Going Home: the transcript (4 of 4)

Your last novel, A Lesson Before Dying, was published in 1993. Can we expect to see another novel by you in the near future?

No. (Laughs)

Why is that?

Because I haven’t written it yet. You have to write it before you can publish it.

I started writing The Man Who Whipped Children. I have five or six chapters, but the energy is not there. The creative energy is not there. The thing that should go into the book is not there. It’s not coming up right now. If it happens that I can go back to the well and bring it up again, then of course I’ll continue to write it, but I don’t know what the near future is. If you’re saying one year or two years, I cannot say yes to that.

photo by Terri Fensel

What’s the experience of teaching at the university been like for you?

I’ve enjoyed it. I can teach one semester and write, just as I did with A Lesson Before Dying. I was teaching here in Louisiana, but going back to San Francisco because we still had our place (there) and writing during the spring semester. So it was wonderful.

I’ve had some wonderful students. I think I’ve helped some of them that have gone on to publish stories and a couple of them have published novels. They’re teaching, and they’re teaching creative writing. From what I hear, they’re teaching my method they learned from me.

I don’t feel like I’m a teacher really. I’m a writer who’s written a few more books than my students have, and I can give them some advice. I always leave it up to my students to make that final decision. I just try to help them.

But it’s been wonderful. You see where I am. I’m two blocks away from my classroom. I have a nice, beautiful house with a yard, flowers and trees. I love this kind of life.This is a wide-open question, but what’s your life been like?

You know, I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve had a lot of physical pain in my life, especially within the last ten years. But I’ve known a lot of wonderful people, right here and across this country. My wife and I do a lot of traveling. I’ve read in over half of the states in this country, major universities all over this country. We’ve met just wonderful people.

So everything balances out. I think that a lot of people here, maybe if not for my pain, would like to have my life. (Laughs) You work six months out of the year and do what you want the other six months and travel as much as we’ve traveled. We have friends all over the place. It’s been an interesting life.

Looking back at your body of work, what is that you’re wrestling with? What compels you to put the pen to paper?

As I’ve said earlier, I don’t know what I would do if I did not write. I’m not trying to write to change the world. As I said earlier, I like to entertain. Through this entertaining, I draw from experience that you, as a white, may not have experienced and many blacks have not experienced or an Asian or a Russian has not experienced. I’m telling them a story, something about this little piece of land and my time here.

I was in Portland recently, and I met three students from China. They just wanted to talk to me. The young lady had read the book - I don’t know if those guys had read anything - but the young lady had read the book, and she spoke beautiful English. But that I could reach somebody like that and talk about a book, that gives me such great satisfaction.

I get letters from people from all over the country and different parts of the world. It gives me satisfaction for what I’m doing with my life. I don’t know of any other way that I could have reached so many people had I not been a writer.

As I told Oprah, when she asked me what I try to do in my writing - and this is on the spur of the moment because I didn’t know what the hell else to say - I said, "I try to create characters with character to better improve my own character and maybe the character of the person who might read me." So that’s what I try to do. But I didn’t know I was going to say that five minutes before she asked me that question. Those doggoned cameras were running, and I’m sitting there at this table. OK, say something quick.

You said you’re writing about this little piece of land, but you also maintain another little piece of land, the cemetery on the plantation where you were raised. How many people are buried out there and how many people help you every year?

Gaines strolls through the Mount Zion Baptist Church Cemetery. Photo by Terri Fensel

I have no idea the number of people buried out there. Just as my aunt raised me, we were too poor to put a marker there when she died. I was too poor. I couldn’t even come back to the funeral because we didn’t have any money. I’m sure there are hundreds of graves there that no one can find. There are maybe 40 or 50 there that can be identified. Maybe not quite that many. Up until, I’d say, the ‘40s or the ‘50s, very few people were buried in tombs there. They were just put in these wooden boxes.

After so many years, this stuff just decayed. There are sunken graves all over the place. So I have no idea the number of people buried there. I know we’ve been burying people back there since the nineteenth century. It could have been a slave cemetery for all I know. I don’t know all the facts about all of this. Very few people had tombs of any kind. They just dug that six feet of hole and put a coffin inside it. If they put any kind of little marker there it was made of wood and, of course, that decayed.

Usually when we go out there we can have as many as 20 or 30 people show up.

Did you organize that group?

Dianne did. Dianne does all that stuff. (Laughs) She gets it all together, and she puts a notice in the Pointe Coupee Parish paper each year. We try to get people to come out the Saturday before All Saints’ Day, La Toussaint, as we used to say on False River.

A couple of my students went out there with me one year. (Laughs) Ed Gauthier and - what’s that big guy’s name? Seems like I can’t remember his name.

What does it mean to be a man?

Responsible to one's self and to one’s world. To me, a man, a woman, whatever, is someone who loves mankind. He cares for mankind, and he respects nature. I care for people, and I must care for nature. I care for trees and the waters and the plants and the earth and the birds and the insects and everything around me. You know, you have to, at times, destroy things in order to survive, like a rattlesnake. You’ve got to get rid of the rattlesnake. And I suppose in areas you have to destroy things, but I believe in respecting nature.

I wish we could all get along, care for each other, help each other, support each other. That’s my idea of what living should be about, having the courage to do it. Most of us are such cowards that we’re afraid to stand up and believe in things. We’re afraid to go against our peers, our race or our family and to speak out.

But you know, life is made up of balance. You’re always going to have evil in the world. You’re going to have good people, and you’re going to have evil people, no matter what the hell you do. And if you concentrate only on the evil, you are going to be destroyed by it. If you try to destroy evil in the world, you will be destroyed. I think that a good example is in Moby Dick, you know, Ahab going after Moby Dick. "I’m going to destroy this thing." Who’s destroyed? Ahab is destroyed.

So you try to control it, and you try to help develop goodness in people. The world is always going to be made of good and bad, and who’s to say what is good and what is bad? I don’t know. That’s why I said I hate saying anything that can be quoted. Goethe once said that everything has been done. The problem is doing it all over again. Goethe would say things like that, and I believe in it. But I would never say things like that.

Yeah, I just try to write. I try to write in a way that anyone can read it. The writing is simply put, but I hope that the story has some meaning to it, that you can get something out of it, to improve one's self, and yet, that’s not the purpose of it, the main objective to writing.

A writer is nothing but a storyteller. A guy went to another little village or he’s traveling, walking across the world, the earth, with a little walking stick and enough food in his pack, and he tells a story so that somebody will give him another biscuit or a piece of cheese or something to eat. He entertained them while he was sitting there, starting out in these caves, millions of years ago. So they would start out and go from one village to another, one cave to another, tell a little story and move on.

That’s all we are, just storytellers.