Welcome to the Ernest J. Gaines Center Academic Blog

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 Gaines, as an ingenous capturer of the experience of Black Americans in this country then and now, utilizes his inherited traditions to great effect in his stories to better illustrate and contextualize these lives.

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 -- especially A Lesson Before Dying, A Gathering of Old Men, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman -- Brady Sims has yet to be brought into many scholarly discussions, a gap which seems reflective only of time and certainly not of the novella's richness and depth.

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 Antebellum Era), Reconstruction, and civil rights, and the Civil Rights Movement in rural South Louisiana.

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 forefront of several historical events. Through his words, Dr. Gaines preserved a way of life for African American, Cajun and Creole tenants and sharecroppers in Oscar, Louisiana.

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 some of the distinct characteristics of the now-global Black Lives Matter movement. The novel’s introduction explains that the coming narration has been reproduced from interviews between Miss Jane and an educator who eagerly requests to hear her story, one that is not provided in the textbooks from which he teaches. The novel spans from just after the American Civil War, through the Reconstruction and Jim Crow Eras, and into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. It is not until after two important characters, Ned Douglass and Jimmy Aaron, become martyrs of movements for racial justice that Miss Jane fully embraces her role as a leader, though she had been one all along.