National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. Gaines has also been awarded the
National Humanities Medal of the United States, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre
des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest honors. In 2007 the Baton Rouge
Foundation established the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence in his
honor to recognize new fiction by African American authors. Gaines is emeri-
tus writer-in-residence at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he began
teaching creative writing in 1983.
In his fifth novel, A Gathering of Old Men, Gaines reworks the popular
genre of the detective story while depicting the actions of a rural community
after an African American man kills Beau Boutan, a Cajun farmer. Hindering
the investigation by Sheriff Mapes is the expected retribution by Boutan’s father,
a vigilante whose past acts of violence against the black community are well
known. In addition, eighteen elderly black men and one white woman declare
responsibility for the death, thus preventing the immediate arrest of the obvious
suspect, Mathu. The novel is the culmination of Gaines’s most popular themes
and narrative techniques. It uses a range of first-person narrators, fifteen in all,
who each take turns “speaking,” to highlight the relationships across generations
and ethnic communities. Eight of the African American narrators are among
the “old men” of the title. Also included are an African American boy and two
women, one white, the other black. The other narrators are white men, two of
whom are sympathetic to the African American community and two who are not.
In that context, an interesting study in addition to those cited below is Suzanne
W. Jones’s Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties (Baltimore: Johns Hop-
kins University Press, 2004), which considers interracial relationships as treated
in Gaines’s novels, including A Gathering of Old Men, along with works by both
black and white writers, such as Josephine Humphreys, Ellen Douglas, Randall
Kenan, and Chris Wiltz.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Gaines’s departures from the genre of detective fiction underscore themes
related to race, community, and responsibility on the part of both individuals
and society. Students interested in genre-related issues might consider how
Gaines’s depiction of setting, structure, and characterization compare to these
elements in typical detective fiction. For definitions and elements of detective
novels, students can consult Charles J. Rzepka, Detective Fiction (Cambridge,
England: Polity Press, 2005), especially the first chapter, “What Is Detective
Fiction?,” and George N. Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story (Bowling
Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1997). - A Gathering of Old Men addresses a theme prevalent in most of Gaines’s work:
black masculine identity or manhood. Keith Clark has noted that “Gaines
does not merely digest and regurgitate shopworn definitions of masculinity,”
those that emphasize physical strength, intimidation, and power. Instead,
he redefines African American manhood to emphasize responsibility to
the self, family, and community. “A man got to do what he think is right,”
Mathu says, “That’s what part him from a boy.” Using discussions of mas-