Going Home: the transcript (2 of 4)

You’ve said before that when James Meredith entered Ole Miss in ’62, it had a profound effect on you.

Oh, yes. Definitely so. I was supposed to go to Mexico with some friends of mine in ’62. At that time, many of the people about my age, especially in California, were leaving the country. They said, "You can’t write under this oppressive condition. We have to do other things." They were going to Europe, going to Africa. Some were going to Mexico. So two good friends were going to Mexico - a guy and his wife. I couldn’t go in the summer when they were leaving. I said, "I’ll join you guys later. I need some money. I don’t have enough money to support myself for a year in Mexico. I’ll have it by the fall, or the end of the year, and then I’ll join you guys."

Ernest J. Gaines stands on the main road running through the quarters. This shot was taken through a hole in the front door of Mount Zion Baptist Church. photo by Terri Fensel

Meredith went into Ole Miss, and that was felt all over the world, especially for a young black who wants to write and who’s writing about the South and staying away from the South and saying "I can’t put up with this stuff." I just decided that the only way I was going to save my writing - because I couldn’t get done what I was trying to write about, I didn’t want to get involved with it - I just wrote my friends Jim and Carol and told them I wouldn’t be able to join them.

I wrote an uncle and an aunt in Baton Rouge and asked them if I could live with them for about six months. They said sure. They had a bunch of guys in the place, but they made some of the guys sleep together so I could have a room to myself, a little small room about half the size of this porch. But it was big enough for me. All I needed was a little place to sleep. I did my writing after everybody had gone to work. I’d get out my little typewriter, and I’d write. I only needed that little room just to sleep in.

But it was James Meredith going into Ole Miss that I’m sure saved my life, as well as my writing. I didn’t know whether I would succeed as a writer, had I not come to Louisiana in January of ’63. I left California on the third of January and got to Baton Rouge on the fifth of January. If I had not come back to Louisiana at that time, I don’t know that I ever would have completed Catherine Carmier. If I had not completed Catherine Carmier, I don’t know what I would have done with my life.

Was that the heart of darkness for you? Having to return to Louisiana and to tackle it head-on?

When I came back, I came back to be and to see. I joined a couple of little demonstration protests in Baton Rouge at the time. Nothing significant. Nothing big. Nothing grand. No cops coming up and beating people in the head or anything like that. The cops stayed back and sort of looked at what you were doing over there. But there were no physical engagements with the cops. We didn’t have that.

I just felt that whatever happens has to happen. I’d been back in Louisiana twice before. I had been back here in ’52 and ’58 to visit family. So I had been back, but I had to come back. I didn’t want to come back when all of this violence was going on, but I wanted to be back here. I didn’t want to be caught up with it, but I wanted to be back here. It wasn’t too hard to come back, once I got back here. I settled down, and I found that I could visit places that I was trying to write about. I saw the kind of people I was trying to write about.

It was tremendously segregated in the early '60s here, to the point where you ate in a separate little place there in Baton Rouge and New Roads. I had done that before when I was here. I think in ’65 they began to slightly whitewash those ‘Black’ and ‘Colored’ and ‘White’ off of benches and doors and places like that, but not completely. The people could still see beneath that little smear of white paint where they had sat and eaten years before. They still went there.

I remember in ’63 when I was going back to California, I was sitting in what had formerly been the white waiting room at the train station, but most of the blacks would not come in there at that time. They still went to the place they had gone to for so many years. I wasn’t trying to break any laws. Maybe I went into that side to show them that, you know, you can come here. The whites could not say you can’t come in here. Things had begun to gradually change. Not completely because we were still eating in separate places. It may not have been ’63. Maybe it was ’65. I can’t remember it right now. I would have to go back to friends in Baton Rouge to give me dates.

You’ve said before that if you were forced to say who you are writing for, it would first be the black youth of the South and secondly the white youth of the South.

When I said that, Wallace Stegner, my teacher at Stanford, had asked me, "Who do you write for?" I said, "Wally, I’ve learned so much from so many great writers of nationalities all over the world. I learned from War and Peace, Fathers and Sons by Turgenev. I’m sure those great Russian writers, those aristocrats, were not writing for me, but they’ve helped me so much by their work, by the way they draw characters, their themes and their description of nature. They bring in the smallest detail to the largest details that make it so simple for you to understand. It goes so deep into the psyche. They try to understand that peasant as well as they try to understand that count or that duke over there. Those great writers can write about these things. I've learned from that. I’ve learned from Shakespeare. I like his fools as well as I like those great kings and princes. I learn from everybody."

He said, "Yeah, but those people were writing for somebody. If I put a gun to your head and I asked you who you write for…" I said, "Well, then, I’ll come up with something. If there was a gun to my head, I would tell you I write for the black youth of the South, to help him find himself, to find out who he is and the meaning of his life." And he said, "OK, suppose the gun was still at your head." I said, "Then I would say I write for the white youth of the South to let him know that if he does not know his neighbor of the last 300 years, he knows only half of his own history. He doesn’t know anything. He has to know the guy next door to him. He’s been around him those 300 years, and they share the same culture in a way - the food, the music and they wear the same clothes. They speak the same language, and they do all of these sorts of things, but they have no communication. Unless he knows his neighbor, the white or the black, you know only a little of your history." And that’s what I was trying to say to Wally at that time.

In 1972, you published the first chapter of a book titled The House and The Field in the Iowa Review, but you abandoned the book to write In My Father’s House. What ever happened to The House and Field?

photo by Terri Fensel

I thought the book was going in the direction of Miss Jane Pittman in a way. I just thought, I can’t continue with this. I had just published Miss Jane Pittman in ’71 and I was dealing with slavery again. It was a different story in that it showed the difference of how the slaves in the big house were treated as compared to how the slaves in the fields were treated.

One of the slaves in the big house, his mother was a slave and he was the son of the white owner and his mother had to be quite fair herself. But he was so fair he could easily pass for white. Although he was a slave, he was given better treatment than the blacks, than the ones in the fields were given.

So one day he decides, "I’m going to run away." He had a brother who looked just like him. I think he was about a month older than his brother. He had a white brother by the white owner and his wife. He was mulatto, with his mother and the same father. But they looked so much alike that they could almost pass for twins. So he decided to dress with his brother’s clothes and he was going to run away with those slaves. He had planned all of this stuff out. I did not get this far. He goes far with them, and then they just stop one day.

I’m telling you something I haven’t told anyone else. He just stopped at this one place, and it was raining and storming. A guy let him come into his farm and his barn to settle down. Because this fellow thinks he’s white, he invites him to the house. They’re sitting, talking and drinking while the blacks are in the barn. He starts gambling with this guy. He’s drinking. He’s gambling. He’s losing. The guy tells him, "I’ll take some of these (slaves) off of your hand to pay for your debt."

That was not his plan, but then he realized, hey, I can get some money here. He leaves them. He pays his gambling debt, has some money in his pocket, and he gets away. That’s what the story’s supposed to be. One of the guys (slaves) eventually gets away to look for him. The others are sold to other people. But one guy gets away to look for him and find him some way. Someone must find him and kill him.

That was the story of The House and The Field, but I got as far as the first or second chapter, and I quit. I said, "I don’t want to deal with slavery any more. I’ll deal with something else." Even at that time I was writing that, I had In My Father’s House in mind.

One critic of your work has suggested that the tragedy in your writing is less about the confinement and the aspirations of the people in the quarter as it is the disappearance of the quarters and that community. How do you respond to that?

No. I think my stories are all about the people. It’s all about how they confront life. The disappearance of the quarter doesn’t come about until my later novels, beginning with In My Father’s House and then A Gathering of Old Men. The tragedies are about the people. For example, in Catherine Carmier, the big tragedy is that, well, at that time, yes, the land is beginning to shift. Certain people are taking over the land, and the blacks are not involved as much. But in Of Love and Dust, it’s about a conflict between Marcus and Marcus himself, him saying, "I will not be a slave on this plantation."

Later, in the writing, the disappearing of the structure of the plantation as it was plays a part in the lives of some of the people, but that’s not the major theme theory of my writing.

Yeah, I wouldn’t think that the disappearance of the remnants of a slave system would be tragic.

No. I think of a community where people held together, that, yes. But not of a plantation system.

Recently, I've run across some criticism of white writers who portray blacks in their work. Some of the criticism has gone so far as to say that white writers have no right to even attempt to portray blacks. How do you see that, particularly as a black man who has written about Cajuns?

I think the writer should write about whatever he wishes to write about, and I think he should know what he’s writing about. If you can write about Dracula, and you can write about Frankenstein’s monster, and Shakespeare can write about a ghost, and other people can write about whales and things like that, I think I can write about man. I think we’re closer to man than I would be to a whale.

I think we’re all prejudiced and I think we all see certain things from our own point of view. I’m not saying that I’m fair in what I write and say about whites. I’m as fair as I possibly can be. I can’t say that I’m fair when I write about Creoles or even my own blacks. I say things that others may not see my way.

I know a lot of the militant writers disagree with me on everything because they didn’t see that I was, quote, participating as I should be doing in the '60s. I was not writing their kind of writing. I wasn’t doing that kind of writing. They’re saying, "You’re not writing truthfully about black people."

Since A Lesson Before Dying, quite a few people have come up to me and complimented me on my depiction of Paul in the book. I suppose that out of all of my books, he’s probably the most sympathetic of a white character in the books, although there have been white characters in all of my books. Some of them are decent, and others of them are not.

I remember I got a letter from a teacher in Mississippi, and she said, "I cannot teach The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman to my students. My black students don’t want to read or study the book because you use the n-word too much, and the white kids don’t want to read the book because you make all the white people devils and the black people good." (Laughs) So I couldn’t please either one of them. No matter who it is, I couldn’t please either one of them. (Laughs)

It was taken off of the bookshelves in Houston, Texas, about three or four years ago because of the n-word. That was done by a group of blacks, but it was put back on the shelf because the word got out. The New York Times ran a story on it, and several other papers wrote about it.

Gaines walks out to his pier on False River. Photo by Terri Fensel