Every culture possesses a body of traditional knowledge and patterns of behaviors which are utilized to navigate the many windfalls, challenges, and vicissitudes of the world and African Americans, with their long, complex, and multi-layered history of presence in the US are no exception. Ernest...
In Ernest J. Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying, many things strike me having finished the book. One thing in particular is the way the novel ends with a bittersweet moment of hope despite the profound unfairness of Jefferson, an innocent Black man's execution at the hands of the state in rural 1940's...
In 2017, two years before his death, Ernest J. Gaines published The Tragedy of Brady Sims, a novella that opens with the titular character shooting and killing his newly convicted son in the Bayonne courthouse. Unlike his earlier work鈥攅specially A Lesson Before Dying, A Gathering of Old Men, and The...
Huey P. Newton (left) and Ernest J. Gaines (right) The iconography of Black Pride movements rarely if ever visualized the rural South. Black Power appeared in the streets of urban centers like Oakland, CA where Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seal founded the Black Panther Party. But Ernest J. Gaines...
In the novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Dr. Ernest J. Gaines creates the main character, Jane, who has lived through every historical event to happen to African Americans in the South. Jane functions as a living history book that provides personal reflections on American Slavery (the...
To what extent is it possible to get inside the creative mind of a writer? No single source can unequivocally take us to the core of the literary imagination that draws us to it. But if we take as a helpful starting point materials once held in the writer鈥檚 possession and gifted to a repository of...
Dr. Ernest J. Gaines is internationally known as the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying. He authored additional award-winning novels and short stories that became made-for-television movies. Though fictional, Gaines' novels and short stories take place at the...
State of Marshall Plantation In Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men, Johnny Paul finds himself reminiscing about an old memory when he notes: Thirty, forty of us going out in the field with cane knives, hoes, plows--name it. Sunup to sundown, hard, miserable work, but we managed to get it done. We stuck...
The life and literature of Ernest J. Gaines continues to instruct folks of all races about the struggles and the triumphs of black people living in South Louisiana. His novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, is a work of historical fiction that may now be understood as a foreshadowing of...
