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Bard From the Bayou
| Article
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11120 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1993 |
2,305 Words |
| Author
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Ruth Laney
Ruth Laney wrote and produced the television documentary
Ernest J. Gaines: Louisiana Stories. She lives in Baton Rouge
and contributes articles to national magazines. |
Mention Ernest J. Gaines, and most people frown as though trying to place the name. Add the qualifier "the man who wrote The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," and a smile of recognition breaks through.
That book and its title character--later made world famous through a television movie--are household words. So much so that Gaines has instructed his family not to mention Miss Jane on his tombstone. "I don't want to be remembered only as her creator," he says.
Indeed, he is much more. In six novels and a book of short stories, Gaines has created a complex world of human relationships--black, white, and Creole--set in the plantation country of southern Louisiana. He began publishing his work in the 1960s, when many black writers used their books as soapboxes.
But Gaines was made of sterner stuff, and he had the soul of an artist. "If I can't move you with the story I tell, I don't want to do it through rhetoric," he once said. While the battle for civil rights raged, he closeted himself in a tiny rented room and wrote about Miss Jane, whose life spans 110 years from slavery to the movement. He was intensely aware of the war going on but chose to fight it his own way. "When Bull Conner turned the hoses on the marchers, I just said to myself, 'Write a better paragraph,'" he says.
Most of his work is set in the past--the 1940s through '70s. He treats all his characters--even the most loathsome redneck--with compassion, and he writes and rewrites to give his prose the clean beauty of the classics. "I want to create something I can be proud of years later," he has said.
During his thirty-year career, Gaines gave up all semblance of what most people call normal life, choosing not to marry and have a family so that he could devote himself to his work. Often living hand to mouth, he wrote for up to twelve hours a day. But he never became a household word, even when Miss Jane and A Gathering of Old Men were seen by millions on television. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Miss Jane won neither.
Gaines won his share of awards and plaudits, but other black writers such as Toni Morrison and his friend Alice Walker excited far more attention. His was a quieter kind of fame largely centered around Miss Jane, which has been translated into a dozen languages and is taught on numerous college campuses. But peak success eluded him until
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