22 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
work reminded him of the social divisions in the South. He also acknowledges the
influence of American writers Ernest Hemingway, Eudora Welty, and William
Faulkner. Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Gaines’s rural St. Raphael Par-
ish and its central town of Bayonne connects all his works and characters. Most
important to his development as a writer, however, is the storytelling or “porch
talk” he heard while growing up in “the quarters.” His characters’ speech patterns,
physical appearances, and mannerisms are modeled on the people he has known.
“I’m very very proud of my Louisiana background,” he has said, “the people I
come from—my uncle and the people we drink with, the people I talk with,
and the people I grew up around, and their friends” (Lowe). This pride shows in
Gaines’s literary representations of African American speech patterns, a hallmark
of his style and work.
Gaines’s work typically features ordinary people plagued by circumstances
beyond their control. Despite racism, lack of formal education, poverty, and ill
health, they achieve dignity and provide inspiration—like his Aunt ’Teen, who
“did not walk a day in her life, but who taught me the importance of standing.”
This tribute to his aunt serves as the dedication to The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman (1971), Gaines’s third novel, in which the 108-year-old title character
recounts events from her birth in slavery to the era just before desegregation.
Framing her story is that of the white historian to whom she tells her story. Many
readers believed the novel to be true, a testament to its realism. Gaines’s ability to
reproduce the tenor and variation of African American speech patterns contrib-
utes to the realism of all his stories and novels, most of which are told in the first
person; only his first novel, Catherine Carmier (1964), and fourth, In My Father’s
House (1978), are narrated in third person.
In his writing Gaines combines the “theme of commitment, of responsibility”
with the related motif of “someone teaching someone younger something about
life” (Academy of Achievement interview). Teaching occurs by example as in the
short story “The Sky Is Gray” in Bloodline (1968) when a boy watches his mother
interact with others during a trip to town. It also happens indirectly through
storytelling through which important lessons are transmitted. To underscore the
importance of teaching, Gaines makes many of his characters teachers who, ironi-
cally, often need to learn as much as, if not more than, their students. A Lesson
before Dying (1993), for example, features schoolteacher Grant Wiggins, whose
“lessons” for a young convict sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit
are as much for him as they are for the innocent prisoner. Against the themes of
teaching and responsibility, Gaines’s fiction provides an implicit criticism of racial
hierarchies. His first two novels, Catherine Carmier and Of Love and Dust (1967),
feature biracial couples whose romantic relationships are thwarted by racism.
Gaines also elaborates the complex system of social codes dividing Louisiana’s
African American, Cajun, and Creole communities, revealing not only conflict
but surprising alliances as well. In A Gathering of Old Men (1983), for example,
Gaines reveals the interdependency of Louisiana’s unique and varied cultural
communities.
In 1993 Gaines received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foun-
dation Fellowship or “genius award.” That year A Lesson before Dying won the