Clearly, their love is doomed from the start, but
it transforms Marcus. His anger softens, and his
affair reveals his tenderness. While the novel il-
lustrates throughout the emasculation that Afri-
can-American men suffer at the hands of white
men, it is love that ultimately affirms Marcus’s
true strength, honor, and manhood. Juxtaposed
with Marcus’s and Louise’s tragic love is the af-
fair between black Pauline and the white overseer,
Bonbon. Society condemns the truer love of Mar-
cus and Louise but seems to condone the shallow
sexual relationship shared between the white man
and the African-American woman. Bonbon has
also vowed to “tame” Marcus, and Hebert sets the
two men at odds to fulfill his own agenda. Bon-
bon eventually kills Marcus, an event that drives
Louise insane.
The tragic history of the South is also displayed
in Gaines’s best-known work, The Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman. A neo–slave narrative, the
novel follows the life of one of African-American
literature’s most famous characters, the 110-year-
old Jane. Born a slave, Jane lives to see the begin-
ning of the civil rights era. Her story is told in a
frame narrative to a young history teacher intent
on collecting slave autobiographies. Jane’s story
reverberates in the history of the American South.
Though a fictional account, the novel and its title
character are representatives of all the silent stories
of real African Americans who survived but were
never heard.
Some of those voices are heard in The Gather-
ing of Old Men. The novel is framed by the mul-
tiple accounts of some of the “old men” in the
title. The community of voices, of stories, not only
structures the work but also acts as a metaphor for
all the tales lost to history. Several of the narrators
are white as well, showing the interrelatedness of
race in the South. The multiple narrators each tell
their version of the killing of Beau Boutan, a white
man. Charlie Biggs, his African-American em-
ployee, is guilty of the crime, but several old black
men and a young white woman, Candy Marshall,
claim responsibility. Each stands up to the law to
protect Biggs. Their resistance to the sheriff—and
to white America’s idea of justice when it comes to
black America—emboldens the old men to stand
up and be seen as men by the white citizens for
the first time. Biggs refuses to let others take his
place and is ultimately charged with the crime,
but he is treated fairly. The men’s act of solidarity
has changed the minds of many white citizens of
the town about what constitutes a good man and
about racial prejudice.
A Lesson Before Dying also explores how Afri-
can Americans find dignity within a racist society
that tries to strip them of their humanity. Also set
in rural Louisiana, the novel narrates the tragic
circumstances in the life of a young man who has
been wrongly accused of a crime. Jefferson, who
was only in the wrong place at the wrong time,
is sentenced to die. His grandmother asks Grant
Wiggins, a teacher, to educate Jefferson and to
help him come to terms with his impending death.
Under Wiggins’s guidance, Jefferson learns to
write, and begins to express himself on paper. His
ability to finally find his “voice,” not only gives him
dignity, it allows him to have some sense of control
over his identity that white society has stripped
from him and the African-American community.
As he did in The Gathering of Old Men, Gaines
shows in A Lesson Before Dying that the South is
not populated only by white bigots. Candy Mar-
shall in The Gathering of Old Men stood beside the
old African-American males, willing to risk her life
to change the ways of the South. The deputy in A
Lesson Before Dying, Paul, also transcends his com-
munity to embrace Jefferson and Wiggins. Gaines
suggests that if America is ever going to be able
to overcome the burden of the past it will require
both races joining together to change the course
of the future.BIBLIOGRAPHY
Babb, Valerie. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991.
Estes, David C., ed. Critical Reflections on the Fiction
of Ernest Gaines. Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 1994.
Lowe, John, ed. Conversations with Ernest Gaines.
Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995.Tracie Church GuzzioGaines, Ernest 195