{"id":8169,"date":"2011-02-18T14:23:24","date_gmt":"2011-02-18T19:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/?p=8169"},"modified":"2013-07-09T12:16:05","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T16:16:05","slug":"february-18-2011-ernest-gaines","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2011\/02\/18\/february-18-2011-ernest-gaines\/8169\/","title":{"rendered":" Ernest Gaines"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>BOB FAW<\/strong>, correspondent: Ernest Gaines is older now, 78, and hobbled by a bad back, but as he slowly makes his way to the church where as a boy he rang the bell at funerals he will not, indeed, cannot forget the debt he owes to his ancestors in this Louisiana bayou country.<\/p>\n<p><strong>ERNEST J. GAINES<\/strong>: Without them, buried back there under those pecan trees, I would not be the writer today, if I would be a writer at all.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: For more than 50 years, he has brought them to life in short stories and novels, some made into major films. Perhaps his most famous novel, \u201cThe Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,\u201d charts the dawn of the civil rights movement from her days as a slave.<\/p>\n<p><em>From \u201cThe Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman\u201d: \u201cI\u2019ve been carrying a scar on my back ever since I was a slave.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Miss Jane Pittman was inspired by Gaines\u2019s Aunt Augusteen, whom he calls the greatest influence in his life.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: She could not walk.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/files\/2011\/02\/post01-ernestgaines.jpg\" alt=\"post01-ernestgaines\" width=\"280\" height=\"210\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-8182\" \/><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: She could not walk. She crawled over the floor all her life, but she did everything in the world for me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: She could not walk, but you say she taught you how to stand.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: Right. By  her action, by her overcoming all the obstacles.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Gaines remembers his aunt and other forebears as he sits in the church which he has restored on plantation land where he once picked cotton.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: When I\u2019m sitting in the church alone, I can hear singing of the old people. I can hear their singing and I can hear their praying, and sometimes I hum one of their songs.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: And Gaines feels so indebted to his elders that on his own property he has also lovingly restored and now maintains this cemetery where many of those elders are buried.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAINES<\/strong>:  I\u2019d always go back to the cemetery and sit on one of those tombs back there, and I felt more at peace at that time than any other time in my life. I could feel their spirit there with me.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: That connection helps explain why Gaines writes so passionately about the people and places in his past\u2014because he worries that past is facing extinction.<\/p>\n<p><em>From \u201cA Gathering of Old Men\u201d: \u201cThat tractor was getting closer and closer to the graveyard, and I got scared that that tractor would plow up them graves and get rid of all the proof that we ever was.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/files\/2011\/02\/post02-ernestgaines.jpg\" alt=\"post02-ernestgaines\" width=\"280\" height=\"210\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-8183\" \/><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: All writers write about the past, and I try to make it come alive so you can see what happened.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: John Lowe, professor of literature at Louisiana State University, is an expert on Ernest Gaines.<\/p>\n<p><strong>PROFESSOR JOHN LOWE<\/strong>: He\u2019s writing for his people. You know, there\u2019s an old African proverb that says no people should be hungry for their own image. That world was missing, and he\u2019s put that world on the stage now.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: There is in that world darkness, then hope. In \u201cA Lesson Before Dying,\u201d an innocent man, Jefferson, will be executed. But before that he learns to face death with dignity.<\/p>\n<p><em>From \u201cA Lesson Before Dying\u201d: &#8220;Good-bye, Mr. Wiggins. Tell the children I\u2019m strong. Tell them I am a man.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>LOWE<\/strong>: His works radiate that spirituality that Gaines has always seen as part of the human condition\u2014that man has to believe in something bigger than himself, and it might be religion, it could be any number of things. Jefferson does  walk to the electric chair as a man,  because he has come to understand that his life has meaning for other people in the community, and it makes a big difference to them how he handles that situation, and so he does, indeed, endorse something bigger than himself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Through Jefferson\u2019s transformation his teacher, Grant Wiggins, also grows and emerges stronger.<\/p>\n<p><em>From \u201cA Gathering of Old Men\u201d: \u201cAin\u2019t going to be no lynching tonight.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: And in \u201cA Gathering of Old Men\u201d an entire community, long beaten down, finds self-respect.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/files\/2011\/02\/post04-ernestgaines.jpg\" alt=\"post04-ernestgaines\" width=\"280\" height=\"210\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-8185\" \/><strong>MARCIA GAUDET<\/strong>: There is a sense of hope.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Marcia Gaudet is the director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAUDET<\/strong>: It may not be perfectly optimistic hope, but there\u2019s certainly the possibility of hope, and that\u2019s a much more realistic thing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Raised a Baptist, Gaines attended Catholic school for three years. He doesn\u2019t want readers to overstate religious symbolism in his work, but many scholars find it there\u2014from Miss Jane Pittman\u2019s religious conversion to the Christ-like figure of Jefferson in \u201cA Lesson before Dying.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>LOWE<\/strong>: Gaines was raised in a religious tradition, and this is a pretty religious state even today, and it\u2019s quite understandable that his work would be permeated everywhere, you know, with this kind of religious symbolism. In the South, our great mythology is the Bible. It\u2019s not Greek or Roman myth like it is in Europe. It\u2019s the Bible.<\/p>\n<p><em>From: \u201cA Gathering of Old Men\u201d: Go home, Jameson. I don\u2019t want to have to tell you anymore.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Black clergymen in Gaines\u2019s novels are sometimes portrayed as sanctimonious and ineffectual. When in \u201cA Gathering of Old Men\u201d a group of black men stand up to white oppression for the first time in their lives, the minister tries to stop them.<\/p>\n<p><em>From: \u201cA Gathering of Old Men\u201d: \u201cReverend Jameson, nobody listening to you today. You old bootlegger, shut up.\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/files\/2011\/02\/post05-ernestgaines.jpg\" alt=\"post05-ernestgaines\" width=\"280\" height=\"210\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-8186\" \/><strong>LOWE<\/strong>: Gaines understands the importance of the church, particularly during the civil rights movement. But at the same time he\u2019s also aware because of the way the white community imposed it on the slave community to keep blacks in line. I think he has a very mixed attitude about the church.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: For the black church, Gaines is awed by its role as a sanctuary.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: What I miss today more than anything else\u2014I don\u2019t go to church as much anymore\u2014but that old-time religion, that old singing, that old praying which I love so much. That is the great strength of my being, of my writing.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Do you regard yourself as a religious person?<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: I think I\u2019m a very religious person. I think I believe in God as much as any man does. I don\u2019t only believe in God, I know there\u2019s God.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Gaines wrote the first draft of all his novels by hand. While he isn\u2019t writing much now, he still remembers 1948, when he first left the plantation land around False River, carrying with him an imaginary block of wood.<\/p>\n<p><strong>GAINES<\/strong>: The old people told me that okay, you can leave us, but you would carry this, this symbolic big piece of wood that I must struggle with for the rest of my life until I\u2019ve completely finished that wood, which I doubt that I ever will. But there will always be something to chip away and to carve into something nice and beautiful.<\/p>\n<p><strong>FAW<\/strong>: Ernest Gaines\u2014honoring the past, making it come alive because he must.<\/p>\n<p>For Religion &amp; Ethics NewsWeekly this is Bob Faw in Oscar, Louisiana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;That old singing, that old praying which I love so much\u2014that is the great strength of my being, of my writing,&#8221; says the author of &#8220;A Lesson before Dying&#8221; and many other critically acclaimed books. <a href=\"https:\/\/pbs-wnet-preprod.digi-producers.pbs.org\/wnet\/religionandethics\/2011\/02\/18\/february-18-2011-ernest-gaines\/8169\/\" class=\"more\">More <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":72,"featured_media":17275,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6569],"tags":[921,6072,2814,9408,601,1892,26,1830,6884,989],"class_list":["post-8169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-videocast","tag-african-american","tag-black-church","tag-civil-rights","tag-ernest-gaines","tag-literature","tag-louisiana","tag-religion","tag-slavery","tag-south","tag-spirituality","topics-race","faith-christian"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.1.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>February 18, 2011 ~ Ernest Gaines | February 18, 2011 | Religion &amp; 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