Mozart and Leadbelly (2 page)

Years ago, in one of the essays from his collection
Shadow and
Act,
Ralph Ellison said one cannot chose one’s (racial and cultural) relatives, but one can choose one’s own (literary and artistic) ancestors, and among the ones he chose were Hemingway, Eliot, Dostoyevsky, and Faulkner. It is interesting to see how Ellison’s figurative concept of relatives and ancestors is revised by Gaines through the use of Mozart and Leadbelly as a metaphor for his own influences as a writer. His exposure to classical and canonical influences in literature, art, and music was important to his development as a writer in ways that are best explained by him in the essays that are to follow, but he does not privilege these over those of his own cultural heritage.

Gaines throughout his remarkable career has drawn equally from those we might now think of as his “ancestors,” such as Mozart, Mussorgsky, and Turgenev, who provided examples of technique, form, beauty, and artistic excellence,
as well as
from relatives such as Big Bill Broonzy, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Bessie Smith, whose mastery of language allowed her to describe the Great Flood of 1927 in twelve lines of poetic blues lyrics, whereas it took Faulkner more than one hundred pages to do the same thing in prose. Even if Gaines did not have works of black writers to draw upon in his developmental period as a writer, he balanced the influence of the Mozart tradition with that of what we might think of as the blues culture of his youth, the cultural environment that permeated the plantation quarters where he spent many of his formative years and to which he returned to find his voice as a writer. In the title essay, “Mozart and Leadbelly,” he relates a story he heard from a friend about a young black man on an elevator whistling a Mozart melody. Ernie makes it clear that whistling Mozart is a good thing, but also that “there is some value in whistling Bessie Smith or Leadbelly.”

We are mindful of the fact that Ernest Gaines is a writer of novels and stories and that many readers will pick up this book primarily to encounter
new
Gaines stories. None of the stories in this collection are new in the sense of being newly written, but for most readers they will represent newly discovered treasures. For example, how many readers would cherish the opportunity to read the first story written by one of their favorite writers, especially if they knew the story was originally written in what we might think of as a desperate attempt to get a decent grade in a college composition course? In this volume is the story “The Turtles,” Gaines’s first published story, which in 1956 appeared in the first issue of
Transfer,
a literary magazine at San Francisco State that is still in publication today. At that time, Dorothea Oppenheimer was in the process of starting a literary agency. When she read this story she quickly enlisted Gaines as a client. The rest is history.

Besides “The Turtles” and the aforementioned “Christ Walked Down Market Street” are other stories that were published in magazines from earlier in Gaines’s career, such as “My Grandpa and the Haint”—a story that so well embodies the language and themes that have become known as Ernest Gaines trademarks—the delightful “Boy in the Double-Breasted Suit,” and “Mary Louise.” Those familiar with Ernie’s first novel,
Catherine Carmier,
may especially appreciate the fact that “Mary Louise” was an early draft of a work that eventually developed into that novel.

A recent critic proclaimed Ernest Gaines as the writer whose works best serve to extend the most important qualities of Southern literature, especially those of community and place. This might be true, but as much as any other American writer, Faulkner included, Gaines’s writings grow out of a particular community and a particular place. Although students often tend to confuse the universal with the general or common, something we have all learned from James Joyce (as Grant Wiggins does in
A Lesson Before Dying
) is that the universal in art is always best captured through specific and particular depictions of human life. If the mantra of the Southern writer concerns the representation of community and place, Gaines can be best understood in terms of a particular land that habits a particular community of people, a land that is important to him because of the people—his people—who have inhabited it for generations, just as they do today. From reading the following essays, readers will discover that Gaines’s apprenticeship as a writer was spent while serving as this community’s scribe. Although he left the land, he never forgot his calling to serve. His service to these people as a writer illustrates that Gaines more so than any other writer in our history represents what it means to be an American griot.

Calling Gaines a griot is not at all far-fetched. But he is not African and has no pretensions about being one. His tales emanate from the plantation quarters where his ancestors endured slavery and Jim Crow, but his audience is primarily an American one and through America the rest of the world. His commitment to these people—
his people
—is demonstrated year in and year out in a ritualistic event that could easily be imagined as a scene in a Chinua Achebe novel or a depiction from Julie Dash’s classic film
Daughters of the Dust
in the annual ceremony at the graveyard site where his ancestors, friends, and a brother are buried. Ernest and Dianne Gaines serve as president and vice president of the Mount Zion River Lake Cemetery Association in Cherie Quarters, Oscar, Louisiana, and in late October of each year, when pecans cover the cemetery grounds, shortly before All Saints’ Day, they lead a gathering of family members and friends from all over the country, along with present and former students, in a special beautification ceremony dedicated to honoring the dead by cleaning their resting places and offering them a gift of communion from the living.

Those who have participated in this sacred event know a side of Gaines that is as important as anything he has ever written and that conveys the very spirit of his work as a storyteller. Anyone who has seen Gaines in such a setting is well aware that he is very spiritual. It is important not to confuse religion and spirituality in this instance, because people often act religiously by going through the motions without substance or real commitment. As with many of his most memorable characters, his spirituality is not limited to a specific day and hour of the week, and it is not confined to the dictates of fallible human institutions. As Gaines has said himself:

My church is the oak tree. My church is the river. My church is walking right down the cane field road, on the headland between rows of sugarcane. That’s my church. I can talk to God there as well as I can talk to him in Notre Dame. I think he’s in one of those cane rows as much as he is in Notre Dame.

There is a particular church, however, that is of particular importance to Ernest Gaines’s life. It is a church many of us have visited in scenes such as the one where young Jimmie is proclaimed to be “the One” in
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
where Grant Wiggins teaches Irene Cole, and where Tante Lou and Miss Emma sing their Termination Songs in
A Lesson Before Dying
. A further illustration of his commitment to his people and the spirit of those who came before him on the land is his acquisition and restoration of the old church from the quarters where he grew up, the same church building where he attended Sunday services and completed the early years of his education. Today the church sits in back of
la maison entre les champs et la rivière,
next to the guesthouse that the Gaineses built on their property for the comfort of visiting family members and friends. Anyone who enters the church is struck by a solemn feeling not unlike that of being in the quarters’ graveyard. It is as if it is a place where thousands through the generations have come for rest at the invitation of their griot, their storyteller and caretaker. The spirit of the church is the same spirit manifested in the pages of so many of Gaines’s most notable works.

Gaines elaborates on this aspect of himself as a person and his writing in a recorded conversation between himself and Marcia Gaudet and Darrell Bourque that has been transcribed to serve as a closing coda to this book. Besides serving as coeditor of
Mozart and
Leadbelly,
Marcia also served as an editor of one of the most widely read books of Ernest Gaines scholarship to date: the collection of interviews titled
Porch Talk with Ernest J. Gaines.
Both Marcia and Darrell have been close friends with Ernie through their years together as colleagues on the UL Lafayette English department faculty, and they are probably the only two people who could have engaged him in such a lively, open, and informal discussion. Of the published Ernest Gaines interviews, this one is among the best. It took place while the Gaineses still occupied the property that is now known as the Gaines House, the house just steps from the campus that was donated to the university by a local benefactor when Gaines agreed to come on board as writer-in-residence with the express purpose of allowing him to live there as long as he desired. The discussion that took place over the dining room table that day occurred as the participants broke bread together while consuming oyster/shrimp po’boys from Old Tyme Groceries (one of Ernie’s favorite delicacies; in fact, if you ever plan to visit him, you would be wise to stop by Old Tyme in Lafayette to pick up some on the way), and libations from a vintage bottle of Chardonnay.

During their conversations, Gaines says a number of things that help to illustrate the importance of the Mozart and Leadbelly theme of this book. One in particular is a statement he makes about the use of the radio that Grant Wiggins gives to Jefferson in
A Lesson Before
Dying,
one that Jefferson uses to listen to blues stations and that serves as an instrumental step in the process of the character reaching what we might think of as a secular salvation. Although some might see this term as an oxymoron, it is important to remember that Jefferson has been figuratively reduced by his own lawyer to the status of a hog, and any good Christian knows that Jesus Christ did not die to save such beasts. So when Gaines tells Marcia and Darrell that when Jefferson’s in jail and he’s playing that radio and he’s listening to blues, the old man—the minister—says “that sin box.” Well, sometimes that sin box can help you get to heaven as well as anything else. That’s what I was trying to show. But the artist himself cannot separate the religious or the blues or the spiritual. The artist cannot.

Dichotomies such as the one that views the blues and spirituals as antithetical entities are nowhere to be found in Gaines’s philosophy of art, and this is also true of his artistic influences. Therefore, in this interview he discusses such diverse sources of influence as Dvořák’s
New World Symphony,
Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition,
Lightnin’ Hopkins singing “Tim Moore’s Farm,” and John Coltrane. For those who know Gaines only from a distance, the interview at the end of this book is an excellent opportunity to gain insight into the man while he is sitting back talking with friends as just Ernie.

It is our hope that this introduction will do more than preface the works that are to follow. It is from us, and especially from Ernie himself, a welcome to readers, new and old alike, to a collection of works that are like treasures from a vault that the world is being allowed to view for the first time. But unlike museum pieces, these are works you can actually hold on your own, experience at your leisure, and take with you to become part of your own valued possessions. We are both in anticipation of a new masterwork from Ernie in the future, one that many of us have been allowed to glimpse but that he does not want any of us to talk about. In the meantime, for those of us with an appetite for new and undiscovered works by Ernest J. Gaines,
Mozart and Leadbelly
promises to be as satisfying as any oyster/shrimp po’boy could ever be.

Marcia Gaudet and Reggie Young
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
December
15
,
2004

Essays

MISS JANE AND I

I shall try to say a little about myself, about my writing, and about Miss Jane Pittman and how she and I came to meet. Since the publication of
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,
I’ve read reviews in which critics have called Miss Jane a real person. A representative of
Newsweek
asked me to send the editors of the magazine a picture of Miss Jane Pittman to be used with a review of the novel. I had to inform her that I could not, since Miss Jane is a creation of my imagination. The lady who called me was both shocked and embarrassed—“Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” she said. The actress Ruby Dee, when reviewing the novel for
Freedomways,
also mistook Miss Jane for a real person. Several newspapers made the same mistake. One lady accused me of using a tape recorder, then calling the interview a novel after I had cut out all the inconsequential material. A good friend of mine who writes for one of the leading newspapers in San Francisco felt that
Miss Jane
is definitely a novel, but he also felt that I must have, at some time in the past, interviewed my grandmother or my aunt who raised me when I lived in the South. Bob Cromie on
Bookbeat
out of Chicago also thought I had interviewed my grandmother.

But
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
is absolute fiction. By that I mean I created Miss Jane, and if I did not create all the events she mentions in her narrative, I definitely created all the situations that she is personally involved in.

It is written somewhere that when Gertrude Stein was dying, Alice B. Toklas leaned over her and asked, “Gertrude, Gertrude, what is the answer?” Gertrude Stein raised up on her dying bed and said, “Dear Alice, but what is the question?”

Who is Miss Jane Pittman? But first, who is Ernest J. Gaines? Because to get part of the answer to the former question we must go back, back, back—not to 1968, when I started writing the novel, but to 1948, when I had to leave the South.

Until I was fifteen years old, I had been raised by an aunt, a lady who had never walked a day in her life, but who crawled over the floor as a six-month-old child might. Some people have said that she had been dropped on the floor by another child when she was small; others have said that she was born with that affliction. To this day I do not know which story is true—but I’ve never met anyone who ever saw her walk.

When I say that my aunt raised me, I mean she did more than just look after me, my brothers, and my sister. I can remember us children bringing the potatoes, rice, meat, flour, and water to her sitting on her bench by the stove so that she could cook for us. I can remember the loaves of bread, cookies, and cakes she used to bake for us in the oven of the woodstove. I can remember seeing her sitting on her bench and leaning over a washboard, washing our clothes in a tin tub. Once this was done, and after she had taken her afternoon nap, she wanted to do more. She wanted to go into her garden then and chop grass from between the rows of beans, cabbages, and tomatoes. She had a small hoe, about half the size of the regular hoe. After sharpening it well with her file, she would let it down on the ground, and then in some way, but with true dignity, she would slide from step to step until she had reached the ground— then she would go into her garden. Other times she would go into the backyard with her little rice sack and gather pecans under the trees. No pecan, not even the smallest one, could hide itself in the bull grass from her eyes forever. They would try hard, the little pecans, but eventually they would give up the ghost just like all the rest. These are just a few of the things I can remember about my aunt, but there is much, much more.

Then there were the people who used to come to our house, because she was crippled and could not go to theirs. In summer they would sit out on the porch, the gallery—“the Garry,” we called it— and they would talk for hours. There was no television then, and only a few people had radios, so people would talk. Sometimes there would be only one other person besides my aunt; other times, maybe a half dozen. Sometimes they would sew on quilts and mattresses while they talked; other times they would shell peas and beans while they talked. Sometimes they would just sit there smoking pipes, chewing pompee, or drinking coffee while they talked. I, being the oldest child, was made to stay close by and serve them coffee or water or whatever else they needed. In winter, they moved from the porch and sat beside the fireplace and drank coffee—and sometimes a little homemade brew—while they talked. But regardless of what time of year it was, under whatever conditions, they would find something to talk about. I did not know then that twenty or twentyfive years later I would try to put some of their talk in a book that I would title
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.

This all took place before 1948. In 1948, I had to leave my aunt and the South to go West to my mother and stepfather to finish my education. I probably—I definitely—would have stayed in the South if I could have received the education that they thought I rightly deserved. But since there was no junior high or senior high school near me, and since I would have to go away to school anyhow, my mother and stepfather thought I should come to California, where they were. I remember the day I left. It was Sunday. It took me all day to pack, unpack, and repack the old brown leather suitcase. I didn’t have many clothes, I can assure you, but for some reason I could not get it done. Maybe it was the bag of oranges, or the shoe-box of fried chicken and bread, or the tea cakes and pralines wrapped in brown paper, or the bag of unshelled pecans—maybe it was one of these or all of these that kept me opening and shutting the suitcase. But, finally, I got it done and came out onto the porch. Everybody was there: the old people on the porch talking to my aunt and the children in the yard waiting for me to come down the steps so they could follow me to the road. I went to each one of the old people, shook their hands, and listened to their advice on how to live “up North.” Then I went to my aunt. She sat on the floor—just inside the door. “I’m going, Aunty,” I said. I did not lean over to kiss her— though I loved her more than I have loved anyone else in my life. I did not take her hand, as I had taken the other people’s hands, because that would have been the most inappropriate thing in the world to do. I simply said, “I’m going, Aunty.” She looked up at me from the floor. I saw the tears in her eyes. She nodded her head and looked down again. When I came out into the road, I looked back at her. I waved and smiled; she waved back. The old people were silent all this time—but I’m sure that before I reached the highway to catch the bus, they were talking again.

I went to Vallejo, California, a seaport town, because my stepfather was in the merchant marine. I had gone there in summer, and I had nothing much to do during the day but play with other children. We lived in the government projects at the time, and my friends were a complete mixture of races: Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, whites, and Indians. I made friends quite easily, and most of the time, especially during the day, I was very happy. But at night, when my new friends had gone, I sat alone in a room and thought about home. Many times I wished that my aunt would write my mother and tell her to send me back—or that some wise man would come up and tell me how futile an education was when I had to sacrifice so much for it.

A few months after I had gone to Vallejo, my parents moved out of the projects into another part of town. I did not have nearly as many friends there, and my stepfather warned me against those young people I did meet. They were a rough bunch, and he felt that they would all end up in jail before they graduated from high school. I took his advice about staying away from them, and that’s how I found myself in the public library.

I soon found out that all I needed was a library card and then I could take out as many books as I could carry in my arms. At first I took books indiscriminately—I would choose one simply because I liked its dust jacket. But soon, because of the schoolwork, or maybe because of the weight of the books, I began to select only those that I would definitely read. Number one, they had to be about the South, and two, they had to be fiction.

So I read many novels, many short stories, plays—all written by white writers—because there was such a limited number of works at the time by black writers in a place like Vallejo. I found most of the work that I read untrue and unreal to my own experience, yet because I hungered for some kind of connection between myself and the South, I read them anyhow. But I did not care for the language of this writing. I found it too oratorical, and the dialects, especially that of blacks, quite untrue. (Twain and Faulkner can be put into or left out of this category, depending on your taste.) I did not care for the way black characters were drawn. (Twain and Faulkner can be accepted or not accepted here—again, depending on your taste.) Whenever a black person was mentioned in these novels, either she was a mammy, or he was a Tom; and if he was young, he was a potential Tom, a good nigger; or he was not a potential Tom, a bad nigger. When a black woman character was young, she was either a potential mammy or a nigger wench. For most of these writers, choosing something between was unheard of.

Despite their descriptions of blacks, I often found something in their writing that I could appreciate. Sometimes they accurately captured sounds that I knew well: a dog barking in the heat of hunting, a train moving in the distance, a worker calling to another across the road or field. Pasternak once said that Southern writers wrote well about the earth and the sun. These writers, who so poorly described blacks, did well with the odor of grass and trees after a summer rain; they were especially adept at describing the sweat odor in the clothes of men coming in from the fields; you could see, better than if you were actually there, the red dust in Georgia or the black mud of Mississippi.

I read all the Southern writers I could find in the Vallejo library; then I began to read any writer who wrote about nature or about people who worked the land. So I discovered John Steinbeck and the Salinas Valley; and Willa Cather and her Nebraska—anyone who would say something about dirt and trees, clear streams, and open sky.

Eventually, I would discover the great European writers. My favorite at this time was the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant—de Maupassant because he wrote so beautifully about the young, and besides that he told good stories, used the simplest language, and most times made the stories quite short. So for a long time it was de Maupassant. Then I must have read somewhere that the Russian Anton Chekhov was as good as or better than de Maupassant, so I went to Chekhov. From Chekhov to Tolstoy, then to the rest of the Russians—among them Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenev, especially Turgenev’s
A Sportsman’s Sketches
and his
Fathers and Sons.
The nineteenth-century Russian writers became my favorites, and to this day as a group of writers of any one country, they still are. I felt that they wrote truly about peasantry or, put another way, truer than any other group of writers of any other country. Their peasants were not caricatures or clowns. They did not make fun of them. They were people—they were good, they were bad. They could be as brutal as any man, they could be as kind. The American writers in general, the Southern writer in particular, never saw peasantry, especially black peasantry, in this way; blacks were either caricatures of human beings or they were problems. They needed to be saved or they were saviors. They were either children or they were seers. But they were very seldom what the average being was. There were exceptions, of course, but I’m talking about a total body of writers, the conscience of a people.

Though I found the nineteenth-century Russian writers superior for their interest in the peasants, they, too, could not give me the satisfaction that I was looking for. Their four- and five-syllable names were foreign to me. Their greetings were not the same as greetings were at home. Our religious worship was not the same; icons were foreign to me. I had eaten steamed cabbage, boiled cabbage, but not cabbage soup. I had drunk clabber, but never kvass. I had never slept on a stove, and I still don’t know how anyone can. I knew the distance of a mile—never have I learned the distance of a verst. The Russian steppes sounded interesting, but they were not the swamps of Louisiana; Siberia could be as cruel, but it was not Angola State Prison. So even those who I thought were nearest to the way I felt still were not close enough.

I wanted to smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking to school on cold days while yellow Louisiana buses passed them by. I wanted to see on paper those black parents going to work before the sun came up and coming back home to look after their children after the sun went down. I wanted to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers left home—not because they were trifling or shiftless, but because they were tired of putting up with certain conditions. I wanted to see on paper the small country churches (schools during the week), and I wanted to hear those simple religious songs, those simple prayers—that true devotion. (It was Faulkner, I think, who said that if God were to stay alive in the country, the blacks would have to keep Him so.) And I wanted to hear that Louisiana dialect—that combination of English, Creole, Cajun, black. For me there’s no more beautiful sound anywhere—unless, of course, you take exceptional pride in “proper” French or “proper” English. I wanted to read about the true relationship between whites and blacks—about the people that I had known.

When I first started writing—it was about when I was sixteen or seventeen—my intentions were not to write polemics or anything controversial. At that time I had not read much writing by black writers, so I did not know what especially a black youth trying to write his first novel was supposed to write about. (I still don’t know what a black writer is supposed to write about unless it is the same thing that a Frenchman writes about—and that is what he feels deeply enough inside of him to write about.) No, when I first started writing, I wanted to write a simple little novel about people at home. I think the first title I gave it was
A Little Stream,
because it dealt with two families, one very fair, one dark—separated from each other by a stream of water. But I gave the novel at least a dozen different titles before I was finished with it. Whenever the plot took a sudden change—a direction beyond my control—I erased the original title and gave the manuscript one that was more fitting.