Mozart and Leadbelly (13 page)

GAINES: I don’t—maybe they get it through that rap. Maybe that’s what they’re talking about. Maybe—I almost feel that that’s what they’re talking about. They’re communicating something out there for people to be so much impressed by it. As you said, the white kids are doing it. You go to France, you find French kids are doing it. I’m pretty sure they’re doing the same thing in Japan. So, it is going on. It’s something that I cannot understand, but they wouldn’t understand—well, I can’t say they don’t understand me, now, because the book is being read from the middle years in school to the university level, and I’m constantly getting letters from the students—teachers make them write the letters—but letters from the students about the book.

DB: I think one of the things that great art always has the potential to do is sort of crack us open in a way—to crack us open and to show us something that we didn’t know before, and I think that person at the graduation or that woman in Richmond, you know, were saying that. Because I think we live in a time where we’re not aware that we’re living in a time where there’s a great need for spiritual rootedness, and I think when they pick up the book and read
A Lesson
Before Dying
or “The Sky Is Gray,” or one of your other stories, that’s one of the things that it puts them in touch with—that spiritual rootedness, or being rooted in something that is sacred. And I think one of the things that your works do so well is to show that there is a sacredness in the everyday life.

MG: We haven’t touched upon the influence of visual art.

DB: And you’re a photographer.

MG: Yes, and we’ve talked about how music has influenced you. But what about the visual arts? I know that you’re a really great photographer, and the photographs you took, especially at River Lake Plantation, serve as documents in a way. How do you think art, paintings, and pictures, and photographs, both by other artists and the things you’ve done—how do you see that and what does that bring to your whole idea of art?

GAINES: Well, the photographs remind me of a time, remind me of a place, and of a people, that I write about. Without those photographs, I don’t know that I could recall as accurately the things that I’d like to write about. And seeing the paintings by someone like Van Gogh. I’m thinking about
The Potato Eaters
now. People sitting around the table. That awakened something in my mind, and I can recall that I did the same thing. There’s a lamp on the table, people sitting at the table, blessing the food, eating, and the place. That brings it back to my memory—to what I saw as a child. A workman’s shoes, those all-muddy shoes, you know, brogans, that snaps my mind back to the past where we wore those same kind of shoes, and I’ve seen the people kick them off their feet and leave them out on the porch or something like that. Those kind of things that just remind me of my own past, so I can draw from that.

MG: You’ve talked about
Vincent’s Room,
and how that sort of gave you an image of the order, of arrangements—

GAINES: Yes, I have a picture of
Vincent’s Room
in my study out there. Yes, of the minimum of things you actually need—you can get by with so little. And I try to do that with my work. You don’t have to overblow things. I mean, I’m incapable of writing using a broad stroke. I have to use a smaller pen, be very selective. I think I prefer to repeat something three times to get it over, than to use a broad pen to get it over.

DB: I’m reading a book right now on Vincent van Gogh, and what you’re saying reminds me of something he’s saying in that book. He says that he doesn’t—he can admire the beautifully finished and the well-finished painting of the seventeenth century, but what he loves about Rembrandt is that there are parts of it that are unfinished. There are parts of it where you see the brush of the real man in there. And that strikes me as sort of close to what you’re saying about your stories. That they’re about the little things, about the brogan that can bring you to a particular memory, or about the potato eaters. And it occurred to me, too, that as you were describing
The Potato Eaters,
when he talks about that painting, he says— you were talking about blessing the food, eating the food and blessing the food—and he says that one of the influences for that painting was Christ at Emmaus, where Christ has to deal with a few of his followers after the Crucifixion and before he is actually ascended. So he sees that as a sacred painting, and I thought that was interesting that in what you said, up to this point, about the job of the artist to marry the sacred and the everyday, the sacred and the ordinary.

MG: You mentioned the lamp, and I’m sort of fascinated with—we called them coal oil lamps—

GAINES: Right, coal oil lamps.

MG: And it’s almost a nostalgic thing I have about coal oil lamps. My dad used to sell coal oil in his drugstore. When you have a drugstore in a rural area you sell lots of different things. And one of the big things that people would come to get every day was coal oil to fill the lamps. The coal oil lamps—was that something you had in your home when you were growing up?

GAINES: Definitely so. I learned to read with a coal oil lamp. You see, we had no electricity on the plantation until after the war, so that was about ’45 or ’46, about two years before I left. But for my first twelve years, I’m pretty sure, there was no electricity, so we read by the lamp on the table or the fire in the fireplace.

MG: You know, I was thinking, too, when you were talking about the lamp on the table, and often the coal oil lamp was on the table.

GAINES: Right. It was set on the mantel until you had to read or to study, and then you read like that. But when you were there just for illuminating the room, it was on the mantel. The clock would be there, too.

MG: Maybe I’m romanticizing this too much, and I’m thinking of
The Potato Eaters,
where you saw the images, you saw the objects that the light touched, and you didn’t see the whole picture.

GAINES: Right, the place was transformed by that light. These are the kinds of things that I find in the movies as well—and I see what the camera can do. I’ve been influenced by all of these things. Not one thing or two things, but all of these things. I remember I used to do a lot of walking in San Francisco in the morning, and there was this old man who used to sweep the streets before we got the motorized street sweepers in San Francisco. He used to sweep the streets, and whenever I’d come back from my walk in the park, I’d see him pushing his broom. And, you know, I’d talk about baseball or football or whatever. But he would never leave a piece of paper or a piece of anything without brushing it up and moving it along to pick it up. And I thought, it’s a wonderful thing that this man, this street sweeper, that he’s so particular about everything that he does. That little piece of trash—to be sure that it’s done. I feel the same way with my writing. The little things—you be sure that they’re corrected. Don’t leave it there if it’s not necessary. So I learned—you asked if I learned from the visual arts and from music—but I also learned from watching the everyday person, what he does, how he does something. Or watch a great athlete—see how they place themselves, how they do things so smoothly. So writing, for me, is not just learning from novelists or short-story writers, but from all the things around us.

DB: Talking about visuals, it seems to me—and I don’t mean in any way to make a statement about your story—but it seems to me in so many of your stories, you get the story right out there right away. You know, like the basic parts of the story—in
A Lesson Before Dying,
right away we know what happened. And it seems like so much of the rest of your story is about drawing characters.

GAINES: Yes, right, that’s what it is about. Yes, in the beginning, in the first chapter, you know what has happened, and the people that are going to be involved, but the rest of it is, ah—I said one time— Oprah asked me who I was trying to reach, and I said I tried to create characters with character to improve my own character and the character of that person who might read it. So it is what happens to the characters after this tragedy has happened. And the rest of it is—portraits.

DB: When we were talking about visual art, I couldn’t help noting that one of the things you use to make a story is drawing these portraits. In that book I’m reading about Van Gogh, he said that was the thing. He said, “Portraits—that’s what I want to do, portraits.” And it reminds me of you because that’s what you do. In
A Lesson Before Dying,
you know, from the beginning to the end with Miss Emma, for instance, you don’t have the complete portrait until the end of the book, and there’s the drawing of that portrait, the drawing of Jefferson’s portrait, and it’s just this beautiful collection of portraits. And I felt the same way about
A Gathering of
Old Men.

GAINES: Yes, yes. I know when I was writing
The Autobiography of
Miss Jane Pittman,
I was thinking about titling it
Sketches of a Plantation
. I think what I’m possibly doing is sketching and writing letters. Writing letters is like sketching.

DB: Yes, and you know I feel that those kinds of group portraits that Rembrandt was so famous for. I know that you’re working in a completely different place and you have a different objective, but to me,
A Gathering of Old Men
is a beautiful collection of group portraits. I don’t know who did the cover art, the dust jacket, but it seems to me that they had the idea in mind—of that old seventeenth-century Dutch masters group portrait.

GAINES: Right, yes.

DB: Can you talk a little bit more about—I remember you told us one time about listening to classical music and you talked about the music, the Mussorgsky, that you were listening to when you were writing
Miss Jane Pittman.

GAINES: Right,
Miss Jane Pittman.
I was writing about Miss Jane, and I was listening to
Pictures at an Exhibition
. The structure or frame is of this guy at an exhibition, and he was observing these pictures. And the motif would be as he moved from one picture to another, there was a motif and repetitive theme. At that particular time I was thinking about writing
Miss Jane
from the single point of view. It wasn’t really
Miss Jane Pittman
yet. It was just
Sketches of a Plantation.
That was the original idea. But in order to have a common theme to connect those sketches, well, there would be this little old lady. Just sketches and sketches, and after each book, there would be this huge ending. There are four books—the War Years, Reconstruction, The Plantation, and The Quarters. And each one almost ends up in violence. And if you listen to the sketches in
Pictures at an Exhibition,
all of these characters are going through this piece of music. And at the very end, it’s loud, loud Russian crazy music. “At Hell’s Gate,” I think it’s called. But then I realized that music could only take me so far, and then without anything else, it wasn’t going to work. With music, you can learn so much from it, but you could not repeat it in literature exactly as it was there. So I went over it, the sketches of the plantation that I did, the short biography of Miss Jane Pittman that I did, and I realized that I still was not getting the real character that I had to get. So I had to put all of that aside, and go back and do
Miss Jane Pittman.
But I started off with that
Pictures at an Exhibition
as the first influence on what I wanted to write about.

DB: I remember, Ernie, that one of the great thrills that I had in listening to
Pictures at an Exhibition
after you talked about what you had done and what your experiences with it had been and everything was to hear the
walking
music in
Pictures at an Exhibition,
and to realize how much walking that little woman did. Because she walks, yes, and that was so exhilarating for me to realize that.

GAINES: Well, I got that from—that walking stuff—so much I got from Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.” The walking and walking and walking. And that was also a good influence on “The Sky Is Gray.” The walking and walking and going back and forth.

MG: You both have commented that blues was a good influence on the form you put “The Sky Is Gray” in.

GAINES: Oh, yes. “The Sky Is Gray” as well as
Of Love and Dust.
Especially
Of Love and Dust,
the blues form that’s used in Lightnin’ Hopkins there. And just one verse from Lightnin’ Hopkins:

The worse thing this black man ever done
Was move his wife and family to Mr. Tim Moore’s farm.
Mr. Tim Moore’s man never stands and grin.
[That’s the overseer.]
He said, “You stay out the graveyard, nigger,
I’ll keep you out the pen.”

And so I took that and dealt with Marcus. He would not go to the graveyard. I mean he would not be killed, and this guy here would keep him out of the pen. And the next verse was like:

But he wake you up so early in the morning.
You catch a mule by his hind leg [to go to work].

So those two verses were really what pushed the story. And, of course, I knew all the things I could bring in because I had lived on a plantation and I had seen things that happened around me, so I could bring other things into the story—government affairs, and all that stuff.

MG: I remember you saying that in “The Sky Is Gray” that indirection, “playing around the note,” was an influence from the blues.

GAINES: Yes, I said it all the time. You don’t have to see them thrown out of a store or a place where they’re going to get something to eat uptown. You don’t have to have that happen in order to get the feeling that this was a segregated world. Some things you don’t have to come to directly and scream at. You just play it smoothly and that is even more painful for you, a reader, to see—this mother and child walking down this cold street without being able to go in to get warm or to get something to eat. It’s so much more effective so that you leave some stuff out. But what you do is get that little line that really shows it exactly—that shows enough—and you leave the other stuff out. At least I feel that way.