Keith Clark - Navigating the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines: A roadmap for readers

NAVIGATING THE FICTION OF

ERNEST J. GAINES

NAVIGATING THE FICTION OF

ERNEST J. GAINES

A ROADMAP FOR READERS

KEITH CLARK

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

BATON ROUGE

Published by Louisiana State University Press

Copyright 2020 by Louisiana State University Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

LSU Press Paperback Original

First printing

Designer : Mandy McDonald Scallan

Typeface : Sentinel

Printer and binder: LSI

The authors 2014 interview with Ernest Gaines is reproduced

with the permission of the Ernest Gaines family.

Library of Congress Cataloging - in - Publication Data

Names: Clark, Keith, 1963 author.

Title: Navigating the fiction of Ernest J. Gaines : a roadmap for readers /

Keith Clark.

Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2020] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019040507 (print) | LCCN 2019040508 (ebook) | ISBN

978-0-8071-7104-2 (paperback ; alk. paper) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7338-1 (pdf) | ISBN

978-0-8071-7339-8 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Gaines, Ernest J., 19332019 Criticism and interpretation.

| Southern States In literature. | African Americans in literature. |

African Americans Southern States Social conditions.

Classification: LCC PS3557.A355 Z63 2020 (print) | LCC PS3557.A355

(ebook) | DDC 813/.54 dc

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040507

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019040508

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

For William Hall Jr.,

Kimberly Gregg Hall,

Joy Myree Mainor,

and the late

Dr. J. Lee Greene

and

Dr. James W. Coleman

In Memoriam

Ernest James Gaines

1933 2019

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful for the support of colleagues at my home institution, George Mason University: Debra Lattanzi Shutika, English Department chair; Ann L. Ardis, dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences; Stefan Wheelock, exemplary intellectual, teacher, and friend; and Cynthia Fuchs, esteemed film/media studies scholar and a compassionate colleague who always manages to coax a smile.

I benefited from a residency at Virginia Humanities, which provided invaluable research time in Charlottesville at a particularly perilous moment in that city s and our nation s tumultuous racial history. I especially appreciated the generosity of Jeanne Nicholson Siler, director of the Fellowship Program, whose attentiveness covered everything from making sure payments arrived on time to recommending Cvilles best coffeehouses and eateries. Dear scholar/friend Maurice Wallace proved an indispensable presence during my Charlottesville sabbatical, providing scholarly support and, even more importantly, brotherly camaraderie in an unfamiliar environment.

I owe my unreserved gratitude to a community of persons whose identities overlap friends , scholars, mentors: Trudier Harris (University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa) brought her formidable intellect and boundless generosity to an earlier draft of this work. Joy Myree Mainor (Morgan State University) and Hilary Holladay (biographer and journalist) also provided keen insights on portions of the manuscript.

I am indebted to former Gaines Center head Matthew Teutsch, who invited me to deliver the third annual Ernest J. Gaines Lecture in 2015, and to its current head, Cheylon Woods, who graciously facilitated and hosted my inaugural visit to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Margaret Lovecraft, acquisitions editor at Louisiana State University Press, has been exceedingly supportive unfailingly patient, professional, and gracious.

Longtime friends from my undergraduate days, Lola Singletary and Jacob Wilson, have remained steadfast in their love and support.

Finally, Im inestimably indebted to William Hall Jr., Kimberly Gregg Hall, and Joy Myree Mainor: heaven - hearted friends, when the hot winds truly tested.

NAVIGATING THE FICTION OF

ERNEST J. GAINES

Introduction

When the young Alice Walker proclaimed in 1970 that Ernest Gaines was perhaps the most gifted young black writer working today, one might have been inclined to view this avowal as the product of youthful insouciance and more than a tad bit premature (Walker, In Search 135). Since Gaines himself was still emerging in 1970 as a thirty - seven - year - old writer who had yet to compose the masterworks The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Lesson before Dying (1993), one might have forgiven those who bristled at Walkers intrepid claim as an affront to more popular and widely published young voices: think of such firebrands as Amiri Baraka and Nikki Giovanni, not to mention a fortyish flame - throwing writer/activist named James Baldwin. But in light of Gainess own blossoming over the subsequent five decades into the most acclaimed black southern male writer since Richard Wright, Walkers observation now seems keenly prophetic, her foresight a testament to an artist whose early, less well - known fiction probed the depths of human emotions with a subtlety, intensity, and sensitivity that may not have been appreciated at the time when more thundering expression was in vogue. Gaines maintained his prodigious output into his ninth decade, his fiction consisting of, in addition to the aforementioned works, the novels Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), In My Fathers House (1978), and A Gathering of Old Men (1983); Bloodline (1968), a collection of the short stories; and most recently a novella, The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017).

The African American southern male canon abounds with prominent and underread fiction writers whove chronicled the harrowing experiences of blacks below the Mason - Dixon Line, their works spanning over a hundred years: Charles W. Chesnutt, George Wylie Henderson, John Oliver Killens, Albert Murray, Raymond Andrews, Randall Kenan, and of course, the aforementioned patriarch, Wright. While we may debate whether Gaines, still writing into his eighties, supplanted the Black Boy and Native Son author whose influence he has disclaimed, Gainess array of accomplishments is indisputable: the National Book Critics Circle Award for Lesson ; Pulitzer nominations for Jane Pittman and Lesson ; the Southern Book Award for Fiction; a MacArthur Foundation genius award; a Guggenheim Fellowship; a National Endowment for the Arts Award; the National Governors Association Award for Lifetime Achievement to the Arts; the National Medal of Arts, especially noteworthy because it was bestowed upon Gaines in 2012 by the nations first African American president. To be sure, he has fulfilled his most ardent desire, expressed in a 1978 essay in which he ruminated on his tenure as an undergraduate in the mid -1950s: When I told my adviser that I wanted to be a writer, he asked me what else I wanted to be. I told him nothing else.... I could not think of anything else I wanted to do ( Mozart and Leadbelly 1213). Further reflecting on those early days at San Francisco State, Gaines would add: There was something deep in me that I wanted to say something that had been boiling in me ever since I left the South and maybe before then (13). His Bayonne, Louisiana, stands as the black fictive counterpart of Faulkners mythic Yoknapatawpha, a hamlet where Gaines dramatizes the landscapes and personscapes of the rural southerners who kindled and cultivated his literary imagination.