The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

Ernest J. Gaines
1971
Introduction
Author Biography
Plot Summary
Characters
Themes
Style
Historical Context
Critical Overview
Criticism
Sources
For Further Study

Ernest J. Gaines
1971

Introduction

Heralded by some as the best African American author writing in America today, Ernest James Gaines is best known and celebrated for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. As a black writer, Gaines has taken full advantage of African American culture by writing stories about rural Louisiana. In doing so, Gaines has made himself a "country-boy writer" of folk tales more grown than made. These stories tell of the struggles of blacks to make a living in a land that has not championed the rights of all its people.

The story of Miss Jane Pittman is a supposed interview with a woman who is 110 years old. She has witnessed and been a part of the history of black America since the end of the Civil War. She tells her story to the persistent recorder in her own words and with humor. This "editor" admits that he restructured the narrative so it would be more accessible to a novel reader but he tried to maintain, as much as possible, her voice. A triumph in American literature, the subject of the novel has been taken to the heart of its readers, and was made into an Emmy Award-winning television movie.

Author Biography

Amid the worst times of the Great Depression, Ernest James Gaines was born on a plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, in 1933. At the age of nine, he joined his parents in the field and dug potatoes for fifty cents a day. During this time on the plantation he was heavily influenced by his aunt, Augustine Jefferson. She had no legs but was still able to care for him and other members of the family. It was this aunt who took care of laundry and cooking for the family, even though she had to crawl to perform her chores. She became the model for many of the women in Gaines's novels, such as the title character of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, whose faith and self-sacrifice would enable the next generation to have a better life.

At the age of fifteen, Gaines was taken by his mother and stepfather to Vallejo, California. This was a fortunate move for a boy who was to become a writer. The education to be gained in the Californian school system was better than that on the Oscar plantation, and the library, his favorite retreat, was open to readers of all races. But the books he found did not include rural black people as subjects or authors. He read the next best thing— stories of Russian peasants and immigrants. But while their history paralleled the plight of Southern black slaves, he knew that African Americans had tales of their own, since members of his family were constantly telling stories. Gaines began writing to fill those gaps on the library shelves.

At the age of seventeen, he naively sent his first novel to a publisher, but it was returned. Not easily discouraged, he continued to write. He also read extensively. Some of his favorite writers included Russian author Ivan Turgenev, as well as Americans Willa Cather, William Faulkner (to whom he is sometimes compared), and Ernest Hemingway. His diligence paid off when he met with his first success. In 1956, while a student at San Francisco State College, he published a short story in a small literary magazine called Transfer. With this encouragement, he graduated from college, won a Wallace Stegner fellowship and went on to study creative writing at Stanford University from 1958-1959.

He reworked the rejected novel he wrote at the age of seventeen and in 1964 published the work as Catherine Carmier. Although the novel was not a critical or financial success, Gaines found his voice for future works. That voice was centered on the world of the plantation and its effect on the creation of black culture. "We cannot ignore that rural past or those older people in it. Their stories are the kind I want to write about. I am what I am today because of them," he said in an interview in 1977.

Having found his voice, his 1967 novel, Of Love and Dust, brought him recognition. Four years later, Miss Jane Pittman established Gaines as a literary master of American fiction. Since then, he has won numerous awards, including a National Books Critic Circle Award and a MacArthur "genius" grant, and has published several collections of short stories and several novels. A writer in residence at the University of Southern Louisiana, Gaines lives with his wife in San Francisco but makes frequent trips to Louisiana.

Plot Summary

Introduction

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman follows the life of one woman from her emancipation as a slave in the 1860s to her initiation into the Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. A work of historical fiction, the Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman takes place in rural Louisiana. It opens with an encounter between the ostensible "editor" of the novel, a high school history teacher, and Miss Jane Pittman, a woman who is about 110 years old. He wants to use her life story to teach his students history as it has affected real people. The editor attests that he has tried to reproduce Jane's story in her own words, and the rest of the novel is narrated from her point of view.

Book I: The War Years

A Union Army corporal and his company stop at the Louisiana plantation on which "Ticey," as Jane is called until she is about eleven years old, is enslaved. (As a slave girl whose parents died when she was very young, Jane is not sure when she was born.) The corporal renames Ticey "Jane Brown," after his own daughter, and thereafter Jane refuses to respond to her original slave name.

A year later, at the end of the Civil War, Jane and some of the other former slaves head north. They run into "patrollers," white men who tracked escaped slaves during the war and returned them to their masters. The patrollers murder everyone in the party but Jane and a young boy named Ned. Though Jane is perhaps only eight years older than Ned, she takes responsibility for him as if she were his mother. Jane gathers up some food, and charges Ned to carry a flint and iron, two small rocklike tools for starting a fire.

The two of them continue to travel toward what Jane hopes is Ohio, but they never make it out of Louisiana. They are fed and aided by several people, black and white, friendly and unfriendly. At one point, they meet a hunter:

"Who was them other people you seen?" I asked him. "Any of them going to Ohio?"

"They was going everywhere," he said. "Some say Ohio, some say Kansas—some say Canada. Some of them even said Luzana and Mi'sippi."

"Luzana and Mi'sippi ain't North," I said.

'That's right, it ain't North," the hunter said. "But they had left out just like you, a few potatoes and another old dress. No map, no guide, no nothing. Like freedom was a place coming to meet them half way. Well, it ain't coming to meet you. And it might not be there when you get there, either."

"We ain't giving up," I said. "We done gone this far."

Tired and exhausted, Jane and Ned soon settle on a plantation owned by Mr. Bone.

Book II: Reconstruction

On Mr. Bone's plantation, Jane works clearing fields and pays for Ned, whom she now considers her own son, to attend school. For a short time, conditions improve slightly for Jane and the other slaves, but quickly worsen as economic instability and racist organizations come to dominate the South. When Colonel Dye takes over the plantation, Jane comments, "It was slavery again, all right." However, she no longer idealizes the North as a place of opportunity and equality for blacks. She continues to perform field work for Colonel Dye through Reconstruction, a period of about twelve years following the Civil War.

Ned changes his name to Ned Douglass, after the abolitionist and autobiographer Frederick Douglass. When he is about seventeen, Ned becomes an organizer for a group that encourages blacks to leave the South and helps them settle in the North. After he is threatened because of his work, Ned leaves for Kansas. Jane and Joe Pittman then commence a common-law marriage and move with Joe's two daughters to Mr. Clyde's ranch. Jane dreams for years that Joe will be killed trying to break a certain wild stallion. When one day she believes she sees that horse in the corral, she visits the hoo-doo woman (a kind of fortune-teller), who confirms that Jane's dream is accurate. Hoping to prevent disaster, Jane frees the stallion from the corral. However, all the men, including Joe, chase after it, and in the process, Joe is killed. Jane keeps the name Pittman in honor of Joe and moves again, settling near Bayonne.

In the year 1899, she is joined by Ned, now a teacher, and his wife and children. Ned ignites the anger of local white supremacists for speaking publicly about the necessity for black freedom and equality. They hire Albert Cluveau, a mercenary killer and Jane's fishing partner, to murder Ned. Neither Jane nor Ned's family can seek justice because the legal system is controlled by white hate groups. Cluveau dies ten years later, suffering violent hallucinations which he wrongly believes are caused by a curse put on him by Jane.

Book III: The Plantation

Though she wishes to relocate far away and escape her painful memories, Jane is persuaded to move eight miles to Samson, "because memories wasn't a place, memories was in the mind." She works in the fields and later in the main house of the Samson plantation. Jane joins the church and becomes a respected member of the community.

During her time at the Samson plantation, Jane witnesses the cruel fate of Timmy Henderson, the illegitimate black son of plantation owner Robert Samson. He is brought up to the house to be a riding companion for his younger half-brother, Tee Bob, and his father allows him to get away with all sorts of pranks as long as he shows proper respect to whites. When the plantation's white overseer, Tom Joe, begins beating Timmy after Tee Bob is thrown from a horse, Timmy talks back to him and accidentaly knocks him over. Robert forces him to leave the ranch, even though his own wife argues Tom Joe should be punished instead. "You pinned medals on a white man when he beat a nigger for drawing back his hand," Robert argues.

Later Tee Bob, the only legitimate son and heir to the plantation, falls in love with Mary Agnes LeFabre, a mulatto schoolteacher. Knowing that social customs in the 1930s South would never permit an interracial marriage, Mary Agnes refuses Tee Bob's proposal. Distraught, Tee Bob commits suicide and Robert Samson blames Mary Agnes. Jules Raynard, a longtime family friend, prevents Robert from harming Mary Agnes and sees that she leaves town immediately.

Book IV: The Quarters

This book begins in the early 1940s, just after the birth of Jimmy Aaron. Jane moves out of the main house and back down to the "quarters," where the black sharecroppers live. Jane does not pay rent, but her house has no electricity and no running water. She, like many others in the parish, believes Jimmy to be "the One"—that is, a future leader of their African American community. As he grows up, they all take special care to instill in him high expectations for himself. Since Jane and many of her neighbors are illiterate, Jimmy writes letters for them. He also reads the comics and sports sections of the newspaper out loud to Jane. Jane's passion for listening to baseball games on the radio results in her being replaced as church mother.

Jimmy leaves Samson to attend school in New Orleans, and when he returns in the early 1960s, he tries to persuade Jane's community to join in some civil rights protests he has organized. Though only a few are inclined to join Jimmy, Robert Samson demands that anyone who participates in civil rights demonstrations leave the quarters (which are on his property).

Jimmy and his group determine to have a young mulatto girl arrested in the nearby city of Bayonne. The girl drinks water from a fountain reserved for whites and is arrested. A few days later, Jimmy and his group begin to protest the arrest by marching on the Bayonne courthouse. Jane, who is now well over one hundred years old, and several others from Samson start toward Bayonne to join the demonstration. Robert Samson intercepts them and tells them that Jimmy has been shot dead. Despite Jimmy's death, they are undeterred. Jane stares down Robert and continues past him with the others towards town.

Characters

Jimmy Aaron

The people in the quarters continually hope for a leader like Moses who will help them leave the plantation. By the time Jimmy Aaron is five or six years old, Jane and the others are already wondering if he is the "One." Jimmy's father is unknown and his mother left to find work in New Orleans shortly after his birth, so Jane and the other women of the quarters are his surrogate mothers. His love for reading and learning inspire the hope that he will be the "One." However, when he returns from schooling in New Orleans and asks the church members to begin demonstrating like Dr. Martin Luther King, they all but refuse. Jimmy is shot for his political activism but his death causes passive people like Jane to take a stand, and so she walks past Robert Samson.

Olivia Antoine

A woman from the plantation quarters who sells smalls items such as seeds and perfume around the parish. Since she has a car, she also runs errands for many of the older folk on the plantation. She takes young Jimmy with her on her runs when he is young, and she says she wishes he was her own son. When Jimmy organizes the demonstration at the courthouse in Bayonne, Olivia volunteers to drive everyone there and pay bus fare for those who cannot fit in her car.

Big Laura

A large woman known as Big Laura takes charge of the freed slaves who have struck out for the north. She carries her baby girl, pulls a little boy named Ned along by the hand, and still carries the most supplies of anyone. She keeps the group orderly and refuses to allow a boy to "stud," or rape, Jane. Consequently, Jane looks upon her as protector. Tragically, a group of Confederate soldiers, called "Secesh" (precursors of the KKK), massacre everyone in the group except Ned and Jane. Unable to bury Big Laura, Jane drapes her with clothing then quickly leaves taking Ned with her.

Harriet Black

See Black Harriet

Black Harriet

A very dark "Singalee" woman who is "queen" of the fields at the Samson plantation. When another worker, Katie Nelson, challenges her for the title, she enters into a "race" of digging up weeds. Harriet eventually cracks and begins digging up cotton instead of weeds. Tom Joe gives her a severe beating, and she is forced to leave.

Mr. Bone

Having failed to make much progress toward Ohio, the newly freed Jane ends up at Mr. Bone's plantation. Mr. Bone was put in charge of the plantation by the Union Soldiers as part of the Reconstruction of the South. He is involved in local politics and assists Republican (the antislavery party) candidates in their run for office. Unfortunately, his days at the plantation end when the federal government decides that Reconstruction has done enough. Mr. Bone gives the plantation back to Colonel Eugene I. Dye, but not before warning his workers that they should no longer count on the "Yankees" to care about their situation.

Etienne Bouie

A Creole yardman at the Samson plantation during Tee Bob's time, he is one of the older folks left on the plantation during Jimmy's time.

Jane Brown

See Miss Jane Pittman

Mr. Brown

Ticey has been placed at the roadside to meet the Yankee soldiers and give them water. The soldier who speaks to her is Mr. Brown. He tells her that the Yankees are going to set them free and avenge the inhumanity of slavery. He also tells her that 'Ticey' is a slave name. He calls her Jane Brown in honor of his own daughter at home. This encounter causes Jane Brown to decide to go north in search of her namesake and to be free.

Ned Brown

When Ned's mother, Big Laura, is killed by the Secesh (a part of the Confederate Army), Jane gives him the two flint stones she used for making fire. He carries these in honor of his mother and follows Jane North. As Ned grows up, he goes to school and works for a local committee helping African Americans but he leaves when the Ku Klux Klan comes looking for him. He becomes a teacher, serves in the Army during the Cuban (also known as Spanish-American) war, and begins a family in Kansas.

Eventually he moves his family back to the South to be near Jane and to educate the children of former slaves so that they might have a better life than their parents. He also tries to spread the word about black politics—specifically the teachings of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, whose name he has taken as his own. His rhetoric is uncompromising and sounds revolutionary to the rigid minds of both black and white folks. Inevitably, he is murdered, but his name takes on the aura of legend and a school for black children is built in his memory. Ned's story is one of Gaines's many pieces of anecdotal evidence that change, even though its slow, will always come.

Jimmy Caya

Jimmy hangs around Robert Samson's son Tee Bob because he wants to be accepted into the legitimate aristocracy. He is ashamed of his background as "white trash"—a distinction given to middle-class whites who have come to money late by working land. Jimmy rides from the University with Tee Bob and on one journey Tee Bob tells about his love for Mary Agnes LeFabre, a mixedrace Creole teacher. Jimmy tries to set Tee Bob straight on the rules of white and black in the South. This only infuriates Tee Bob. Later, when Tee Bob commits suicide, Jimmy tries to ingratiate himself with Raynard and Samson by blaming Mary. This backfires because of Tee Bob's letter. Consequently, Jimmy gains nothing but humiliation as he confesses his part in the matter to the sheriff.

Albert Cluveau

A white man, Albert is a contract killer for the area between Johnville and Bayonne. Strangely, he is a friend of Jane's. They fish together quite often, and he performs small chores for her while she sometime cooks for him. However, he talks endlessly about killing people. When Jane's foster son Ned arrives in the area and insists on pursuing his plan to build a schoolhouse for the children, Albert is asked to kill Ned. He tries to avoid the assignment and even warns Jane, but he eventually does the job because he doesn't want to be killed himself. However, he regrets having done so and tries to avoid Jane. Eventually their paths cross and Jane tells him he will not die pleasantly. From then on he leads an uneasy life. When death finally comes, his screams are heard all over the district.

Media Adaptations

• The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was adapted as a television drama in 1974 by Tracey Keenan for Tomorrow Entertainment Inc. The adaptation aired on CBS starring Cicely Tyson in the lead role. The drama was highly acclaimed and received nine Emmy awards. It is available on video through Prism Entertainment.
• The novel has also been recorded several times into audio-book format. The first time was in 1974 when Claudia McNeil read the work for Caedmon Records. Then in 1987, Roses Prichard read the work for Newport Beack Books on Tape. Most recently, Prince Frederick Recorded Books produced a reading by Lynn Thigpen in 1994.

Mr. Clyde

Mr. Clyde owns the ranch where Joe and Jane come to work after leaving Colonel Dye's plantation. He generously loans Joe the money to pay off Dye and is a fair employer, allowing Joe, who will become his Chief Breaker, to be his own boss.

Edward Stephen Douglass

See Ned Brown

Ned Douglass

See Ned Brown

Vivian Douglass

Vivian is Ned's supportive wife. She explains to Jane that she won't try to change his mind about lecturing because she knew before he started he might be killed. After his death, she wants to continue his work but Jane convinces her to take her family back to Kansas where it is safe.

Colonel Eugene L. Dye

As part of Reconstruction, the federal government agrees to withdraw Northern troops and give back land confiscated at the end of the Civil War. Consequently, Mr. Bone is replaced by the Colonel. "It was slavery again, all right," says Jane. To make matters even more difficult for Jane, the Colonel is a bit crazy. Jane and her husband, Joe Pittman, eventually leave his plantation, but only after paying the Colonel money he says he spent to get the Klan away from Joe.

Madame Eloise Gautier

Madame Gautier is a mulatto "hoo-doo" woman (a type of fortune-teller) from New Orleans. Jane visits her after the dreams she has of Joe's death prevent her from sleeping. Madame predicts Joe's death and gives Jane a powder to keep him away from the horse, but Jane doesn't trust it. Instead she frees the horse, setting in motion the events that lead to his death.

Sheriff Sam Guidry

The local sheriff, Guidry, "didn't ask you for information, he told you he wanted it." He views blacks and whites differently, and when Mary LeFabre is too upset to speak with him after Tee Bob's suicide, he starts slapping her around. Eventually he does accept Jules Raynard's version of events and allows Mary to leave town without violence.

Joe Hardy

The second teacher on the Samson plantation, Joe Hardy swindles extra pay from the plantation workers and tries to romance the older girls. He has to leave town after he wakes up Sheriff Guidry to complain of a beating he received from one girl's father.

Timmy Henderson

"Timmy was nigger," as Jane tells it, but everybody knew he was Robert Samson's son. Samson never denies the child is his, because Timmy looks and acts more like his father than Samson's legitimate son, Tee Bob. Samson allows Timmy to be more than "nigger" but less than white. He gives him the position of companion and stable hand to his younger brother Tee Bob. The half-brothers grow up as best friends, and together they pull pranks on the older people. Timmy is allowed to get away with his tricks as long as he defers to Tee Bob and shows respect to white people. Despite Timmy's privileges, "white trash" still want to be called "mister" by anyone with an ounce of black blood. One such person is Tom Joe, the white overseer on the plantation.

Tom Joe hates Timmy and wants any excuse to come at him. The excuse comes one day when Tee Bob is thrown from his horse and breaks his arm. Timmy carries him home and Tom Joe finds Tee Bob's injury enough to warrant a beating. Timmy can't quite avoid being whipped because Tom Joe is white, although he does insult the man. Afterwards, Timmy is forced to leave the plantation for his own safety. While Robert Samson provides him with money to travel, he won't protect him from white men like Tom Joe. Tee Bob doesn't understand why his beloved brother has to leave.

Mary Hodges

A constant companion of Jane during her old age, Mary Hodges is fiercely loyal and protective of her friend's health. She is suspicious of potentially harmful situations. We first encounter her as the "editor" tries to ask Jane to tell her story. At the end, Mary tries to convince Jane not to go to Jimmy's demonstration in Bayonne. Seeing Jane's determination, however, Mary finally accompanies her.

Hunter

The Hunter is a black man Jane and Ned meet in their first week on the road. He ridicules them for trying to reach Ohio, but he is also engaged in a similarly improbable quest to find his father.

Just Thomas

Just Thomas is the head deacon of the Samson plantation's black church. He demonstrates the conservative nature of the black church community, and adamantly resists the message Jimmy is trying to bring to the community. He and Jane argue over letting Jimmy speak. In resisting Jimmy, Just Thomas shows that those who put their trust in religion without also asserting their political rights—as the Reverend Martin Luther King does—do so in the belief that their reward will be greater in heaven.

Mary Agnes LeFabre

Mary Agnes is one of a class of Southerners known as Creoles—an exclusive, mixed race society that is proud of its French roots, and shuns "white trash" as much as it shuns black ex-slaves. This group is mulatto (of mixed black and white ancestry) and in Mary's case it means that her grandfather kept a black mistress (as did many white men before the Civil War). Mary herself is a "high yaller" Creole—so light-skinned she can pass for white. However, she decides to give up her class advantages and bring her education to a plantation school house. Mary comes to realize, members of the Creole class do little to assist in bridging the gap between white and black. In trying to remedy this, she finds herself embroiled in another boundary crossing that ends tragically.

Tee Bob, Robert Samson's son, falls in love with Mary. She explains to him the reality of their situation—their world won't let them be together because he is white and she is black. Following her rejection, Tee Bob kills himself. In his final letter he releases her of blame but the situation forces her to flee the plantation.

Aunt Lena

See Lena Washington

Miss Lilly

Miss Lilly is the first teacher on the Samson plantation. When she arrives from Opelousas, she tries to improve her students' manners and appearance as well as their minds. The workers don't appreciate her interfering, and she finally leaves.

Molly

Molly is an aging black house servant at the Clyde ranch. She has driven off all of the previous workers sent to help her because she is scared someone might take her place as cook and nanny. Jane is too stubborn to let Molly get the best of her, so Molly leaves the ranch. She eventually dies "of a broken heart."

Old Man

The Old Man is a white man who feeds Jane and Ned during their first week on the road. A sympathetic figure, he tries to point out the difficulty of reaching Ohio, but gives the children assistance when they decide to leave anyway.

Miss Pittman

Miss Jane Pittman is the focus of the narrative, for she has witnessed one hundred years of life in Louisiana, from slavery to the civil rights movement. As a strong candid woman she relates the events of the novel. While she sees little good coming from the federal government or from the white race, as individuals she sees both their faults and their goodness. She acknowledges her own weaknesses as well, saying that disliking some people on first sight is "one of my worse habits, probably the worst I have, but I can't get rid of it." Most of all, Jane is a survivor.

Jane's instincts for survival are hard earned. When she leaves the plantation where she was born, she is stubborn in her faith that the North is a sort of promised land. She is determined to take Ned there even when told it will take her thirty years to get there. By the time Mr. Bone turns his plantation over to Colonel Dye, however, she has learned not to believe in rescue: "I would stay right here and do what I could for me and Ned. If I heard of a place where I could live better, where Ned could get a better learning, I would go there to live. Till then I would stay where I was." Jane realizes she can only depend on herself to make her life better.

But Jane also knows that individuals can make a difference in the lives of many. When Ned is threatened because of his work with the committee, she tells him to "do what you think's right," even if it meant leaving her. She also sees the inspiration successful African-American athletes, like boxer Joe Louis and baseball player Jackie Robinson, give to her community. So, although her foster son Ned was killed for his attempts to improve things for black people, she encourages Jimmy in his own crusade for rights. She warns him to be patient, for she knows that only time and the concerted effort of each person toward change would make the difference. While Jimmy ends up another casualty of racism, by the close of the novel, Jane, now inspired by Jimmy, takes a stand for human rights. Jimmy told her that her example would inspire others.

Thus while Jane's "autobiography" is the story of one individual, it is also the story of a community. Jane embodies the philosophy that today's people must sacrifice so their children will have a better future. The expression of this philosophy, however, is especially successful because it is communicated within an entertaining folk narrative. Jane's story is not simply a biography, but a history—a story, finally, of all of us.

Joe Pittman

Joe has lost his wife and his two half-grown daughters are now without a mother. When he meets Jane while working on Colonel Dye's plantation they begin to live together and Jane changes her name to Pittman. Not believing in the church, the two never officially marry. Shortly after, Joe begins to consider leaving the plantation to break horses. With his skill he hopes to get better pay and better treatment. Eventually, he does find a ranch near the Texas border and so impresses the owner, Mr. Clyde, that he is offered a job and given the money he needs to move his family. Dye tries to thwart the move by bringing up a bogus debt, but Joe pays him anyway and moves to the ranch with Jane and his daughters Ella and Clara.

They live well on the Clyde ranch for seven or eight years until Jane begins to dream of his death. When she sees the horse that kills Joe in her dream, she turns to a hoo-doo woman for help. She eventually sets the horse free and in going after the horse, Joe is killed. Joe's battle with nature can be seen as a parallel to Ned's and Jimmy's battles with a racist society.

Jules Raynard

Jules, Tee Bob Samson's parrain (godfather), is a good friend of the Samson family. It seems to him that he has lived as much of his life at the Samson plantation as at his own house. He and Jane are good friends who have long chats in the kitchen whenever he visits. His stature in the family enables him to take charge during the chaos following Tee Bob's suicide. He takes control of the evidence and the investigation. He allows enough truth to come out without wholly compromising the family or causing the death of Mary Agnes LeFabre.

Miss Amma Dean Samson

Married to Robert Samson, Miss Amma Dean is a typical wife of the white southern gentleman. She rules the house with quiet dignity, and accepts that her husband has fathered a child with one of the black workers. While she is quirky enough to expect things of Robert not in his character, she is traditional enough to expect Tee Bob to marry Judy Major. She is bothered by his liking for Mary Agnes and devastated by his suicide.

Tee Bob Samson

See Robert Samson Jr.

Robert Samson

Robert owns the Samson estate where Jane lives when Gaines approaches her for a story. He does many things to begin the process of raising the previously enslaved. He treats his wage earners decently and slowly begins to give land to sharecroppers—although he favors the white Cajuns and mulatto Creoles when doing so. However, he is a harsh follower of the Southern moral code governing black and white relations. When his illegitimate son Timmy fights with his white overseer, for instance, he banishes the boy from his plantation, saying "there ain't no such thing as a half nigger." He is ready to murder Mary LeFabre for her innocent involvement with his son until Jules Raynard stops him. When one of his tenants participates in a demonstration in Baton Rouge, he kicks the man's family off the plantation. As a result, when Jane walks past Robert Samson to go to the courthouse in Bayonne, her act symbolizes a blow against the old racist order.

Robert Samson Jr.

As the son of Robert Samson, Tee Bob stands to inherit the plantation but he cannot accept the Southern code which accompanies this heritage. Consequently, he pursues Mary Agnes LeFabre, a woman he is struck with although she is a mulatto. He fights Jimmy Caya when he suggests Mary Agnes is made for Tee Bob to use, not to love. When Mary refuses his advances repeating Jimmy's argument that black and white cannot mix—he violently attacks her. In the end, he writes a letter to his mother saying he can't "find peace" in such an unjust society, and then kills himself.

Ticey

See Miss Jane Pittman

Tom Joe

Tom Joe is the white overseer on the Samson plantation. Considered "white trash," he takes out his anger and feelings of inferiority on the black workers. He knows he can mistreat black people without fear of punishment. For instance, when he argues with Timmy, he is supported by Robert Samson, Timmy's white father, who gives his son a beating after the argument.

Unc Isom

At the opening of the novel, Unc Isom is advisor and spokesperson for the slaves on the plantation. After emancipation, he advises them to think carefully before setting out for the north and breaking up their community. Rumor has it that once he was a witch doctor. However, he is considered to be too old to be able to put a curse on anyone. Therefore, at the news of freedom, several of the younger people defy him and set out from the plantation for the North.

Lena Washington

Lena, Jimmy's great-aunt, raises him as the hope of the community. She is typical of Gaines's self-sacrificing women—the greatest being Jane. This character makes sacrifices in the present that are not immediately beneficial but later result in the betterment of the whole community. Thus, Lena cares for her great-nephew not just because he has no parents, but with the hope that he will become a leader for his people.

Themes

Custom and Tradition

The social code of the South was a set of rules passed down from father to son from long ago. By this code, black and white people are viewed and treated differently. The distinctions between black and white do not always depend on skin color but on blood—as in the case of Mary Agnes—and class standing. The latter condition fits Jimmy Caya, whom Sam Guidry looks at as less than white because of his poor origins. After the South's defeat in the Civil War, however, this social code no longer stood upon legal ground. So while men of Robert Samson's generation accepted it as their heritage, many of their sons had to come to terms with the reality of a changing world. For Tee Bob, it was too much. As Jules Raynard says to Jane, "these rules just ain't old enough."

What Raynard means is that the corruption of the traditional code in the South has not happened fast enough for all involved. While many people involved with the code still participate in its upkeep, there are a few renegades like Tee Bob. For example, Mr. Raynard and Jane are friends, in every sense of the word, yet they are unable to sit at the same table. Small discrepancies like this friendship are slowly eating away at the traditional code but not doing away with it entirely. Those who directly challenge the code, like Ned and Jimmy, are killed. Those who might, like Jane and Mary, are not yet ready. Then there is Tee Bob; he is born into a world where blacks are workers, not slaves. Moreover, Tee Bob—perhaps because his half-brother Timmy is black—has never learned the meaning of being a Southern white according to the rules of the code. Thus, he goes where his heart leads and sees nothing wrong with loving a "black" woman.

When he shares his secret with Jimmy Caya he receives a crude response, suggesting Tee Bob treat Mary like a slave. Caya, who aspires to be as socially valued as a Samson, also aspires to maintain the code that gives the Samsons their standing. Caya emphatically attempts to defend what he presumes to be the honor of the Samson family. Tee Bob cannot love this woman and remain in society but, as Raynard says, "He couldn't understand that, he thought love was much stronger than that one drop of African blood. But she knowed better." Tee Bob could not rape Mary, as Caya suggested, because he loved her. When she refuses him, he beats her—thus becoming just like the society who says he should not love her. Not wanting to live in a world of such inconsistencies, he commits suicide.

Choices and Consequences

Freedom, for most people, means the ability to make your own choices. In the novel's opening, the reading of the Emancipation Proclamation presents each particular slave with a choice—stay or go. While those who leave are eager to begin a new life, they soon learn that freedom is not so easily gained. The legal chains binding them have been removed, but they have neither the political power nor economic means to enforce their freedom. Throughout the novel, this reality of being "free" but being constricted by second-class status slowly develops into a series of risk-taking choices. These choices often involve a sacrifice by an individual that serves as a source of inspiration and a step forward. Slowly, the abyss between being a freed slave and being a citizen with rights is crossed. This is done through small moments of choosing to be free.

Jane is aware from the moment she hears the Proclamation that she is free to leave. However, not being a slave is very different from being free. When she says, "So this is freedom?" she has only known of being free from her owners, not true freedom. It is very difficult to be "free" when the Ku Klux Klan exists and men like Albert Cluveau are contracted to kill "uppity" blacks like Ned. Changes do begin to occur, however, as people speak out. After Ned's murder, Jane speaks her mind to Cluveau. The school for black children that Ned was killed over later exists at the Samson plantation, and eventually Jimmy goes to college. The fight to gain one's freedom often consists of a series of small steps. As Jane whispers to Jimmy, claiming their rights will take a lot of time and healing, not "retrick."

In the end, enough time has passed. Jane, a representative of the freed slave, is now able to claim her rightful status as an equal person. Jimmy's murder serves as a catalyst. Jane asserts her freedom for the first time in a moment of defiance. She walks past Robert Samson. Her choice to exercise her freedom validates her life. While she did live before that moment, the act of walking by a representative of those who enslaved her heralds a new dawn in her life.

Politics

Miss Jane's story subtly reflects the political history of America from the Emancipation Proclamation to the early moments of the 1960s. While her century-long story is affected by the great events, she is directly involved in them. This makes her an average person, except for her healthy old age; her uniqueness comes from retelling those events. In other words, worldchanging events like Lincoln's Proclamation are not as significant to her story as are acts such as her renaming, which occurred because of her encounter with Mr. Brown.

While the novel presents the life of one ordinary individual, Jane's story represents the untold history of thousands of freed slaves and their descendants. In reading Jane's story, one sees evidence of various historical and political programs designed to empower African Americans. Individual efforts to improve education, hold voter registration drives, and protest inequality are part of a larger political effort. In the end, the novel argues, grand political change can only be made by individuals—and not just great leaders. As Jane tells Jimmy, "the people and time brought [Martin Luther] King; King bring the people. What Miss Rosa Parks did, everybody wanted to do. They just needed one person to do it first because they all couldn't do it at the same time; then they needed King to show them what to do next. But King couldn't do a thing before Miss Rosa Parks refused to give that white man her [bus] seat."

Topics for Further Study

• Ernest Gaines has remarked that modem literature and histories tend to focus on grand events and large cities. Research what he calls the "rural past" and explain how ordinary Americans outside of the city have affected history. Possible time periods to investigate include the American Revolution, the building of the American West, and the eras of World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Vietnam War.
• Explain how the person who is "recording" Jane's story succeeds in making history more exciting. How does Jane's story make it easier to explain what happened from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement?
• Do some research into the period of American history known as Reconstruction. Which efforts to rehabilitate the South failed and why? Why were men like Colonel Eugene I. Dye allowed to return to their plantations?
• Jane Pittman tells of her fondness for Jackie Robinson, the first African American to play major league baseball. Research the history of African American participation in professional and Olympic sports and write a paper connecting milestones on the playing field with milestones in civil rights for African Americans.

Style

Narration and Dialect

Much of the critical acclaim awarded to Gaines for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman centers around his narrative creation—Miss Jane Pittman. Jane's first-person ("I') account of one hundred years of her life in America brings a uniquely personal perspective to this historical novel. An important part of her narration is the use of dialect—a variation in language particular to a region or culture. Jane's retelling is recorded in her own rural black dialect, in this instance the language of Gaines's native Louisiana. This use of dialect brings a realism to both the characterization of Jane and the Louisiana setting of the book. In addition, by allowing Jane's unrestrained frankness to take charge of the story, Gaines maintains the feeling of the conversation of her telling. The novel is experienced more as something heard than as something read.

Jane's frank narrative style also serves to highlight one of the themes of the book, that the ordinary individual can make a difference. For example, she says:

"Jimmy … I have a scar on my back I got when I was a slave. I'll carry it to my grave. You got people out there with this scar on their brains, and they will carry that scar to their grave. Talk with them, Jimmy."

In this little speech she bypasses the "retrick" of fancy education as well as any moralizing that might have impeded her story. She simply talks and talks and talks her life to the recorder—Gaines. In turn, he presents her without the "retrick" of social commentary that would have made her into an obvious symbol of history instead of an individual. By allowing Jane Pittman to speak for herself and about herself, Gaines creates an African American experience more powerful than any chronological history might have done. This story told by an old woman as if it were fact recovers a lost history that is as important as the one students read in history books.

Setting

In the history of African American literature, Gaines's novel is very important in terns of its setting. Popular literary works by black authors immediately preceding Gaines set their novels in the locale of big industrial cities. Works like Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God were set in rural America, but they gained little notice until the 1970s. Gaines used his Louisiana home as background for his novel and stayed within that setting. In this fashion he could fill in the background of black heritage: the inheritance of plantation life after the Civil War. As Gaines explained to an interviewer from Essence magazine, not all blacks immigrated to the North. They might have tried, but, like Jane, never made it as far as the county line. More important, he said, "a lot happened in those 350 years between the time we left Africa and the fifties and sixties when [black writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison] started writing novels about big-city ghettos.… We cannot ignore that rural past or those older people in it. Their stories are the kind I want to write about. I am what I am today because of them." Consequently, many of the novel's metaphors are rural symbols, such as the repeated reference to the power of the river and its tendency to flood, or Joe Pittman's battle with the horse.

Symbolism and Metaphor

Jane touches on many symbols to summarize the experience of her life. When she "gets religion," she testifies before the church of her travels. Her salvation testimony is a metaphor—an image or story that has a deeper meaning beyond its surface—about crossing a river. Jane uses other symbols to explain why her community is not rising up against racism as other African Americans have done in other places. She speaks of a black quilt blinding people to the truth. A quilt has long been held to be a symbol of southern feminine life because the quilt, made and added to over generations, records the stories of whole families. Jane tells Jimmy that the older people "must one day wake up and push that black quilt off his back. Must tell himself I had it on too long." She also uses the metaphor of scar tissue to explain why people are so reluctant to demonstrate: scarred by fear, they do not want to risk being hurt again.

Joe Pittman's job breaking wild horses can also be seen as a symbol or metaphor of a larger theme. His lonely struggle against the powerful forces of nature parallels the individual's struggle against a similarly powerful racist society. His death by wild horse parallels Ned's and Jimmy's deaths by bullet. All three were challenging society in the way they knew best. After all, Joe had to stand up for his right to be free to go and challenge the greater strength of nature. Nature proved to be more powerful, but he earned the legend of being a great horse breaker—skin color not withstanding.

Another powerful symbol is the river. When Jane speaks of the flood of 1927, it provides one of her few moments of obvious sermonizing. Whether a man builds dirt levees or dams of concrete, it amounts to the same thing—a futile attempt to control the power of nature. Eventually the levees break and the water destroys: it "will run free again" says Jane, "You just wait and see." It is the same story with the human spirit, or so Gaines would like us to understand. That spirit can be enslaved, scarred, and beaten but, like the river, it will break through the levees and run free. In this reflection on the river, Jane has also foreshadowed, or hinted at, the coming triumph of spirit in the last section of the novel.

Historical Context

The Civil Rights Movement in Louisiana

In 1971, when Ernest Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pituman, the United States had just seen a time of great social and political upheaval. Throughout the 1960s, African Americans had been struggling to gain equality. Various types of protests, such as the demonstrations described in the novel, were helping to bring centuries-long practices like segregation and racial discrimination to an end. Civil rights were still in the forefront of many African Americans' minds in 1971. Gaines's home state of Louisiana became famous during the 1960s for two events: the New Orleans school integration crisis and the Bogalusa movement.

In its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools. Nevertheless, by 1960 the New Orleans school board had still made no progress toward integrating its schools. That fall, Judge Skelly Wright forced the board to come up with a plan for integration. Although this plan allowed only four black first-grade girls to attend white schools, opposition from local whites was tremendous. Most parents of white students at the two schools chosen for integration pulled their children out; those who did not were taunted and terrorized by anti-integration neighbors. Politicians who supported the integration were also harassed and threatened, but the worst treatment was suffered by the four young black students. Every day they went to school, they were bombarded by spitting, screaming crowds of angry white faces. Without the bravery of these four first-grade girls and the support of the African American community and organizations like the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), the terrorism of these white protesters might have continued to prevent school integration.

Instead, gradual improvements were made in integrating schools and other public facilities across Louisiana. More and more African Americans, inspired by the example of the four girls, began to stand up for their right to equal treatment and an integrated society. Bad publicity about the New Orleans school crisis and a resulting loss of business helped the civil rights movement in Louisiana. Local business people lent their support to integration policies, hoping to drum up lagging business by improving Louisiana's image.

Although slow improvements in civil rights were made in New Orleans and across the state, the racist hatred of many white Louisianians was not easily overcome. In the rural mill town of Bogalusa, for example, movements to register African Americans to vote and to integrate local establishments were met with extreme violence. White and black civil rights workers from the North and politically active Bogalusa blacks were repeatedly threatened, beaten, and even shot by Ku Klux Klan followers. Soon members of Bogalusa's African American population, many of whom were World War II or Korean War veterans, formed an armed self-defense group to protect themselves from the KKK threat because local police would not. This corps eventually attracted enough national attention to force President Lyndon Johnson to declare "war on the Klan." This finally provided Bogalusa and other Southern towns and cities with the military and legal support to enact and enforce civil rights laws.

A History of Black Struggle

Inspired by African Americans' gains in civil rights in the 1960s, Gaines sought to relate the long, hard history of oppression that led to these triumphs. Although the slaves were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation at the end of the Civil War, the transition to independence was difficult. In fact, the prospect of leaving home to start a new life was often too much for former slaves. While some moved out of the South, many chose to stay in the same area—sometimes even on the same plantation—where they had worked as slaves; others returned after failed attempts at starting anew. Although these freedmen and freedwomen often performed the same functions they had before emancipation—plowing fields, picking cotton, cooking meals, caring for white children—they were paid for their work (in land, harvest, or wages) and were expected to pay for their food and shelter. To many former slaves, however, these differences seemed insignificant.

Nevertheless, blacks worked to improve their lot by gaining land, education, and equal civil rights. Meeting in churches and schoolhouses, African American groups provided training and education for one another, published newspapers, and got involved in politics. In Louisiana, African American political action was especially effective in the decade from 1867 to 1877. During that time, newly elected black lawmakers and community leaders led a successful fight to outlaw segregation in public schools, streetcars, bars, and hotels. Unfortunately, passing laws against segregation did not make it disappear. With the victory of anti-integration Democrats in Louisiana's 1877 elections and the 1896 "separate but equal" Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, even the political gains made by Louisiana's African Americans were canceled out. Thus, while many African Americans in Louisiana tried to exercise the new rights granted to them by law, the risk of violent responses from angry whites kept most from crossing the color boundaries erected by white society.

Ironically, since they were no longer the valuable property of white slave owners, blacks often faced worse violence than they had when they were enslaved. As a result, during Reconstruction African Americans were often the victims of savage, even deadly, attacks by angry and demoralized white Southerners. The fictional massacre described by Miss Jane in the novel is no worse than many real attacks reported in the South in the decades following the war. Although attacks like this were technically illegal, few Southern whites were punished for crimes against blacks. The white culture of violence was far more powerful in the postwar era than laws, judges, or Freedmen's Bureau officers, who were appointed by the federal government to ease the transition from slavery to freedom. As a result, white witnesses to such crimes were more inclined to protect guilty fellow whites—especially those who demanded such protection with threats of violence—than to stand up for the rights of African Americans. African American witnesses were also subject to violence if they spoke out against whites, and they faced major legal obstacles as well.

Violence against African Americans became formalized in groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. These hate groups were founded by white Confederates who turned their anger and shame at being defeated by the Union into violence against former slaves. Many members of these groups feared a black revolt against the white people of the South and concluded that the way to prevent it was to beat, maim, or lynch those blacks who contradicted a white person or otherwise sought to exercise their political rights. Although these acts of terrorism became much less common after a federal crackdown in the 1870s, the Ku Klux Klan experienced a huge revival during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Louisiana's Unique Culture

Although Louisiana of the late 1800s and early 1900s was a typical Southern state in many ways, it possessed a unique culture made up of four distinct groups: whites, blacks, Creoles, and Cajuns. Cajuns, who were white, came from an earlier settlement in French Canada to settle in the area. They influenced Louisiana with their language, food, and customs. During the one hundred years portrayed in the novel, however, most Cajuns were poorer and less powerful than other white Louisiana residents. They were often hired to do the dirty work for more powerful whites; Albert Cluveau, for instance, must kill Jane's adopted son Ned or face threats to his own safety. Creoles were people of mixed African and European ancestry who shared some of the French heritage of the Cajuns. They usually looked different, however, because of their mixed ancestry. Nevertheless, some Creoles, such as the teacher Mary Agnes LeFabre, were light enough to pass for white. (Note: while the novel uses the term "Creole" for those with mixed French and African heritage, it has also been used as a term for the exclusively white descendants of Louisiana's original French and Spanish settlers.) The mixed-heritage Creoles generally kept away from Cajuns as well as other whites and from African Americans, speaking their own French-based language and maintaining a unique, sophisticated culture. Before the Civil War, most free people of color were Creole. At the bottom of the Louisiana social ladder during this century were African Americans like Jane Pittman, whose dark skin marked them as inferior in the eyes of most whites, Cajuns, and Creoles. These cultural distinctions often play a pivotal role in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and give it the special regional flavor that has been praised by so many critics.

Compare & Contrast

• 1870s: The Emancipation Proclamation ends the legal sanction of slavery. However, many blacks remain in the South either as sharecroppers or subsistence wage laborers.

  1950s and 1960s: The Civil Rights movement slowly spreads across the South. The biggest scenes surround the bus boycotts and marches led by leaders like Martin Luther King. Elsewhere in the South, however, Jim Crow laws remain unchallenged but changing.

  Today: Several federal Civil Rights Acts allow persons unfairly treated due to color, sex, or creed full recourse of the law.

• 1870s: The sudden disruption to Southern life and identity caused by the release of the slaves and defeat in the Civil War leads to the emergence of terror groups like the KKK. These groups prevent the full implementation of Reconstruction, the realization of equal rights, and the timely integration of African Americans into society.

  1950s and 1960s: Unsatisfied with the rate of progress and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's campaign in India, nonviolent measures were adopted and sit-ins staged in "Whites Only" establishments across America. Other groups, like the Black Panther Party, were formed and became more direct when progress did not happen immediately.

  Today: White supremacist organizations still have a vast following. The membership of the KKK per se is not as large but together with its many branches, sympathizers, and imitators, the number of avowedly racist Americans is worrisome. Fortunately, wherever the KKK appears for membership drives, groups like Can the Klan, remnants of the Black Panther Party, and Amnesty International rally to show opposition to the Klan's hate-filled message.

Critical Overview

The majority of critics have noted that Ernest Gaines made an unforgettable contribution to American literature with The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Gaines has been seen as a historian, as he pretends to be in the introduction of the novel, who has created "a metaphor of the collective black experience," according to Jerry Bryant in the Iowa Review. In serving as this metaphor, Jane Pittman is the story of rural African Americans since 1865. Her final moment in the narrative represents this one hundred-year period as a victorious slow march to freedom. As Josh Greenfield writes in Life magazine: "Never mind that Miss Jane Pittman is fictitious, and that her 'autobiography,' offered up in the form of taped reminiscences, is artifice. The effect is stunning."

The novel has been so celebrated that the difference in critical views is often limited to the way reviewers praise the novel. Often, this praise has been for Gaines's ability to integrate historical events and political changes without writing an angry "protest novel" of the type that often appeared in the 1960s. As a result, note these critics, the novel focuses on the literary qualities of the story rather than its message. The ability to avoid outrage and self-pity, according to a Times Literary Supplement review, stems from the technique Gaines uses to tell the story. Because many of the events Jane remembers are years past, the graphic pain they inspire is somewhat faded. As the reviewer explains: "Cheerfully free of self-pity or dramatics, taking for granted unspeakable persecutions and endurances, faded into matter-of-factness by the suggestions of old age remembering, the record's implicit revelation of wickedness is nevertheless so hard that one would like to turn away from such truth." Fortunately, not all critics have been so nervous.

Novelist Alice Walker, for example, confronts the issue of "politics" in Gaines's work in her review for the New York Times Book Review. "Because politics are strung throughout the novel, it will no doubt be said that Gaines's book is about politics. But he is too skilled a writer to be stuck in so sordid, so small a category." Walker says Gaines is best compared to writers such as Charles Dickens and W.E.B. DuBois, rather than Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, because his preference is for the story over politics. That is, she says, he "claims and revels in the rich heritage" and customs of the Southern blacks of Louisiana. As a result, Gaines's work is "open to love and to interpretation."

In another early review of the novel for Time magazine, Melvin Maddocks calls Gaines a "country-boy writer." He uses this term not only because Gaines writes about rural Louisiana, but also because his stories are set down as if planted, "spreading the roots deep, wide and firm. His stories grow organically … with the absolute rightness of a folk tale." Maddocks also enjoys the way Gaines does not demand immediate change through revolution. Instead, "he simply watches, a patient artist, a patient man, and it happens for him" in the final moment when Jane walks past Robert. Nevertheless, the novel captures the essence of an entire people, states Martin Anis in New Statesman. "Miss Jane's story is a bloody slice of life, a protracted blowby-blow battle with the moonish ignorance and bestiality of the white Southerner." Because Jane has come out of her cycle victorious, the critic observes, there is no self-pity to reduce the effectiveness of the story. Arnis also compares Jane's story to Thomas Berger's novel Little Big Man. That tale similarly captures the history of an entire people, the Cheyenne tribe of the Great Plains, through the narrative of a 111-year-old witness. The difference between the two is that Gaines avoids a mythic sweep and simply tells the tale of an individual woman.

In her CLA Journal review, Winifred Stoelting examines the characters inhabiting Gaines's literary universe. These characters are "caught in the movement of the changing times, they must make choices, the results often unpredictable, the consequences sometimes tragic." Accordingly, Stoelting continues, these characters embody Gaines's belief in the individual: "the world his characters live in values the independence of the human spirit to survive and change."

Picking up the refrain of praise, Addison Gayle summarizes the formula of Gaines's historic novels in his 1975 work The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America: "Realization precedes action; recognition of the truth of history is a prelude for rebellion and revolution." Gayle also dwells on the influence of Nobel Prize-winner William Faulkner on Gaines's writing. Faulkner wrote of the men trapped, like Samson or Raynard, by the old patterns of the white South. In comparing Faulkner's universe to Gaines's, Gayle says: "to endure in Faulkner's universe is to accept predominance of guilt and redemption, and, thus, to accept too the inevitability of fate. To endure in Gaines' universe is to minimize such themes, concentrate upon people, and, thus, to struggle endlessly against fate." As a result, the critic concludes, Gaines can focus on character yet create "a novel of epic proportions."

Criticism

Jeannine Johnson

In the following essay Johnson, a doctoral candidate at Yale University, examines how The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman works as historical fiction and how Gaines makes a single character work both as an individual and as a historical symbol.

Published in 1971, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was Ernest J. Gaines's first major critical and popular success. It exemplifies the author's concerns with the relationship between language, identity, and narrative structure. The novel names itself as an autobiography but it is also generally recognized as a work of historical fiction. Gaines's novel functions as an autobiography in so far as it provides a first-person account of the life of a particular person. However, it differs from conventional autobiography in two ways. First, this is the life history of a fictional character as recreated by a fictional editor. Second, Jane's narrative, unlike those in many autobiographies, does not define her life as a quest toward an inevitable goal. In other words, she does not suggest that her past led in any direct way to her present state. As a historical novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman places its fictional characters in relation to a known history of African Americans in the South and names specific historical persons and events. But Gaines makes Jane, not history, the central figure in his novel, subordinating the broader historical element to her own personal story. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman blends fictional autobiography and the historical novel to create a distinct narrative form.

In the introduction, the editor admits that "even though I have used only Miss Jane's voice throughout the narrative, there were times when others carried the story for her." Of course, it is the author himself who literally carries the story. But continuing in his fictional role as editor, the author suggests an even broader impact of other voices on the autobiography: "In closing I wish to thank all the wonderful people who were at Miss Jane's house through those long months of interviewing her, because this is not only Miss Jane's autobiography, it is theirs as well. This is what both Mary and Miss Jane meant when they said you could not tie all the ends together in one neat direction. Miss Jane's story is all of their stories, and their stories are Miss Jane's."

By linking Jane's story to others' stories, the author does not intend to diminish the uniqueness and individuality of Miss Jane, as the story that follows makes clear. For it is Jane who narrates her own story in her own authentic dialect. Instead, he refers to the contributions of many voices in order to stress that there is no "one neat direction" in which a person's life progresses.

For instance, the first book of the novel imitates the framework of a quest North, common in nineteenth-century slave narratives. But in Jane's story, this framework disintegrates in Book II after Colonel Dye takes over Mr. Bone's plantation. The Union peacekeeping troops have withdrawn and Dye informs those who have stayed on the plantation that the school will close and that he will not be able to pay his workers till the end of the year:

"If that suit you, stay; if it don't, catch up with that coattail-flying scalawag and the rest of them hot-footing niggers who was here two days ago."

If Colonel Dye had told me that a week before I would have turned around then and left. But after what Bone had told us I had no more faith in heading North than I had staying South. I would stay right here and do what I could for me and Ned. If I heard of a place where I could live better, where Ned could get a better learning, I would go there to live. Till then I would stay where I was.

Jane's decision to remain in Louisiana rather than continue to Ohio is an act of survival rather than one of submission. Many characters in the novel do resist and even challenge their conditions, but these are mostly men (such as Ned, Joe, and Jimmy) who possess a greater freedom to travel. As a woman and as a pragmatist, Jane feels it less useful to relocate herself even when her situation is difficult. When Ned urges her to leave for Kansas with him, he observes, "You ain't married to this place." "In a way," Jane responds with characteristically few words. The author seems to approve Jane's rootedness since all the events represented in the novel are contained within the state of Louisiana. The story does not follow Ned when he moves to Kansas, nor does it even expand as far as New Orleans (still within the state) when Jimmy attends school there.

We may explain this geographical limit by noting that the novel shares its Louisiana setting in common with almost all of Gaines's other works, including most recently A Lesson Before Dying (1993). But the geographic boundaries of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman also symbolize the novel's interest in community. In the introduction, the author proposes that the life story of an individual is also the life story of a community and vice versa. And if Jane's history is Louisiana's history, it is also the history of African Americans in the South.

What Do I Read Next?

• Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by herself was first published in 1861. Since then, it has remained the classic example of the slave narrative genre. The autobiography tells of her life as a slave and her escape to the north in the 1830s.
• In order to answer the doubt that he was ever a slave, Frederick Douglass wrote his autobiography in 1845. He rewrote this in 1881 as The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. The book has since become a classic of American literature and a source of inspiration to countless American youths.
• The South's most celebrated author is William Faulkner, who told stories of a mythical Mississippi county called Yoknapatawpha. The 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury is a most powerful tale of the South's decline, partially narrated by a mentally impaired man named Benjy Compson.
• Zora Neale Hurston recorded as much of the cultural experience of black Americans in the South Eastern United States as she was able. Her most acclaimed novel was her 1937 work Their Eyes Were Watching God. The story is that of a woman named Janie who struggles to find equal treatment of others. For a time she has this, but the story ends tragically.
• Harper Lee leaped into the spotlight with her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. This Pulitzer Prize-winning story is told from the perspective of a six-year-old girl whose father defends a black man accused of rape. Despite the lawyer's ability to prove the accused is innocent, the man is still found guilty and is killed in jail.
• Little Big Man is a fictitious autobiography told by an 111-year-old white man "recorded" by Thomas Berger in 1964. This novel mythically sweeps up the whole of the Cheyenne Nation's history into the life of an abducted white boy who grew up "indian."
• Alex Haley's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family was published in 1976. The novel told the tale of an African American family through seven generations. It was a runaway best-seller inspiring many blacks and whites alike to try and fill in the genealogical gaps of their own family.
• Gaines's 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award-winner A Lesson before Dying is considered by many to be his best work. This novel begins as a young black man is sentenced to death for his unwitting involvement in a robbery where a white store owner is killed. A black teacher reluctantly takes on the task of helping this uneducated convict learn to "die like a man."

By creating an editor who wants to use Jane's narrative to teach American history to his high school students, Gaines indicates that Jane's experiences are as important in understanding the past as are those of more famous historical figures. For example, the author incorporates Jackie Robinson into the novel in part as a sign of African American achievement. Robinson's presence is also a means by which to illustrate the personal sacrifices involved in progress. Robinson, who in 1947 became the first African American to play major league baseball, appears in the novel without much fanfare when Jane comments on her passion for listening to baseball games.

Jane recognizes Robinson's significance for a larger community: "Jackie and the Dodgers was for the colored people; the Yankees was for the white folks. Like in the Depression, Joe Louis was for the colored." More importantly, Robinson's presence has deeply personal consequences for Jane: "I was the oldest in the church and they called me the church mother. But I liked baseball so much they had to take it from me and give it to Emma." We might say that symbolically Jane is willing to lose some standing in her local community in order to identify with an emblem of a larger community and of a wider history. However, in so doing, we must be careful not to discount the particular effect this historic personage had on Jane as a private individual. She loses her position in the church, but she is compensated for this loss by the great joy she experiences as a baseball fan.

Jane certainly does not conceive of her allegiance to Jackie Robinson and the Brooklyn Dodgers in terms of its public meaning. While Gaines does not deny the power and significance of symbolic actions, he implies that those who do perform them or otherwise act as representatives of their communities risk losing their own identities. Jane's last act in the novel has at the same time enormous public and private meaning, as she defies Mr. Samson and heads to Bayonne with other residents of the quarters.

Some critics have faulted the novel's conclusion as abrupt and as belatedly introducing a new plot direction. In fact, Jane's act decisively completes the plot of this final book in the novel, whose theme is unity and whose structure is unified. This book is the story of "the One" and, appropriately, it is the only book which contains no titled subdivisions. This single purposefulness parallels the northern quest of the novel's first book. Just as a quest narrative subordinates the importance of the individual to her ultimate historic symbolism, Jane's defiance signals the end of her own individual, fictive existence. She moves to join a greater historical dimension that this autobiography cannot contain: "Me and Robert looked at each other there a long time, then I went by him." And Jane literally walks out of her own story.

As we imagine Jane continuing toward the demonstration in Bayonne, we would do well to remember that, with regard to history, she harbors no unrealistic expectations for what an individual can accomplish. She warns Jimmy that "'People and time bring forth leaders,' I said. 'Leaders don't bring forth people. The people and the time brought King; King didn't bring the people. What Miss Rosa Parks did, everybody wanted to do. They just needed one person to do it first because they all couldn't do it at the same time; then they needed King to show them what to do next. But King couldn't do a thing before Miss Rosa Parks refused to give that white man her seat."

Jane's attitude toward Rosa Parks parallels that of the author toward Jane. Jane observes that Parks is, to a certain extent, simply a representative of a group, having done what "everybody wanted to do." At the same time, Jane grants Rosa Parks her full individuality and recognizes that the personal pain she suffered was not reduced by the symbolic value of her act. Likewise, the author states that Jane's story is everyone's story, and yet Jane's personality, voice, and experience distinguish this autobiography as fully her own.

Source: Jeannine Johnson, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

Valerie Melissa Babb

In the following excerpt, Babb discusses the theme of leadership and the qualities of Jane Pittman as a leader.

From Jackie Robinson to Marie Laveau to nature, all the elements of Jane's narrative show her life to be a microcosm of the vast panorama of African-American culture—its people, its history, its myth, its vision. She is a personified archive that in the first two books of her narrative records the African-American past and her place in it, and in the third provides an insightful commentary on African-American and larger American society. The fourth and last book of her autobiography, "The Quarters," is not so much a record of the past as a blueprint for the future. Its immediacy is represented through the lack of section titles that divide the other books of the work. Previously, titles set the parameters of Jane's memory, naming the experience she is narrating in terms of an event ("Freedom"), a philosophy ("Man's Way"), a vision ("The Chariot of Hell"), or a person ("Miss Lilly"). Such naming cannot be made for the action in "The Quarters," for it is not as far removed from Jane's present as the other sections, and as such, lacks the distance needed to construct a clear defining perspective. The section leaves the reader feeling that it will be the task of another oral historian to look back on its events from the vantage point of the future and give names to those sections which represent Jane's immediate past.

As Jane's autobiography comes forward in time and prepares to address issues that will reverberate in the future, a theme that Gaines will explore in his last two novels emerges: the nature of leadership. Jane and the people of her community are desperately seeking "the One," a Moses to lead them out of economic and psychological bondage. As Jane describes the community in this portion of her narrative, it consists of people searching for dignity even if they must settle for the vicarious esteem derived from the exploits of black athletes. By following such figures as Joe Louis or Jackie Robinson, Jane and her community experience an affirmation their society denies them:

When times get really hard, really tough, He always send you somebody. In the Depression … He sent us Joe. Joe was to lift the colored people's hearts.… I heard every lick of that fight on the radio, and what Joe didn't put on S'mellin that night just couldn't go on a man.…

Now, after the war, He sent us Jackie.… He showed them a trick or two. Homeruns, steal bases—eh Lord. It made my day just to hear what Jackie had done. In their own ways, Louis and Robinson are leaders, and in her own way, Jane will become a leader as well.

The communal wish for a figure to do within their parish what Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson have done before the world manifests itself in close examination of each youth in the quarters, to see whether any possesses the qualities that make him or her "the One." At first the people's hope rests in Ned, but the certainty of Ned's martyrdom is expressed through Jane's statement "Both of us knowed that day was coming. When and where we didn't know." When Ned is assassinated, the community must renew its search for "the One." It spends many years waiting and searching, but at long last a possible candidate appears. This time it is Jimmy Aaron, and the community's desperation is reflected in Jane's explanation of why Jimmy was chosen: "People's always looking for somebody to come lead them.… Anytime a child is born, the old people look in his face and ask him if he's the One.… Why did we pick him? Well, why do you pick anybody? We picked him because we needed somebody."

As a youth, Jimmy feels summoned to a cause he cannot yet articulate. As Jane describes him, "Jimmy would be sitting there on the gallery talking, and all a sudden he would stop listening to what I was saying and start gazing out in the road like he was listening to something else. One day … [h]e said, 'Miss Jane, I got something like a tiger in my chest, just gnawing and … want come out.… I pray to God to take it out, but look like the Lord don't hear me. " The image of an indifferent God crystallizes Jimmy's realization that man, he in particular, must do something to rid himself of the "gnawing" and help his people. Like Ned, he too goes away to be educated, and returns as an active participant in the civil rights movement. And like Ned before him, Jimmy seeks to vanquish racial injustice through peaceful protests modeled after those of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ned and Jimmy are descendants of characters found in Gaines's earlier fiction: Copper Laurent in Bloodline, who in spite of his biracial heritage attempts to reclaim his family legacy; Jackson Bradley in Catherine Carmier, who through loving the Creole Catherine seeks to move outside the boundaries set for him by his society; and Marcus in Of Love and Dust, who wants to be more than "just a slave." What all these characters share, in addition to a common determination to go against the status quo, is a common failure. None have a lasting impact, and for the most part, the systems they confront remain unchanged. Through their failure Gaines implies that the monolith of racism cannot be easily demolished. Razing it will necessitate a different kind of tactic, a different kind of courage, a different kind of leadership.

Ultimately at the end of the autobiography, it is Jane who emerges as a true leader and effects change, not through rhetoric, or as she terms it "retrick," not through tactics, but through her sheer presence and the symbolism embodied in her life. Her decision to go to Bayonne and carry on the protest begun by Jimmy (actually, in a larger context begun by Ned) is the catalyst that charges the rest of the community. A full circle is completed here, as the novel begins with Jane in a position of leadership, guiding Ned to Ohio and freedom, and ends with Jane in a similar position, leading her people in peaceful protest.

Jane's confrontation with racism is not one bordering on insanity, as is Copper's; it is not one that lacks direction, as does Jackson's; and it is not one that is destined to fail from the beginning, as is Marcus's. Gaines casts it as a simple act of personal dignity that commands respect, and the very simplicity of its nature seems to guarantee its success. When Robert Samson, the owner of her plantation, attempts to stop her from attending the protest in Bayonne by reminding her of Jimmy's death, Jane replies, "Just a little piece of him is dead.… The rest of him is waiting for us in Bayonne." She ends her autobiography by describing a scene of quiet strength and understated defiance as she closes: "Me and Robert looked at each other there a long time, then I went by him." The introductory clause of this sentence is a relatively long one for the phraseology given Jane Pittman and serves to build the suspense that allows us to appreciate the finality of Jane's action in the second clause, "then I went by him."

As Gaines considers the question of leadership, it is evident that for him any real and lasting change must be effected through leaders and actions firmly rooted in a cultural past. What makes Jane such a symbol to her people is her connection to the African-American past and her embodiment of African-American history. The people of the quarters look at Jane and see not a leader in the traditional sense of the word but a woman who has lived 111 years, one whose life has spanned many of the major events of black American history. In Jane they can see themselves, their parents, their grandparents, and their great-grandparents. Her presence personalizes their ancestral and sociopolitical history, while giving them strength to form a positive future.

Paraphrasing William Faulkner, Gaines has often stated, "The past ain't dead; it ain't even passed." Miss Jane reminds us that the past is never a distant memory for Ernest Gaines but is instead a constant influence on the present and future. As he listened to the stories of the old folks on his Aunt Augusteen's porch, the past arose, lived again, and donned a mantle of immediacy, and this influence of living cultural repositories was not lost on him. Accounts of what went before shape his creation of present literary experience, and homage to the past is characteristic, leading him to say of his work, "I was writing in a definite pattern.… I was going farther and farther back into the past. I was trying to go back, back, back into our experiences in this country to find some kind of meaning to our present lives." It is this meaning that Gaines embodies in Jane, and it this meaning that empowers her story to complement traditional histories. She recalls her life and that of others with a clarity that fosters an appreciation of the importance of her people's history to American culture. Jane's autobiography is an American history amplified by the many strains of African-American culture that conventional histories of the United States may have muted. Her fictional narrative becomes a timeless American epic as myth, religion, and the recollections of former slaves all accentuate the historicity of her tale and Gaines's vision.

While the actions, patterns, and motifs of the novel are compelling and create a riveting history of America from slavery to the mid-1960s, it is Miss Jane whom we remember. She is the composite of all Gaines characters who embark upon difficult journeys leading to psychic freedom and definitions of self contrary to those their society imposes upon them.

Source: "From History to Her-story: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," Ernest Gaines, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 92-96.

Valerie Melissa Babb

In the following excerpt, Babb examines Gaines's use of fictional character Jane Pittman as a vehicle for his vision of black slavery in American history.

Jane's autobiography gives a detailed, interior view of a familiar epoch, and the uniqueness and veracity of her voice compel the reader into an imaginary union with her historic vision. Her choice of words, selection of details, and inclusion of many asides allow her to capture general, regional, and personal histories. Her recalling the series of teachers employed to instruct the black children of her plantation is an example. As she reviews the nature of education on her plantation, Jane digresses momentarily to tell the story of the Creole family, the LeFabres. By placing a family's experience, views, and values in the middle of a general history of black education on a postbellum plantation, she gracefully includes a supplementary component, the color division within Creole society, that gives her story a distinct Louisiana flavor. Jane also employs temporal markers specific to her Louisiana world to lend order to the diverse events of her history. In recalling larger events, such as the institution of sharecropping and the fight for civil rights, she uses signposts, such as the election and death of Huey P. Long and the floods of 1917 and 1927, as narrative guides. Both her asides and her markers are traditional devices used to structure oral narrative, but they are crafted to give history a regional and personal perspective. Jane's memory unfolds an alternative to the standard and reminds us that history is made up of diverse individuals. Slavery, Reconstruction, and the beginnings of the civil rights movement are all documented through the language, art forms, mythology, spirituals, and folk sermons of one woman and her immediate community.

Book 1 of the narrative of this singular woman begins with the era that has most influenced African-American experience in the United States, slavery. Entitled "The War Years," this section of the work is given over to Jane's concrete descriptions of her life as a bondwoman. The horrendous details of barbarity and dehumanization present in other accounts of the slave system are present here, but Jane's treatment of these details is somewhat different. She reveals not only the facts of slavery but also her personal thoughts and reactions to the experience of bondage. Her account is given greater power by comments and analyses depicting both slavery's inhumanity and the manner in which slaves sought to overcome dehumanization. Every facet of "the peculiar institution" is individualized widtin Jane's narrative, and historic wrongs against a mass of people that might have remained abstract in other historical documents become keenly felt, immediate wrongs against a character so real she seems alive. Her vivid portraits render the horrors of slavery even more abhorrent because they occur to a character whose psyche we know so intimately.

Jane's descriptions reveal an acute, active mind that immediately counters the stereotype of the ignorant, unfeeling slave. In recounting her experience while bringing water to Confederate soldiers, she articulates a slave's perception of the lack of significance chattel status imposes: "They couldn't tell if I was white or black, a boy or a girl. They didn't even care what I was." Jane's matterof-fact tone as she details the casual denial of her presence constitutes a vivid reminder that the disavowal of a slave's humanity was routine. A subsequent description of a similar encounter contrasts sharply to this earlier episode in which Jane is objectified. In this account Jane brings water to a thirsty Union legion, and soldiers unsympathetic to her status as a human being are replaced by those who acknowledge her existence. One even confers a symbolic token of that acknowledgment, a name. Through Jane's joy, we see what the act of choosing a name comes to symbolize: the possibility of defining identity. She is so taken with the name and the gallantry of the Union soldier who gives it to her that both become representations of the distant ideal of freedom she subsequently seeks upon emancipation.

The action of the Union soldier tempers the denial of personal identity through the denial of such vital personal rights as the prerogative to choose one's name. Though yet another white man arbitrarily changes her name from Ticey to Jane Brown because, as the soldier says, "Ticey is a slave name," this process is different for Jane. The soldier' s altering a label of slavery reveals a new world of control to her, one in which the power of the master, in this case manifested through naming, is not final. A name is chosen for her, but for the first time in her life Jane has the option of deciding whether or not she will retain it. Her jubilation in having a choice and a name she perceives as not being rooted in slavery is expressed when she says, "I just stood there grinning.… It was the prettiest name I had ever heard."

Jane pays a high price for her new appellation, and in her subsequent recalcitrance we see the power of nomenclature to confer personal identity and pride, the very characteristics the system of slavery sought to suppress. As her master and mistress punish her for insubordination, the self-esteem she derives from choosing her own name mitigates the arbitrary brutality used to enforce their power within the slave system:

I raised my head high and looked her straight in the face and said: "You called me Ticey. My name ain't no Ticey no more, it's Miss Jane Brown.…" That night… she told my master I had sassed her.… My master told two of the other slaves to hold me down.… My master jecked up my dress and gived my mistress the whip and told her to teach me a lesson. Every time she hit me she asked me what I said my name was. I said Jane Brown. She hit me again: what I said my name was. I said Jane Brown.

My mistress got tired of beating me and told my master to beat me some. He told her that was enough, I was already bleeding. By demanding to be called not only by a new name but also by the title "Miss," Jane demands respect and recognition of an existence apart from that of a slave.…

As Jane's narrative continues, she relates one of the most important aspects of black Me after slavery, the journey to freedom. In earlier preemancipation African-American literature, fear of jeopardizing the safety of those seeking liberation and those assisting in its attainment made precise descriptions of journeys to freedom a rarity. Though her account unfolds after emancipation, Jane's recall fumishes a possible likeness of this often-absent chapter in slave literature. While she is no longer a slave, her freedom is tenuous at best, and her descriptions of heading north contain perils similar to those alluded to in many slave narratives. She recalls in detail the former slaves' fear, their hope, and the rather cryptic freedom that existed for them after the Civil War: "We didn't know a thing. We didn't know where we was going, we didn't know what we was go'n eat.… We didn't know where we was go'n sleep that night. If we reached the North, we didn't know if we was go'n stay together or separate. We had never thought about nothing like that, because we had never thought we was go'n ever be free. Yes, we had heard about freedom, we had even talked about freedom, but we never thought we was go'n ever see that day." Not having any hope for freedom, Jane did not need a clear conception of liberty. The systematic debasement of slavery was designed in part to make certain that no slave was prepared for the advent of freedom; therefore, considerations of future action were few because emancipation was a remote ideal rather than a reality. Though very much a realist, Jane falls prey to simplifying freedom, thinking that emancipation included the provision of such basic necessities as food, shelter, and clothing. Ironically, her position comes very close to exemplifying the argument used by "benevolent" slaveholders for the continuance of "the peculiar institution": that slaves were docile, witless innocents incapable of self-preservation. Jane's thoughts and life belie that argument, however, and debunk the popular myth of black helplessness.

The shock of freedom's reality first jars Jane when she discovers that emancipation not only entails heretofore-denied responsibility but also bestows a nebulous freedom that guarantees no human rights. The intoxication of liberation is replaced by the sobriety of a slave's tenuous existence when she hides in a thicket, watching as fellow slaves are massacred by former members of the slave patrols and former Confederate soldiers. In this powerful and moving scene, Jane describes the remnants of the band of slaves in her usual matter-of-fact tone and underscores the similarity between antebellum and postbellum brutality: "I saw people laying everywhere. All of them was dead or dying, or so broken up they wouldn't ever move on their own." The scene gathers power as Jane recalls her reaction and the reaction of the little boy she informally adopts, Ned, to the killing of his mother and little sister.

At this point in her narrative, Jane is a child of 11 and Ned is even younger. One is struck by their stoicism as much as by the violence and brutality of the murder. Both remain collected during the massacre, and Jane has the presence of mind to hide Ned, while he has the presence of mind to remain quiet. As she says of him, "Small as he was he knowed death was only a few feet away." Slavery has forced a mature awareness of death upon the children. Loss of life and fragmentation of family are everyday occurrences, and Jane and Ned are prepared to deal widh bodh as unfortunate eventualities.…

Viewing the killing of Laura, her baby, and the other ex-slaves matures Jane and alters her conception of freedom, but only somewhat. She is still unaware of the vast geographical distance that stands between her and Ned and the freedom they seek in the North. Her naïveté is evident in her misguided sense of direction, which tells her Ohio is a week's walk from Louisiana. She sets off, actually walking farther south, and a series of picaresque episodes follow, commenting on segments of southern society during Reconstruction. Each is a symbol, and each teaches Jane of the difficulties of freedom: the black hunter seeking his father symbolizes fragmented families and tells Jane freedom "ain't North"; an eccentric old white man reveals the hypocrisy of Jane's freedom and tells her that at her present rate it will take her "about thirty years. Give or take a couple" to reach freedom; and a poor white farmer who by refusing to fight "their war" symbolizes the class conflict among whites during the Civil War leads Jane and Ned to tenuous shelter on a plantation run by the newly formed Freedman's Bureau. Jane's padh from one encounter to the next becomes a circular route returning her to where she began, the plantations of Louisiana, and her circuitous movement back to her origins dramatizes Gaines's concept of freedom and progress. She returns "home" because, in his view, true liberation and the progress it engenders are not an abstract, such as the notion of "freedom," or a spatial entity, such as "the North," but rather a spiritual entity, deeply rooted in a person's character, dignity, and knowledge of his or her history and place. With the exception of one segment, the remainder of Jane's story takes place in the parishes of Louisiana that provide the setting for other Gaines works and details the personal choices she makes to progress toward spiritual freedom.

Book 2 of Jane's memoir, entitled "Reconstruction," achieves exactly that, a reconstruction of significant historical events in a new context. In her rendering of the epoch after the Civil War, the upheaval of the southern social order and the new relationship of North to South shift from a central position and become backdrops for Jane's observations of the similarities between slavery and Reconstruction. In describing sharecropping, Jane reveals it as the reincarnation of slavery. The exploitation, absence of regular education, and denial of human rights that typified one now typify the other: "It was slavery again, all right. No such thing as colored troops, colored politicians, or a colored teacher anywhere near the place.… You had to give Colonel Dye's name if the secret group stopped you on the road. Just because the Yankee troops and the Freedom Beero had gone didn't mean they had stopped riding. They rode and killed more than ever now.… Yankee money came in to help the South back on her feet—yes; but no Yankee troops. We was left there to root hog or die." Jane's characterization of the North contrasts sharply to her early idealized vision of a place filled with citizens sym-pathetic to the plight of African Americans. She is now clearly aware of a North uninterested in racial equality and seeking only to rebuild a southern economy and reunite it with that of the North. For black Americans still uneducated, still hunted by secret patrols, and still monitored strictly, the "North" as an entity had changed little. Through the institution of sharecropping, economic servitude replaced physical servitude, and the negation of humanity remained constant. In detailing her and her husband Joe's efforts to free themselves from the trap of tenant farming, Jane makes it evident that extricating oneself from economic bondage was almost as difficult as extricating oneself from physical bondage. The intimacy characterizing Jane's view of the slavery epoch is continued in her descriptions of tenant farming.…

In book 3, "The Plantation," Jane's narrative moves forward in time, fleshing out life on Samson plantation, her last home. She relates stories of the people of the quarters, and larger historic and current events recede from prominence and assume the place of backdrops. Taken as a whole, these recollections serve as modified allegory, illuminating particular aspects of black culture. In the section entitled "Miss Lilly," for example, Jane tells about the stern Lilly, "a bowlegged mulatto woman," whose aspirations for the children of the quarters force her to impose a value system inappropriate to their day-to-day reality of sharecropping: "She didn't just want lesson, she wanted the girls to come there with their dresses ironed, she wanted ribbons in their hair. The boys had to wear ties, had to shine their shoes. Brogans or no brogans, she wanted them shined." Teachers are a valuable commodity in Jane's world, and rare. Lilly, unfortunately, seems to be more concerned with the outward appearances of her charges than with their inward edification, and Jane uses her to illustrate the belief that education must be utilitarian and relevant to be successful. Lilly's story also signifies the obstacles faced in schooling rural black children who must eke out an education between the harvesting of crops. Further, the number of teachers assigned to the plantation makes clear that the ignorance mandated by law in slavery is now perpetuated in a more benign manner: "After Miss Lilly, then came Hardy. Joe Hardy was one of the worst human beings I've ever met.… Telling poor people the government wasn't paying much, so he would 'preciate it if they could help him out some.… For a year and a half we didn't have a school on the place at all. Going into the second year we got that LeFabre girl." The "LeFabre girl" Jane refers to is Mary Agnes LeFabre, a Creole woman who comes to Jane's plantation to escape the strict doctrines of her Creole society. In recalling her history on the plantation, Jane creates a modified allegory that illuminates the complexities of the color line and the self-hatred that engendered it.…

Personal recollections with overtones of social allegory are only part of Jane's commentary. As she continues to divulge the details of her history, she makes larger American history a living and present process. Important figures of the American past are not two-dimensional portraits housed in history books but human beings who impact on the lives of other human beings such as Jane. The immediacy in her description of Frederick Douglass is an instance: "Now, after the Yankee soldiers and Freedom Beero left, the people started leaving again. Not right away—because Mr. Frederick Douglass said give the South a chance. But when the people saw they was treated just as bad now as before the war they said to heck with Mr. Frederick Douglass and started leaving." In Jane's portrait Frederick Douglass is not the great orator, abstracted and removed from his cultural roots. Instead he is demythologized and shown to be part of a people's daily life as they attempt to make decisions that will form their history and future.…

The personal interpretation Jane gives to history she also gives to traditional Christian religion, and her religion answers the hollow proclamations of the ministers in previous Gaines works. A spiritual woman, she is not awed by religious conventions. She will as soon sit before the radio to listen to Jackie Robinson play baseball on a Sunday as go to church. Her reverence for religion and its symbols is balanced by day-to-day realism, and she keenly feels that worship should not be divorced from life. The use of biblical images and terminology to mark the daily events of life on Samson plantation underscores Jane's pragmatic spiritualism, and the Bible's language is no longer remote but instead provides a fitting lexicon for describing significant periods in black history. The term exodus, for example, is used to refer to black migration: "Droves after droves … was leaving. If you went to town you would see whole families going by. Men in front with bundles on their backs, women following them with a child in their arm and holding another one by the hand.… They slipped away at night, they took to the swamps, they … went." Jane is a realist and sees that the stories of the Bible are meant as examples. She discerns its mythic nature, viewing its accounts as attempts to explain natural phenomena, the origin of humankind, traditions, and rituals. It is thus easy for her to see relevancy and importance in both the teachings of the Bible and the myths that derive from her own culture. Figures of African-American lore are given as much prominence as biblical figures in Jane's narrative. The former interact intimately with her community, and the immediacy of their presence is incorporated into her episodes. In Jane's encounter with the hoodoo woman Madame Eloise Gautier, we see that the legendary hoodoo queen Marie Leveau and her daughter are made integral parts of the communal psyche: "The hoo-doo lived on a narrow little street called Dettie street.… She was a big mulatto woman, and she had come from New Orleans. At least that was her story. She had left New Orleans because she was a rival of Marie Laveau. Marie Laveau was the Queen then, you know, and nobody dare rival Marie Laveau. Neither Marie Laveau mama, neither Marie Laveau daughter who followed her. Some people said the two Maries was the same one, but, of course, that was people talk." Consistently, whether recalling historical events, analyzing biblical parables, or recounting the doings of legendary figures, Jane's insights join the folk and the mythic in a unique historic vision.

Source: "From History to Her-story: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," Ernest Gaines, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 80-92.

Sources

Martin Amis, "MacPosh," in New Statesman, September 2, 1973, pp. 205-206.

Jerry H. Bryant, "From Death to Life: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines," in the Iowa Review, Vol. 3, No. 1,1972, pp. 106-120.

Addison Gayle, Jr., "The Way of the New World Part II," in his The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America, Doubleday, 1975, pp. 287-310.

Josh Greenfield, in a review of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in Life, April 30, 1971.

Melvin Maddocks, "Root and Branch," in Time, May 10, 1971, pp. K13-K17.

"Southern Cross," a review of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in Times Literary Supplement, March 16, 1973, p. 303.

Winifred L. Stoelting, "Human Dignity and Pride in the Novels of Ernest Gaines," in CLA Journal, March, 1971, pp. 340-358.

Alice Walker, in a review of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in New York Times Book Review, May 23, 1971, pp. 6, 12.

For Further Study

Valerie Melissa Babb, Ernest Gaines, Twayne, 1991.

See chapter five in particular, in which Babb examines the role of a woman as narrator. Includes an annotated bibliography of Gaines criticism (including articles, reviews, and interviews) up to the mid-1980s.

Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

In the fifth chapter, Beavers contends that Gaines reenvisions William Faulkner's alienated South by promoting storytelling as a power for social rejuvenation and as a means to reinforce community.

B. A. Botkin, editor, Lay My Burden Down: A Folk History of Slavery, University of Chicago Press, 1945.

A collection of interviews with ex-slaves conducted by the Work Projects Administration in the 1930s and 1940s. Gaines made use of this text in creating an authentic speech pattern for Miss Jane and other characters in her autobiography.

Keith E. Byerman, "A 'Slow-to-Anger' People: The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman as Historical Fiction," in Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, edited by David C. Estes, University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 107-123.

Byerman, in part responding to Babb (see above), contends that Jane's actions should be understood in terms of her instinct for survival rather than for resistance.

John F. Callahan, In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction, University of Illinois Press, 1988.

A wide-ranging study of speakers and voices in the tradition of African-American storytelling.

Mary Ellen Doyle, "Ernest J. Gaines: An Annotated Bibliography, 1956-1988," Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 21, Spring 1990, pp. 125-151.

The most comprehensive annotated bibliography at the time of its publication.

David C. Estes, editor, Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines, University of Georgia Press, 1994.

A collection of critical essays by various authors on Gaines's major fiction. Includes an extensive bibliography on Gaines and African-American studies to 1994.

Ernest Gaines, in an interview in Essence, April 30, 1971. Gaines rationalized the setting of his novel in rural Louisiana, by saying that 350 years of black experience has occurred in this rural setting. This cannot be ignored, but not much has been written about it. Conversely, authors such as Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright have already captured one hundred years of experience in ghetto narratives.

Marcia Gaudet, "Miss Jane and Personal Experience Narrative: Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman," in Western Folklore, Vol. 51, No. 1, January, 1992, pp. 23-33.

Gaudet observes that Gaines uses his experience in oral traditions to create for Jane a truly authentic voice.

Blyden Jackson, "Jane Pittman Through the Years: A People's Tale," in American Letters and the Historical Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Lewis P. Simpson, edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Daniel Mark Fogel, Louisiana State University Press, 1987, pp. 255-73.

Blyden asserts that Gaines records Jane's life as the history of an entire race.

Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, Harvard University Press, 1991.

Jones demonstrates Gaines's ability to create distinct, authentic voices for Jane and other characters and his commitment to the literary possibilities of African-American linguistic traditions.

John Lowe, editor, Conversations with Ernest J. Gaines, University Press of Mississippi, 1995.

A collection of interviews with Gaines by various persons, 1964-1994.

Lee Papa, "'His Feet on Your Neck': The New Religion in the Works of Ernest J. Gaines," in African American review, Vol. 27, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 187-94.

Papa examines Gaines's African-American reinterpretation of Christianity in his novels. He argues that Gaines's characters develop a very personal interpretation of religion which allows them to make and understand self-sacrifice and to establish a deeper relationship with their community.

Anne Robinson Taylor, Male Novelists and Their Female Voices: Literary Masquerades, Whitston, 1981.

A general study of the ways male authors use, create, and alter the voices of female narrators.

H. Nigel Thomas, "The Bad Nigger Figure in Selected Works of Richard Wright, William Melvin Kelley, and Ernest Gaines," in CLA Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2, December, 1995, pp. 143-165.

A study of the ways in which Wright, Kelley, and Gaines revise and complicate the figure of an unpredictable, dangerous, or uncompromising African-American male character.