Going Home: the transcript

On Wednesday, February 12, 2003, I interviewed author Ernest J. Gaines at his home in Lafayette, Louisiana, just off the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. What appears here is the transcript of our conversation. The article based on this interview was published in the March 5, 2003 issue of The Times of Acadiana.

Most of the photos that appear here were taken by Terri Fensel and were shot on Thursday, February 13, 2003 at False River in Oscar, Louisiana.

Ernest J. Gaines photo by Terri Fensel

Are you the oldest child in your family?

I’m the oldest of twelve.

How old were you when your parents divorced?

Let’s see. I must have been quite young. I don’t know the exact age, but I know that I was quite young. Eight, I guess, or something like that.

How much later did your mother remarry?

Soon afterwards.

How did your mother meet your stepfather?

Oh, I don’t know. They both lived on False River. So they could have met in New Roads or somewhere on the river. Everybody knows everybody around that place. So they probably ran into each other. I don’t know exactly how it happened.

He was a merchant marine?

No, he didn’t go into the merchant marines until he left Louisiana.

What kind of man was he?

He was Catholic, very disciplined, a hard worker. Although he isn’t the oldest of his siblings, most of them looked up to him. He’s the guy that took care of the responsibilities of the family.

What do you remember of your father? Did you have a relationship with him after your parents divorced?

Well, I was around him a couple of times and he was very kind to me, but he wasn’t around very much.

Was your stepfather more of your father figure than your father was?

Right. Oh, yes. Definitely so. It was he who took me to California, and it was he who had me educated. When I was a kid about eight or nine, I remember him being there trying to farm. He had a little place and he tried to farm there. He couldn’t raise anything around that place, not in that kind of dirt.

You’ve said before that you were raised by your Aunt Augusteen Jefferson. You said that she was unable to walk, but that she taught you the importance of standing.

Right.

What does that mean?

Being responsible for my brothers and sisters, to strive, to keep striving. That was the only way I was going to make it in the world. That was her advice to me.

Do you know why she couldn’t walk?

No, I don’t know whether she was born like that or if it happened after her birth. My mother never told us. I think that by the time my mother knew her she was already crippled. She was my great-aunt, my mother’s father’s sister. She was probably crippled when my mother knew her.

Do you remember telling some of your students about warming up the floor in the morning for your aunt?

Well, what I would do, I’d get up early and I’m the oldest. So I’d get up in the winter and start a fire. Those little wooden floors, those little cabins out there, they were just cold. So the fireplace would warm the floor.

What was your early education like?

I went to a church school. They didn’t have a school. You’d go to church. If we go down tomorrow, or whenever, I can show you this little building. It’s still there. It’s leaning. It’s just about ready to fall, but it’s still there.

The inside of Mount Zion Baptist Church, Gaines' first school. Photo by Terri Fensel

There could have been 30 children, from the primer to the sixth grade. You had one teacher to teach all the children. The sixth graders could take the primer students over their lessons while the teacher taught the other grades. Then the teacher, in the afternoon, would teach the fourth, fifth and sixth grade classes.

We had a wood-burning heater in the center of the room. I put all of this stuff in A Lesson Before Dying. I think I described it pretty accurately. There was no such thing as desks. You sat on benches and you wrote out your assignments on your lap, with a book on your lap. Or you got down on your knees and put the paper on the seat of the bench and wrote out your assignments for your arithmetic or for whatever it was.

Most of those teachers were very disciplined. They would have a strap right on their desk. That strap would whip you on your hands if you didn’t perform, you didn’t get your work done or you got in a fight or something. At that time, parents expected a teacher to whip the child if the child was unruly in the classroom.

The way we got air in the classroom was by opening up the windows and the two doors - the back door and the front door - of the church. Of course in the winter, you had to close all this stuff and try to stay as warm as you possibly could, with the smaller children up near the heater and the larger children further back.

Approximately 12 or 15 families would send their children to school. There were that many on that plantation, but children would come from other places as well to come to school there. There was no nearby school for black children at that particular time, in the ‘30s and the ‘40s, in Pointe Coupee Parish. Not very many, you know. That was one of the reasons why I had to go to California.

After I finished the sixth grade on the plantation, I went to a little Catholic school for black students in New Roads for three years. Of course there was no high school in Pointe Coupee for blacks, so my folks took me to California.

What was the name of the school in New Roads?

St. Augustine.

So the only option for a black student at that time who completed the sixth grade was to go to St. Augustine?

St. Augustine and there was another little middle school back there, but I forget the name of it right now.

Tell me about Reese Spooner (one of the old men from River Lake Plantation).

He was a very tall, dignified man who worked on the plantation just as everyone else did. He worked on the other side. The plantation was divided among different people there. He didn’t live on the same side as we did, but he lived across the street, across the road. I saw him all the time. He was just another person there. I always remember him being very tall and very dignified.

Was he a natural storyteller?

I don’t know that he was a storyteller as much as a person trying to recall history. He would not have just sat down and said, "Okay, I’m going to tell you a story." But he would talk about the past. A lot of time he got confused. Because I had to talk to other people, and they would disagree with him. But I was talking to him when he was an old man, see. When I was writing A Gathering of Old Men, I would talk to him about lots of things. So he had gotten things confused by then. As a small child, I just saw this tall man.

You’ve said before that you’re a horrible storyteller.

I think when I say I’m a horrible storyteller, I can’t sit around and tell stories. I tell jokes, but I can’t tell stories. I used to run bars with some of my buddies in San Francisco and whenever I would start talking, telling a story, they would always tell me, "Gaines, go home and write. You tell lousy stories."

That’s surprising to me, that a man who has written so prolifically would make such a statement. As a writer, what’s the difference between telling a story . . .

… and writing it?

Yes, but let me be specific about this. Particularly if Reese Spooner told you a story, why doesn’t that translate directly to the page?

I’ve asked that of many friends of mine. My brother Lionel, who lives in Port Allen, is a great storyteller, but he can’t write anything. And if you try to repeat everything he told you, it doesn’t come out right on the page. You have to improvise. You have to interpret it.

I know many people who can tell you the greatest stories, but when you try to record it on the machine and then translate that to the written page, it does not sound right. You have to make the breaks. You have to make the changes. I don’t know where this change comes about. You have to leave out so much. You have to fill in some of the gaps that the person does not tell you about.Hemingway once said that one of the necessary tools for the writer is to have a good shit detector. You have to know that this guy’s telling you a story. But how do you figure this story out that this guy’s telling you? That’s what you’re going to put on your paper. Go through it, think about it and then put it down on that paper. Just like here, if you put everything that I say here in your story, it’s going to sound lousy. You have to edit this stuff and edit it and edit it. I’m always editing interviews when some people interview me. And that’s what a writer does when someone tells you their story. He has to go through it and think about it and take out what he doesn’t want and add something else. So that other person might see that story and he might say, "Well, I didn’t say that exactly." Of course he didn’t say it exactly like that.

Do you think that the old people tell stories like they did when you were growing up and do you think that people are even listening any more?

Well, I like to listen. Anybody that tells a story, I’d listen in a minute. Maybe I can use it again, jokes or anything like that. I like jokes. I’ll listen to a joke in a minute and laugh at it. Yes, I believe in that.

Some of the old people can tell stories. Dianne’s mother just died about five years ago. She could talk about the past, could tell you some great stories. I used to love to listen to her. There’s some of them out there that can still tell those things. My brother, Lionel, there in Port Allen, he’s younger than I, one next to me, a great storyteller. He can make me laugh. He just had a leg amputated.

Gaines walks in front of Mount Zion Baptist Church. Photo by Terri Fensel