468 Gaines, Ernest J.
her name, thereby giving her social legitimacy. Her
goal in journeying to Ohio is to locate her adop-
tive father, but when she does find him he does not
recognize her, just as at birth the parent who has
abandoned a child would not. Unfazed by the disap-
pointment, she sets up a life where she is a parent
and not a child and gives to Ned what she has never
received, love, care, and respect. So the second stage
of Miss Jane’s life as a freed slave is one of creating
an instant family for the vulnerable, which includes
herself.
Miss Jane’s role as a mother to Ned gives her life
immediate meaning and agency until Ned becomes
an adult and carves out his life’s mission to empower
his people and improve their living conditions. But
he is forced to abandon his mission. After a brief
sojourn to escape being killed, Ned returns, hav-
ing transformed himself from Ned Brown to Ned
Douglass after Frederick Douglass. Because of Jane’s
nurturing Ned is able to quickly move to Maslow’s
highest stage of ethical development, giving service
to his community. But his empowering mission
threatens the white-black social hierarchy in the
South; like most noble leaders who initiate ethical
change, he is brutally murdered. When hired killer
Albert Cluveau kills Ned, Jane is furious and curses
Cluveau, but soon after, she helps Cluveau’s daugh-
ters, refusing to withhold compassion even from her
enemies.
Having quelled her childhood and erotic stages
of life to raise Ned, Jane has an opportunity to par-
ticipate in the stage of erotic love after Ned’s depar-
ture. She falls in love with Joe Pittman, a highly
independent, spirited horse breaker, who through
sheer hard work has earned his release from eco-
nomic bondage and taken to breaking wild horses,
never to be beholden to another master because
during slavery, while slaves were kept in literal and
metaphorical chains, after slavery they were kept in
social and economic chains.
During this stage of finding love and losing love,
which spans a decade, Jane is happy and content,
but she has to surrender to the gender hierarchy
of marriage. Joe Pittman’s age and wildness further
exacerbate this hierarchy. When Joe meets Jane, he
already has a family of two girls and is interested in
Jane to some extent to find a surrogate mother for
his children. Insecure in her role as a spouse, Jane is
afraid, a fear that manifests itself as an unexplain-
able paranoia of losing Joe. What she fears at this
stage is separation anxiety, a fear felt by children
and associated with the first stage of life. Being
loved and being in love makes Jane vulnerable,
much more so because she has not gone through
the traditional first stage of life development, so her
vulnerability leads her to bizarre acts that culminate
in Joe’s death.
Devastated though she is by Joe and Ned’s
deaths, she keeps faith by keeping her hands busy as
she enters the recovery stage of her life. She travels
from one work establishment to another, prefer-
ring to work outside in the fields doing heavy labor
rather than domestic chores, forming a philosophy
that steady work, not too much work, and eating fish
does a body good. She does not take sides, but works
and rests and consoles those in need; but she can
trust no one and nothing. Though old and wise and
most suited to give the young direction, she does not
lead, refusing even to speak of her long and event-
ful life to the history teacher who reconstructs her
autobiography. A leader imposes a larger collective
will on others and Jane is dead set against it, having
chaffed under the heavy authority of slavery. She
shies away from such a role, afraid it brings in the
same master-slave paradigm of willful domination.
When the young workers talk about the Civil Rights
movement Dr. King has started she is skeptical, but
when news of Jimmy’s death arrives she cannot stay
uninvolved.
Miss Jane’s biggest challenge has been finding
out what to believe in, since familiarity and ubiquity
make even the wrong appear right. So for Miss Pit-
tman whose life is steeped in and shaped by injus-
tices, believing in any kind of ideological movement
is difficult. Experience has taught her to trust only
the individual and make no generalizations about
either race.
Having lost so many black pioneers and poten-
tial leaders in her community, she cannot bear losing
any more. She decides to lead. Because the people
so badly want a messiah she becomes the messiah,
but an earthly one, not a heavenly one. Her wisdom
comes when she believes and relies on the validity
of something outside of herself, something she has