660 The American Century: Literature since 1945“did not walk a day in her life but who taught me the importance of standing.”
Then, in his fifteenth year, he joined his mother in northern California, which has
been his main residence ever since. He returns regularly to Louisiana, however.
More to the point, his collection of stories, Bloodline (1968), and all his novels are set
in the fictional parish of St. Raphael, based on the parish in which he was born.
Return to the homeplace is a shaping impulse in Gaines’s fiction, from his first novel,
Catherine Carmier (1964), through In My Father’s House (1978) to A Lesson Before
Dying (1993). So is Gaines’s desire to resurrect what he sees as a missing history.
Covering a period as far back as the 1860s, but concentrating as Gaines himself has
said on the era “between the thirties and the late seventies,” they tell the story of
cultural confluence and social conflict between whites, Cajuns, and blacks; but they
focus on the group whose past has, the author feels, been ignored or actively
suppressed, the “peasants,” “the blacks of the fields.” Certain themes recur through-
out – manhood and, in particular, what is called in In My Father’s House “the gap”
between black fathers and their sons, womanhood as the arbiter of value and guar-
antee of continuity in the Southern black community, the moment of trial, testing,
when a person has the “chance to stand” (to borrow a phrase from Gaines’s 1983
novel, A Gathering of Old Men) and so assert his courage and define himself. But the
determining factor in all of Gaines’s fiction is not so much this theme or that but
voice. “I come from a long line of storytellers,” Gaines has said. His fiction, he has
admitted, works best when he “can get into the person of some other character and
let him carry the story.” So in The Autobiography of Miss Jean Pittman (1971), the title
character, based on Gaines’s great aunt, recovers her past and that of her people in a
heroic act of tale-telling. In A Gathering of Old Men, the old men testify to past
weakness and announce their newly found courage in a series of overlapping mono-
logues. And in A Lesson Before Dying, a young black man condemned to death seizes
the chance to be in touch with his own humanity by bearing witness to it in his diary.
In each case, and others, voice becomes a means to empowerment for Gaines’s
characters – and, by implication, for the black community to which they belong.
The silence is broken, the suppressed history released, in an act that involves both a
recovery of folk idioms, the rhythms of the past, and resistance to the present; talk-
ing here has a clear social dimension – in terms of the speech author, narrator, and
character employ, the personal is the political.
With Albert Murray, what has been returned to is not so much voice, the oral
tradition, as the blues idiom. Like Gaines, Murray has drawn on a number of
European and white American influences, but the most powerful shaping factor has
been his African-Americanism: in this case, the general, nurturing aspects of the
African-American community described in his essay collection, South to a Very Old
Place (1971), and the specific cultural forms celebrated in such books as The Hero
and the Blues (1973) and Stomping the Blues (1976). For Murray, the blues idiom
works like classical tragedy. It supplies a stylistic code for dramatizing the most
terrible, painful situations; and it offers a strategy for living with, even triumphing
over them, surviving with dignity and grace. As with any developed aesthetic form,
the blues idiom enables the artist to transform the grit of raw experience intoGGray_c05.indd 660ray_c 05 .indd 660 8 8/1/2011 7:31:37 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 37 PM