement of life and aspiration to the quarters than the very disappearance of the quarters and the community which it formed.

The reader who wishes to see both Gaines' places and people with deeper understanding and empathy can do so best by visits to two places: Burden Research Plantation at the Rural Life Museum, Baton Rouge, and, if possible, River Lake Plantation, site of Gaines' boyhood in the quarters. At the museum plantation may be seen a typical commissary, rural church, Cajun house, and several cabins of the typical “double pen, saddle-bag” (i.e., duplex) construction, with fireplace and chimney in the center and a door between the two rooms, so that two families might live there, each with its own “fire-half.” Also visible for the visitor are an overseer's house with its bousillage walls of cypress insulated with mud and Spanish moss, its cowhide chairs and pewter ware—all indicative of just that social and economic distinction that cut the essential gap between a Sidney Bonbon and a James Kelley, a Cajun overseer and a black leading workman, no matter how much they might associate in labor, in conversation, in mutual understanding. The cane grinding operation (many of Gaines' events occur in “grinding time”) is made real as well: the mule-drawn, two-wheel carts which pulled the cane to the mill, the mule-pulled crusher pole which ground the stalks so that juice went into the huge vats and was emptied into open kettles in the sugar house (“LSU Museum” 15-16). Any pulling and hauling not done by the mule was, of course, done by “the people” and was still done by them in Gaines' boyhood at River Lake. There only a few cabins and the one-room church-school remain, along with a few old people who willingly share memories of the old times and of Ernest Gaines himself, the boy who now returns each year to draw again from the living memory they embody.

From “the people's” experiences, in their memory and honor, Gaines constructs what Rowell has called his “myth,” his “symbolic geography” and “center of meaning” (“Quarters” 735). He articulated his own concept of a “black aesthetic” as a need to write about “people, people … not just problems” (Negro Digest 27). And to an interviewer he stated: “I'm very very proud of my Louisiana background, the people I come from—my uncle and the people we drink with, the people I talk with, and the people I grew up around, and their friends” (Ingram and Steinberg 340). About these common, non-historical but heroic people he wants to write with all the imagination, creativity and passion in him.

III

Who were the specific people who thus shaped Ernest Gaines' own life and attitudes? What early experiences inform his fiction and, if known, can make it more vitally understood? What was it like to live, work, go to school, and be part of “the people” on River Lake Plantation from 1933 to 1948? Why did he leave, and what is it like to return, educated beyond any opportunity available in the home place? Why does that place still so move his heart and creative imagination? What has made him a writer about Pointe Coupée, Louisiana, who chooses to live and work chiefly in San Francisco, California? Numerous interviewers have presented these questions to Gaines and found him both a man of intense privacy that compels respect and a cooperative partner in the effort to make his background and his books accessible.¹

Ernest Gaines was born on January 15, 1933, at River Lake Plantation, then known as Cheri, on the portion belonging to Mr. John Major. His maternal grandparents were the yardman and cook at the “big house”; his parents, Manual and Adrienne Jefferson Gaines, worked in the fields. As the oldest child, Ernest assumed such duties as getting the well water and chopping wood for the stove. By the age of nine, he was in the field himself, picking cotton, digging potatoes and onions, and pulling corn, for fifty cents a day (Lane, “Last One” 7; Carter 52; Grant, DLB 170). The younger children, in their turn, joined in this work until they, too, moved to California. (Gaines has eight brothers and three sisters; the younger ones were born in California.)

An older boy or girl might “advance” to the cutting of cane. Lionel Gaines recalls that in his boyhood there were no machines for either picking cotton or cutting cane; the work was simply “rough” in a climate either “too hot or too cold.” Ernest's novels deal more often with the heat as symbol of the workers' oppressed condition, but Lionel spoke vividly of cutting cane from November to January when workers often had to pick ice off the cane before loading it.

Some of this work was done to assist their mother's uncle, Horace McVay, now an elderly resident of New Roads, then a tenant of forty acres (McVay, interview). During a ride through an area originally of large solely-owned plantations, then divided into leased acreage, Lionel Gaines explained how the tenant system worked at that time: those on “Mr. John's” land “worked on a quarter”; those on “Miss Lillian's” (daughter and heir of Mr. Joseph) “worked on a half,” i.e., a quarter or a half of the crop they “made.” As for the method of payment:

“You see, a tenant used that land, but everything he made, all his checks, had to go to the big man, the man who owned the place, until ‘settle up time.’ Just before Christmas, you'd go up to the big office, and the man'd tell you how much you made, and how much you used of his stuff, how much grain he had to buy for you. Then if you have something left, he'd give it to you; if you don't, then he'd loan you something for the next year.

[Interviewer] “You just took what he said?”

“Oh yeah! You had no other choice but take that or don't take anything.”

(L. Gaines interview)

At Cheri, tenants received two checks at the gin after the cotton and seed were separated; they could keep and spend the smaller check for seed; the other was given to Mr. John, and at Christmas the usual settlement was made. A similar arrangement worked with the cane cutting: a train picked up the cane and brought it to the sugar mill. In this case:

You didn't see no check. Mr. Wilkerson mailed your check back to Mr. John. Whatever they say it was, that what it was. What they gave you at the end of the year, that what you had. They say “You broke even” or “you still owe me ＄200,” that's the way it was. “You want to borrow?”

A final slip of the bolt lock on these workers was payment in the form of plantation money, old samples of which can be seen at River Lake today. Coins marked with the plantation name were minted in values of ten cents to a dollar. Workers had to spend these coins at the plantation commissary, which of course could charge whatever the owners wanted.

Both Lionel Gaines and the older people still at River Lake give assurance that a child's life there was not all heavy labor. During their “plenty of play time,” the boys would shoot marbles or play with a ball made from a marble wrapped in rags, cord, and a cloth cover sewed for them by the old people. “Anywhere we could get it wide enough and big enough, we played ball” (Aaron interview). According to Lionel, however, when he was shooting marbles, Ernest would usually be “somewhere doing something” else, chiefly reading for his own pleasure, reading or writing letters for the old people, or going to the store for them “whether they gave him a nickel or not.” Rose Ruffin, at River Lake before Gaines' birth, says he went “down the quarters” often for her: “a nice boy, raised up nice” (Ruffin interview).

According to Willie Aaron, who has lived all his life on River Lake and is another of its elderly storehouses of memory, the children of his generation went to school only at night; “they used to give school down here in the house; I went to that.” By the time “J” was in school, classes were held in a little church in the quarters. About thirty children, those who could get away from the fields, attended. Ernest and Lionel were among them any day they were not sick. Teachers—“Mr. Paul and Miss Ada … Miss Green”—commuted from New Roads or came from Baton Rouge and lived with someone in the quarters. One teacher lived about five years with the Gaineses' grandmother, Mr. John's cook. The school had benches and a blackboard on the wall; the children used “slate on the wall, but they had paper, too” (Aaron interview). Books were supplied by the state; the students or the teacher went to New Roads to get them.

The school at the quarters ended with Grade 7; then children had the choice to go to New Roads or quit. A school bus ran to New Roads; it would come into the quarters when the road was good enough; when bad, the children made the long walk to the front to meet it. Lionel recalls a little bus that went from Port Allen to New Roads. A Trailways bus from the quarters to New Roads cost fifty cents, this little one only twenty. Children could take the school bus home as far as Bigman Lane, then walk the long remainder of the way. Under the circumstances, the temptation to quit was not small, out Ernest and Lionel were among the five or so children from the quarters who went to St. Augustine's Catholic school in New Roads.

Ernest's response to education in this system is attested by all who remember him: his uncle, his brother, the old folks still in the quarters. He was “pretty smart,” “a scholar,” “pretty high up in every respect”; “look like he always wanted to be somebody, learn something”; he “loved school—yes indeed!” Their accounts, indeed, begin to take on the dimensions of myth. According to Lionel, Ernest would “cry all day” if he had to miss school; he would not go to bed until a lesson was mastered and might often be up till 2:00 studying by kerosene lamp. Sometimes Lionel would go to bed, wake up at 6:00, and find Ernest still at the lamp. If his studies required the whole night, he would take it—and then go to school. Both his uncle and his brother tell the “thorn story,” apparently now a family legend: “E. J.,” who ran often, got a thorn deep in his heel. Lionel pulled it out, put fat meat on it, and tied it up; and Ernest went hopping to school rather than miss. He was about twelve at the time.

On Sundays, of course, the school house in the quarters served its first purpose, Baptist church services. Ernest and all the other children were expected to attend, to learn their Bible, and in due time, to experience conversion and baptism in the False River. He has acknowledged that he and others underwent this public experience more to satisfy their elders than from any real inner impulse of God's Spirit or their own.

From this amalgamation of Baptist upbringing and education in the quarters and the Catholic education at St. Augustine's, Ernest derived the attitude to religion that pervades his work: respect for any sincere belief that issues in worthy action, and an equally sincere belief of his own that no particular denomination or form of church attendance is necessary and that formal religion has not succeeded in bringing about the moral changes so desperately needed in society, especially changes in American racism and its devastating impact on the black family and community.

Of all that devastation, nothing more deeply affected Gaines or appears more movingly in his fiction than the impact of racism on black men, especially as husbands and fathers. The source of this concern he noted tersely in an interview: “My mother and father split up early—and it is a theme that enters everything—and I don't know where the fathers are” (Beauford 18). Manuel Gaines left his family when his oldest son was about eight or nine; his wife and their children then moved to nearby Parlange Lane (now LA 78), where she owned some land, and where she met Norbert Colar. After a few more years back at Cheri, she married him. They found work in New Orleans; Colar joined the Merchant Marine and was transferred to California, where first Ernest and then all the older children except Lionel eventually joined them (L. Gaines interview). To Norbert Colar's memory, Gaines dedicated The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman; from this and from everything he has said in interviews, it is clear that he received from Colar a father's affection and guidance and that he gave in return an equal affection and profound respect.

The temporary disruption of the family, however, had one result which Gaines clearly considers the most positive influence of his life: he and the older children came under the care of his mother's aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson. About this woman, Gaines will speak with a love and reverence and fullness that suggest she has taken almost mythic stature in his memory and imagination (all interviews). Nor is her reality diminished when one interviews the old folk at River Lake who well remember “Aunt Teen” and the way “she raised them children.” The outstanding physical fact about her is that she was crippled from birth or very early childhood; Gaines says he never knew anyone who remembered her walking. Yet she “could do anything she wanted to” by virtue of crawling about the cabin or outside and down the steps to her garden. She raised flowers and vegetables, chickens and hogs; she sat on a bench to hoe or to cook or wash clothes in the water hauled by Ernest or the other boys, and occasionally to apply the switches they were required to cut and bring her. She encouraged, taught and disciplined them by her presence and personality, perhaps most by the fact that she was never heard to complain. To the oldest of her nephews, the indelible lesson was, “Just do the job, do it as well as you could, but don't complain” (“Auntie” [“Auntie and the Black Experience in Louisiana”] 21). Leaving her when he went to California was the most wrenching separation Ernest had known; she has remained the strongest moral influence in his life. In the dedication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, he summarized that influence: she “did not walk a day in her life but [she] taught me the importance of standing.” Miss Augusteen died in the quarters at River Lake and was buried in its cemetery on Carnival Day, 1954.

Augusteen Jefferson was the moral model of Jane Pittman; like Jane, she also embodied that element of life in the quarters which chiefly caused “J” Gaines to become Ernest Gaines the writer—oral tradition. Because Miss Augusteen could not walk, the folk came to her for visits and long conversations which made their principal recreations. “J” had to serve them tea or lemonade; he also sat and listened to them tell the stories of old times. He talked with them when he ran their errands and wrote their letters and when he accompanied another aunt on her rounds to sell Avon products. Listening and listening, he absorbed the stories, the speech patterns in which they were told, and the values and feelings they expressed. And these older folk—Walter Zeno, Reese Spooner, Rosie Ruffin, Willie Aaron, Carrie Hebert—became, under various names, the characters who populate his novels. To them he insists he must return, not merely as an observer, but “to absorb things,” to be with the land and people, to go to the fields and towns and bars, eat the food and listen to the language (Rowell, “This Louisiana Thing” 39).

Even though Ernest's love of study and his success with books made him special in the quarters of River Lake, his “writing” there was limited to early efforts at dramas which he directed and produced in the church. He recalls a mock wedding which he performed as the minister, with his script on the Bible and his back to the audience since he himself did not know his own part (Ingram and Steinberg 344). For the full impetus that made him a successful fiction writer, he required the transplantation to California which occurred in 1948 when he was fifteen years old.

In Vallejo, where Norbert Colar was stationed, Ernest became part of the heterogeneous population of a California military base. His awareness and outlook necessarily expanded as he heard the languages and life experiences of Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, Latinos, American whites and blacks. But though Vallejo was not Watts or Harlem, its variety did include local teen age gangs, and Colar forestalled trouble by counselling Ernest forcefully to “get the hell off the streets.” The lad found his way first to the YMCA. He had no experience with basketball but assumed a “country kid” could box. After one severe punch in the mouth from a well practiced youth, he decided to try the library (“Auntie” 22 and other interviews). What followed there, like the story of his early schooling, has that quality of which legends are made.

Obviously, Ernest Gaines, a black youth in Louisiana before 1948, had never seen the inside of a public library. In Vallejo's, he was astounded to discover that a simple card entitled him to temporary possession of more books than he had ever seen, all he had time enough in life to read. At first, he says, he tried all subjects and borrowed armloads at random according to the attraction of the covers. Eventually, he settled into the fiction section and, to alleviate the homesickness that haunted him, sought stories about the kind of people he knew and intensely missed. There were none. At the time, Richard Wright was the only black author with a national reputation, and Gaines had yet to learn the names of white authors who at least attempted to portray the rural black South. None of these were much in public demand in Vallejo, California, in 1948. He did, however, find stories of rural people and peasants—the works of Steinbeck, Cather, Chekhov, and Turgenev. He read and he read; he saw that they understood rural people. Still, “none of them had Auntie” (“Auntie” 22). And so, at about the age of sixteen, he began to write. If no one else had told the stories of his people, he would do so himself.

The tale of that first attempt at a novel has a decided comic flair as Gaines tells it himself. He wrote in longhand until his mother, “to keep me quiet,” agreed to rent a typewriter on which he pecked out “what I thought was a book.” Startled by Ernest's self-imposed task and his persistence at it, his stepfather, home on leave, voiced in his hearing the opinion that “that boy going crazy there, yeah.” His friends tried to lure him out to sports. Most laughed at the idea of his writing a book; others advised him to write about California—or at least New Orleans, but not “that plantation stuff everybody's trying to forget.” But Ernest had already tried in his early Vallejo days to pass himself off as an urbanite from New Orleans; when sufficiently ridiculed for his inability to name any street but Canal, he had abandoned the pretense. His experience was the quarters at River Lake and the Friday night cowboy movies in New Roads; he would write what he knew—and loved. So his first “novel,” entitled “A Little Stream,” was sent off the New York in 1949, and the young author waited for the fortune he would send back to Auntie. What he received, of course, was the rejected manuscript, which he promptly took to the yard and burned. But he still wanted to write. (“Auntie” 22-23; Davis 1; G & W, “Talking” 231; other interviews).

A long road remained before Gaines the young author could return to his “Little Stream” and give its ideas both form and flow as Catherine Carmier. After graduation from Vallejo High School in 1951 and an A.A. degree from Vallejo Junior College, he spent 1953-55 in the Army. After basic training at Fort Ord, California, in 1953, and six months at Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, in 1954, he went to Guam for a year. There he won two prizes and a total of ＄25.00 for a short story, also new determination to write (“Bloodline in Ink” 8). At the end of his tour of duty, friends urged him to stay in for the security: sure income, food, and three beds—one each in the barracks, hospital, and stockade. He was bright and got along well; he could go to officer's school (“Auntie” 23-24). What more could he want? He still wanted to write.

With that goal and his right to a GI Bill education, he mustered out and went to San Francisco State to take English Literature and Creative Writing. But, junior college notwithstanding, he was behind in General Education requirements and found himself in Expository Writing 110, the only black in a class of about twenty-five. His experience there, analogous to Faulkner's with Freshman English, might well make faculties question the value of the course to potential artists of the pen. Gaines' first three essays received a D, each followed by a conference with the teacher, Stanley Paul Anderson. This man, second only to Augusteen Jefferson and The People, merits credit for Ernest Gaines' becoming a fiction writer. He gave him permission to try explaining himself in that form rather than in essays. The result was a short story, “The Turtles,” which Anderson liked enough to pass around to other faculty. In 1956 it was published in Transfer, the college's literary magazine, which also published, in 1957, a second story, “Boy in the Double Breasted Suit.” Two more results followed: Dorothea Oppenheimer, a former editor about to open her own literary agency in San Francisco, noted Gaines' work; and he won a Creative Writing Fellowship to Stanford University (“Auntie” 24, other interviews). With his BA, (1957), and his new access to some of the best teachers in his field, he was on his way to becoming a writer.

Gaines is often asked about the influences on his formation as a writer—what teachers, what books or other art forms, what other writers, especially black writers? Who or what influenced his persistent choice of Louisiana as subject? From earliest to latest interview, his answers are utterly consistent.

His principal teachers were Stanley Anderson and Mark Harris at San Francisco State and Wallace Stegner, Richard Scowcroft, and Malcolm Cowley at Stanford. All “great critics,” they never fired his creative imagination or produced work he wanted to publish. Louisiana and its multi-ethnic people filled his head and heart; they would be his subject, and he always knew it. What else he needed to know, what his classes and critics taught him, was how to write it, and what authors would give him the best examples of technique. The Little Stream flowed again; Stanford Short Stories for 1960 published “Mary Louise,” whose characters and themes would reappear in Catherine Carmier. Ernest was also advised that to make his living as a writer, he would need to tackle a novel again; simply as a short story writer, he would starve. So he set himself to become a novelist (G & W, “Talking” 229-30; personal interviews).

After Stanford, Gaines gave himself “ten years to make it.” He lived on ＄175 a month in a one-room apartment with no phone and used a dining table in the hallway as a desk. He wrote in the morning, worked at the post office in the afternoon; he made notes on scraps of paper as ideas occurred to him at work; next morning he wrote again—and again—on his Louisiana subject (Carter 71-72; “Bloodline in Ink” 9-10). And all the time he followed his teachers' advice; he read and read and read the authors who could teach him techniques: the Greek tragedians, the Russians, de Maupassant, Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Welty, and Faulkner. Each showed him “one route you could take”; he absorbed all they could give him, then moved beyond them to his own style (Tooker 97; Ingram and Steinberg 341; Werner 35; many interviews).

Early publication was, at best, up-lift and down-drop. Between 1963 and 1966, four more stories were published in noteworthy literary journals. In 1964, Catherine Carmier at last took final form and won the Henry Jackson Literary Prize, but it did not sell. A modest book contract in 1966 gave him some independence and better work time; in 1967 he was able to publish Of Love and Dust and in 1968, three of his magazine stories and two new ones made the collection Bloodline. These books earned few and mixed reviews; most critics who noted his work at all saw its strength and potential, especially in the short stories. But publication brought no royalties, no fame, and no clear hope of ever making his living at his craft. Gaines has admitted that “those first ten years of writing were hell” (Carter 71-72; personal interview).

That he persevered and found his peak skills is partly due to the influences of others living and dead. In those first ten years, if ever, the courage he learned from Miss Augusteen and the encouragement from his teachers stood him in stead. As advisors, Anderson, Harris, and Stegner were replaced by his editors, E. L. Doctorow and Bill Decker at Dial Press, and especially by his agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer, who gave, until her death in 1987, what he counts as his most valuable literary relationship. She offered not only many helpful critiques of his writing, but a related cultural education. With her, he attended symphonies or listened to classical music on radio, and learned the use of motifs, repetition, and understatement; he viewed paintings in galleries, prints in bookstores, and great foreign films, and saw that a few significant details could create a scene. She kept him going with extra food and encouragement; she told him honestly when his work was not yet ready for “the big city”—and when it was. “She was there when no one else was” (G & W, “Interview” 68-69; “Bloodline in Ink” 13-15; letter to author, February 1990).

But his chief supports were his own awareness of his talent, the discipline and repetition of effort he had learned in college track and in the quarters of River Lake, and above all, his independence of character, the haunting memories of his own place and people, and his determination to be loyal to them as his subject.

He has always insisted that no black writer influenced him. By the time he went to San Francisco State, Wright and Baldwin were available, and Invisible Man had just been published. But neither these nor any other earlier black writers were taught in the classroom or recommended to his reading. That may or may not be regrettable: the reading of black writers just might have fogged his clear vision of his own materials and goals, but from the white authors he always knew he was learning skills of narration and not a way of seeing his own world. He acknowledges some impact from reading Zora Neale Hurston, but that is all. Jean Toomer's Cane, he says, would have influenced him had he known it, by its subject (the rural black South) and its structure (short pieces combined into a novel). But he did not know Cane, and any resemblance now is coincidental or due to the authors' similar experiences (Carter 71; Fitzgerald 35; “Talking” 229-30).

Gaines's education in the fifties may have left him uninfluenced by black writers, but beginning publication in the militant sixties subjected him to the demand on black authors to write for social and political goals. Resistance was not easy. California especially was seething with hippies and protest; other young writers thought him out of touch at best, and at worst, an Uncle Tom. Gaines has recognized that had he been in Louisiana, not California, during the Civil Rights era, he might, like his fictional Jimmy, have died on the streets of his home town. But militant words and acts were not what he had experienced “at home”—not even demonstrations. And he believed that the way to force reluctant white recognition of black humanity was to “do something positive. … to use the anger in a positive way, to create a lasting punch, one that will have a longer effect that just screaming” or calling obscene names (Carter 71). And so, as the violence escalated, he kept writing. On a day of bad news, he would sit till he had written a perfect page. He would prove to the Wallaces, Connors, and Faubuses of the South that he could take the letters given by their ancestors and use them better, could do more with them to help his race than they could do to destroy it (“Auntie” 26). And he would do it his way, by telling his people's story. He would “write black” indeed, out his black, that of his people; and he would write not only about his black people in the quarters but his multi-ethnic people, the Creoles, Cajuns, and landowner whites—all their interaction as he knew it, as it had been seared into his memory and carved onto his heart, during the first fifteen years of his life. For his choice of subject, the heart had its reasons which no reasons of any political or aesthetic movement could shake. In this territory, he needed no one to free him.

Eventually, of course, Gaines did begin to include the fifties, sixties, and seventies in his fiction; this fact is due simply to his regular visits to Louisiana, enabling him to know the experiences of young and old in a society changing from sugar cane to oil, from rigid segregation to limited integration, from oppression and fear to activism and assertion. Gaines has said he never expects to change his basic subject because it holds more than he can exhaust in a lifetime. And certainly he has never yielded his position that the artist is a free person, free to write “what he wants, when he wants, to whomever he wants. If he is true, he will use that material which is closest to him” (Grant, DLB 171).

For whom then does he write? Gaines has also insisted without deviation that he writes for no particular audience but to satisfy his own impulse and standards. But he has half-joked that if he were demanded at gun point to name an audience, he would say first, the black youth of the South, and second, the white youth of the South. To the former he hopes to convey a sense of proud and free identity, to the latter a sense of the essential unity of all human beings (Doyle 61 and other interviews). If, in fact, his intuition of his audience and goal is correct, it may explain why children and young people are so much a part of his fiction, why his earliest works choose them as protagonists and even as narrators, and why his stories are so eminently teachable, so appealing and successful as classroom texts.

Success, of course, came—came, in fact, on the appointed ten-year schedule. With The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971, with the dozens of laudatory reviews and especially the televising in 1974, Ernest Gaines became a famous writer. Two more novels, another television production, numerous interviews and public lectures, various awards, a faculty position at the University of Southwestern Louisiana, and a home there in Lafayette—all these have followed his fame. But the essential and compelling elements remain the same: in the fiction, the Place and the People; in the author, a sense of vocation to be the last witness to their way of life before it passes, a sustained modesty in achievement, and the commitment of the person who came from the quarters and returns yearly to replenish his spirit, his imagination, his language, and his love.

Note

1. To the writer, he gave not only several interviews and written responses to questions but also access and introduction to his brother Lionel and his great-uncle, Horace McVay, and to Mrs. Madeline Caillet, present owner of River Lake, who, in her turn, introduced the people still living in the quarters and still very willing to share their memories. The information in this essay not cited from published sources was received from one or another of these generous people.

Works Cited

Aubert, Alvin. “Ernest J. Gaines's Truly Tragic Mulatto.” Callaloo 1 (1978): 68-75.

———. “Gaines, Ernest J.” Contemporary Novelists. Ed. James Vinson. New York: St. Martin's P, 1976. 482-84.

Beauford, Fred. “Conversation with Ernest Gaines.” Black Creation 4 (1972): 16-18. “Black Writer's Views on Literary Lions and Values.” Negro Digest (January 1968): 10-48.

Carter, Tom. “Ernest Gaines.” Essence 6 (1975): 52-53, 71-72.

Curet, Bernard. Our Pride: Pointe Coupée. Baton Rouge: Moran Publishing Corporation, 1981.

David, Idolie Olinde. “Historical Sketch of Early Pointe Coupée.” Written … as Part of the Cultural Arts Program and Bicentennial Observance of the Island Homemakers Club. ts. New Roads, Louisiana Public Library.

Davis, Thadious M. “Headlands and Quarters: Louisiana in Catherine Carmier.” Callaloo 7 (1984): 1-13.

Doyle, Mary Ellen. “A MELUS Interview: Ernest J. Gaines; ‘Other Things to Write About.’” MELUS 11.2 (1984): 59-81.

Estes, David C. “Ethnic Conflict in Southern Louisiana: Ernest J. Gaines's Comic Vision.” MLA Convention. Chicago, 30 Dec. 1985.

Fabre, Michel. “Bayonne or the Yoknapatawpha of Ernest Gaines.” Trans. Melvin Dixon and Didier Malaquin. Callaloo 1 (1978): 110-24. Originally published in French in Recherches Anglaises et Americaines 9 (1976).

Fitzgerald, Gregory and Peter Marchant. “An Interview: Ernest J. Gaines.” New Orleans Review 1 (1969): 331-35.

Gaines, Ernest. “Auntie and the Black Experience in Louisiana.” Louisiana Tapestry: The Ethnic Weave of St. Landry Parish. Eds. Vaughn B. Baker and Jean T. Kreamer. Lafayette: Center for Louisiana Studies, U of Southwestern Louisiana, 1982.

———. “Bloodline in Ink.” CEA Critic 51 (1989): 2-12

Gaudet, Marcia, and Carl Wooton. “An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines.” New Orleans Review 14 (1987): 62-70.

———. “Talking with Ernest J. Gaines.” Callaloo 11 (1988): 229-43.

Grant, William E. “Ernest J. Gaines.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 2: American Novelists since World War II. Ed. Jeffrey Helterman and Richard Layman. Detroit: Gale Research, 1978: 170-75.

Ingram, Forrest and Barbara Steinberg. “On the Verge: An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines.” New Orleans Review 3 (1973): 339-44.

Laney, Ruth. “The Last One Left.” Sunday Advocate Magazine (Baton Rouge, La.) 30 October 1983: 6-7.

“The LSU Rural Life Museum.” Guidebook for Tourists. 21 pp.

Rowell, Charles H. “That Little Territory in and around Bayonne: Ernest Gaines and Place.” MLA Convention. Los Angeles, 1982. ts.

———. “‘This Louisiana Thing That Drives Me’: An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines.” Callaloo 1 (1978): 39-51.

———. “The Quarters: Ernest J. Gaines and the Sense of Place.” The Southern Review 21 (1985): 733-50.

Tallant, Drury. “French Influences on River Lake Plantation.” ts., 3 pp. Private collection, Mrs. Madeline Caillet.

Tooker, Dan, and Roger Hofheins. Interviews with Northern California Novelists. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

Werner, Craig Hansen. Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since Joyce. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1982.

Personal Interviews

Aaron, Willie, Carrie Hebert, and Rosie Ruffin. Residents of River Lake Plantation Quarters. 22 July 1986.

Caillet, Madeline. Owner of River Lake Plantation. 22 July 1986.

Gaines, Ernest J. October 1982 and July 1983.

Gaines, Lionel. 23 July 1986.

McVay, Horace. 23 July 1986.

Turner, Bruce. Archivist, Dupre Library, U of Southwestern Louisiana. 21 July 1986.