Ernest J. Gaines was born on
a Louisiana plantation in 1933 in the midst
of the Great Depression. He began working the fields when he was
nine, digging potatoes for fifty cents a day. He spent most of his
childhood with his aunt, Augusteen Jefferson, a determined woman
who had no legs but who managed to take care of her family. Gaines
considered her the most courageous person he ever knew. At age fifteen, Gaines
moved to Vallejo, California, where he joined his parents, who had
moved there during World War II. In Vallejo, Gaines discovered the
public library. Since he could not find many books written about
African-Americans, he decided to write his own. A few years later,
he enrolled at San Francisco State University and took writing courses
at Stanford University.
In 1964 Gaines published his first
novel, Catherine Carmier. He published the novel Of
Love and Dust three years later, followed by a short story
collection entitled Bloodline (1968)
and another entitled A Long Day in November (1971).
He received little attention for these efforts, but felt happy about
his progress as a writer. In 1971 Gaines
completed one of his most famous novels, The Autobiography
of Miss Jane Pittman. The novel follows the life of a fictional
woman, Jane Pittman, who is born a slave and lives to see the black
militancy of the 1960s. After the critical
and financial success of The Autobiography of Miss Jane
Pittman, Gaines published several more novels on the topic
closest to his own heart: the black communities of Louisiana. The
most successful of these was A Lesson Before Dying, which
was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1993, won
the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Gaines’s novel investigates the difficulties facing blacks
in the rural South during the 1940s, but
the historical context of the novel spans almost a century. Following
the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Jim Crow Era commenced in
the 1880s and continued through the turn
of the century and up until 1964. This era
contained the systematic destruction of black farmers in the South
at the hands of resentful whites who sought to undermine black entitlement
to property, animals, financial support, and even wages. The Jim
Crow Era also brought with it severe segregation laws that affected
every area of life and the development of white racist organizations,
such as the Ku Klux Klan, which terrorized black -communities.
As a result, between one and two million black farmers
left the South during the first Great Migration from 1914 to 1930, in search
of work in northern cities where factory owners promised, but never
provided, high-wage jobs. In the 1940s, with
the outbreak of World War II, a second Great Migration brought black
farmers from the rural areas in the South to the urban, industrial
areas—primarily in the northern and western United States—in search
of higher-paying jobs in the burgeoning industrial economy. The
second wave of migration from the rural countryside to the cities brought
greater success, if only relatively. Between 1910 and 1970, more
than six million blacks left the South.
A Lesson Before Dying highlights the
tension inherent in the lives of African-Americans during the 1940s.
Gaines highlights how the pull away from the South divided blacks
from their heritage and their roots, stranding them in a world where,
it seemed, one had to look, talk, and act white in order to succeed.
At the same time, however, remaining connected with one’s roots—with
the rural South—meant having to live in a world fraught with Jim
Crow laws and racial segregation (which remained in existence until
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965). Racial violence and
hatred pervaded all sectors of American society, but were felt most
acutely in the rural South.
