Mozart and Leadbelly Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  Essays

  MISS JANE AND I

  MOZART AND LEADBELLY

  A VERY BIG ORDER: RECONSTRUCTING IDENTITY

  BLOODLINE IN INK

  AUNTY AND THE BLACK EXPERIENCE IN LOUISIANA

  WRITING A Lesson Before Dying

  Stories

  CHRIST WALKED DOWN MARKET STREET

  THE TURTLES

  BOY IN THE DOUBLE-BREASTED SUIT

  MARY LOUISE

  MY GRANDPA AND THE HAINT

  In His Own Words: - Ernest J. Gaines in Conversation

  A LITERARY SALON: OYSTER/SHRIMP PO’BOYS, CHARDONNAY, AND CONVERSATION WITH ERNEST J. GAINES

  About the Author

  ALSO BY ERNEST J. GAINES

  Copyright Page

  To my brothers and sisters

  and in memory of

  my mother, Adrean Jefferson Colar

  INTRODUCTION

  I think the artist must deal with both God and the Devil. I think you can’t put one aside or the other. You know, if you’re going to write for certain groups, and I don’t believe in writing for any specific group. So let others call blues the “sin music” and gospel is God’s music. . . . But the artist himself cannot separate the religious or the blues or the spiritual. The artist cannot.

  ERNEST J. GAINES

  When this book was still in its embryonic stages, we made the first of several trips from our campus in Lafayette to False River to discuss the project with the man we know better as “Ernie.” Both Dianne (Mrs. Gaines, who might be the only person in his circle of family members and friends who calls him Ernest—his old “homeboys” have always called him E. J.) and Ernie had recently finished consolidating several households they had maintained through the years in different cities around the country—including Lafayette, New Orleans, Miami, and San Francisco—into “La maison entre les champs et la rivière,” a name given to the newly built Gaines residence by Ernie’s longtime booking agent Tanya Bickley. The house sits on the land of the same plantation where Ernie was born and spent the early years of his life. It is the same plantation landscape where most of the stories in the Ernest J. Gaines fictional universe are set.

  Both of us had visited Ernie and Dianne at the camp they still maintain on the river—which is actually an oxbow lake, across the road from the new house—one that consists of a trailer home and a deck that extends out into the river. In previous years, the Gaineses usually spent the week in their Lafayette home near the university where Ernie has served as writer-in-residence for the last two decades, and their weekends at the False River camp. (He is now in semiretirement, but his appointment at the university is one that he holds for life.) We had seen their new house during various stages of its construction, but for both of us this was our first visit after the Gaineses had moved in. Our purpose for coming, however, was not strictly social. We had been in discussion with Ernie over the summer about one of several projects dedicated both to commemorate his upcoming retirement from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and to pay homage to a remarkable career as a writer that promises to extend itself well into the future. This book was one of those ideas.

  In the beginning, we conceived this book as something that would be published by our own Center for Louisiana Studies, a program at the university that devotes itself primarily to the scholarly concerns of the region. The book would have served two purposes: to give exposure to the center as a growing and developing university press, and to make available to the scholarly community various writings (some composed as talks) that were either unavailable or difficult to find. Since Ernie wholeheartedly supports the university and its efforts, he was more than happy to allow it to place in print these works, which he assumed would have little value to anyone other than the kind of scholars who like to “pick over everything” that a writer has ever done.

  It is important to point out that Ernie was not really enthusiastic about our idea to compile all of his “old and dusty writings” together in a collection. If anyone else had approached him with the idea (and at least one person had in the past), chances are he would have laughed and sent that person away empty-handed. For a lot of people, he would not have even bothered with the laugh. But he likes the two of us and he also likes the center, and anyone who knows Ernest Gaines very well will realize the possibility that the permission he gave us to publish his works might well have been a retirement present to us. He’s just that kind of man. Maybe he was feeling sorry for the two of us because of the many years to come before we will be able to join him at our leisure, day after day, fishing in False River or sitting in one of the rockers on the porch of la maison Gaines, chewing cane and discussing the books and writers that serve as our common passion. Knowing Ernie, he probably felt it was the least he could do because we still have to read student papers night after night and direct dissertations, while he does not.

  During this meeting, three important things happened. The first was that Ernie told us he felt an obligation to run the material by his literary agent, Jeff Gerecke. He said that Jeff might want to have Ash Green, his editor at Knopf, look at the material before making a commitment to the center. Since Knopf is his publisher, he didn’t feel it would be right to have works he had written come out under the banner of a different publisher. At the time, none of us thought Knopf would have interest in the various pieces; after all, they had been around and available to Knopf for years. The most we hoped for was that Knopf might agree to publish the works jointly with the Center for Louisiana Studies as a favor to Ernie because of their long-standing relationship. But we were wrong. As soon as Ash Green received the material—various pieces that had been scanned from different sources and that had not yet been typed into a manuscript—he began editing the works for publication. There was no deliberation on his part; he knew these works deserved widespread circulation.

  The second thing that happened involves the story that opens the book’s second section: “Christ Walked Down Market Street.” We had heard Ernie, during previous discussions, tell how—in his opinion—all the stories he had tried to write that were set away from Louisiana were failures. In fact, he has stated this publicly in talks such as one titled “Miss Jane and I,” which is the opening essay in this volume. But as we drove along La. 190 that day on our way to la maison Gaines on False River, we wondered if we needed to look at these works that Ernie has always dismissed. We had little faith in Ernie as a judge of his own work. Most of his efforts that he views as failures would make a lesser writer’s career. Then we remembered this particular story that Ernie had read once at our Deep South Festival of Writers and one that he had mentioned to us as his personal favorite of everything he had ever written. We thought, why not include “Christ Walked Down Market Street” in this collection?

  This is a story Ernie wrote while serving a semester as a visiting writer at the University of Houston’s downtown campus twenty years ago, and it involves his desire to write a story with a title similar to one he had read by Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer titled “The Spinoza of Market Street.” But having spent so much time on Market Street in San Francisco, Ernie wanted to use that city as the setting for his work. Without giving away the story’s plot, we feel it is important to point out that he wrote it out in longhand, as he still does the first drafts of everything he writes, and then typed it after he returned to the Bay area. Other than his reading the story at our Deep South “festival” and on one other occasion, the story served no purpose other than to sit in a private spot among his other possessions. But he had always insisted that out of everything he had written, this was his favorite story. We
thought that alone made it a crucial piece to have as part of our collection. He agreed to consider our request and went to retrieve his only copy of the story—only one other copy of this work existed at the time in Ernie’s papers at UL Lafayette’s Dupré Library in files that are unavailable to the general public. When he came back just a minute or two later, he held in his hand a group of rolled-up goldenrod sheets of paper with a rubber band around them. He sat down and with a kind of jovial look on his face told us again about the circumstances behind the story’s composition, which would make a great essay for any future collections like this one. Then he began reading from the sheets, including the story’s introduction (which also introduces the story in this book), and as he read, his face lit up like a Christmas tree in July. The two of us sat there in awe of the personal reading we were receiving from someone who is in constant demand from colleges, universities, and arts organizations to read his works before large audiences—from a writer who has been honored with numerous literary awards and whose works have been translated into at least a dozen different languages. It seemed as if he decided right then that our book idea was a good one and that he would let us include “Christ Walked Down Market Street” because his love for it alone made it worthy of publication.

  The third thing that happened that day was Ernie also agreed to let us include a talk that he had been giving at recent speaking engagements, “Writing A Lesson Before Dying.” He had explained his reluctance by saying, “If I let you guys put that talk in print, then I won’t have anything people haven’t read the next time I’m asked to come and speak.” We felt that placing it in print would actually increase its value as a stump speech while he works away on what we hope will one day develop into his next novel, The Man Who Whipped Children. Reading and hearing are two different experiences, and when Ernie has presented his Lesson talk, he has always added off-the-cuff remarks to the prepared text to further explain things in more detail, to offer illustrations about people or events he mentioned, or to offer humorous anecdotes. In fact, his spirited and informative question-and-answer sessions where he often engages audiences in lively discussions are alone reason enough to attend his events. We argued that people often like writers to read material they already possess, because it allows them to read the words off the page while they hear them in the author’s voice and from the author’s mouth. There are thousands of readers across the country and around the world who will have the opportunity to discover this talk on the printed page who may never have a chance to hear him read it. Besides, we argued, if “Christ Walked Down Market Street” was included in the volume, it would become another piece that audiences all over would enjoy hearing him read.

  For those familiar with Gaines’s works, whether scholars, students, or general readers, this volume will be a welcome edition because it illustrates his development as a writer and offers illumination into the process that has resulted in the masterworks of the Gaines canon: Catherine Carmier (his first published novel and one deserving of a renaissance), Of Love and Dust (which is still considered by a select few to be his best), Bloodline (the story collection that includes such favorites as “The Sky Is Gray,” “Just Like a Tree,” and “A Long Day in November”), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (one of the most important of all twentieth-century novels and a work that is so successful in portraying the female voice that unknowledgeable readers still mistakenly think it was actually written by a woman named Jane Pittman), In My Father’s House (the only Ernest Gaines novel that explores the relationship between fathers and sons), A Gathering of Old Men (one of the most revealing testaments ever written on the strength of human dignity), and A Lesson Before Dying (a work that became an instant classic and that has been the subject of programs such as the Seattle Reads Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying—it has already been adopted and read by dozens of cities across the country). For new readers who are encountering the writings of Ernest Gaines for the first time, this book will no doubt serve as an introduction to a writer whose success has made him the personification of what it means to be a national treasure.

  The Ernest J. Gaines story is a familiar one to many, but new readers will learn more of his background from his own words in the essays that follow than we could hope to convey in this introduction. Still, it might be helpful to provide some background on the various stories and essays collected here.

  The first section comprises talks Ernie has given over the years, and the dates of their initial presentations range from 1971 to 2001. The fact that these essays were written as talks is something that Ernie felt important for readers to know, since they were not written with publication in mind. He emphasizes the fact that he is a writer of stories and not an essayist. There are some things he repeats from one essay to another, but this is not redundant writing; instead, it points out the consistency of his story and how it has influenced his developing vision as a writer. Since the talks were presented to different audiences over the years, what individuals in attendance heard when Ernie discussed being raised by an aunt who never walked a day in her life, leaving the plantation to continue his schooling in California with his mother and stepfather, his experiences at San Francisco State College and at Stanford, the factors that motivated him to return to Louisiana once he had established that his life would be dedicated to writing, and other developments that are important to his literary legacy were new revelations about a writer whose books had touched their lives. We have altered the material in some places to eliminate repetition, but in other places we left everything as it was originally written for the sake of continuity and to give readers the full essence of that particular work.

  Although Ernie, as a writer, does not view these essays with the same significance that we, as scholars of his works, do, it is important to point out that no matter what their original purpose, these are great pieces of writing. In fact, the talks in this volume with the exception of “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” have appeared as essays in preeminent literary journals such as Callaloo, Southern Review, and Georgia Review, or have appeared in specialized publications that had small print runs, which means they received very little exposure. Now that they are available to a broader audience, each of the selections in this section will take on additional importance as a notable example of the personal essay. Without a doubt, the essays in this section will soon start appearing in leading literary anthologies as well as in textbooks for creative nonfiction classes. Their value can be measured in terms of the volume’s title and the theme that figuratively governs all of Gaines’s work: Mozart and Leadbelly.

  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 perme
ated 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.