Remembering Ernest Gaines

In late October 1972, I was a copy editor at LSU Press in Baton Rouge. I was sitting at my desk on the second floor of Hill Memorial, working on a manuscript, when Charles East, then associate director of the Press, rapped on the doorjamb.

With Charles was a tall, shy man in a brown suit who held a brown beret in his hand. Charles introduced him as Ernest Gaines, and said he was in town from San Francisco to help select sites for the filming of his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which had been published the year before.

Gaines, thirty-nine years old, was scheduled to give a reading that afternoon on campus. Although Gaines had written three novels and a book of short stories, I had never heard of him. Charles said that if we wanted to hear him read we were welcome to take off from work to do so. 

At the appointed hour, chief editor Beverly Jarrett and I strolled the few hundred feet to Lockett Hall and took seats among the small audience of creative-writing students and English teachers. 

 Professor Warren Eyster introduced Gaines, who seemed a bit ill at ease as he stood in front of us and prepared to read his story “Just Like a Tree.” 

He was not a showy or dramatic reader of his own work, but his quiet voice underscored both the humor and the pathos of his characters, who range from a young boy to an old woman. He didn’t need pyrotechnics. His words were enough. I think everyone in the room that day knew we were in the presence of a master storyteller.

Like much of Gaines’s fiction, the story was set in a plantation quarter. The central figure is Aunt Fe, an old woman who has lived there all her life but must now leave because civil-rights activities and growing racial tension have made it dangerous for her to stay.  

Just as interesting to me was Gaines’s own life story, which he sketched for us. He had grown up in Pointe Coupee Parish, leaving at fifteen to join his mother and stepfather in California. He told us he had stood out on the highway near False River, flagged down a Trailways bus with his handkerchief, climbed aboard, ridden to New Orleans, and from there taken a train to Vallejo. 

I was intrigued by his story and wanted to know more. Although I had never interviewed anyone, I was seized by the desire to talk to Gaines one on one.  I turned to Beverly and said, “I’m going to try to interview him for Gulfstream,” (a new publication at the time). Beverly gave me a blank look.

I asked Gaines for an interview, although I had no idea where I might publish it, no assignment. But he agreed to talk to me, and we made a date to meet a few days later. 

At the LSU Union bookstore I found a Bantam paperback of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. I speed-read it and made notes.

On a Saturday morning, I met Gaines in front of the Union. We went inside to the Tiger Lair and sat at a table. Armed with a pen, a notebook, and a borrowed tape recorder, I asked him about his book and his life. 

Two or three hours and many cups of coffee later, he had told me about the crippled great-aunt who had raised him, about his childhood on a plantation, and about his life in California. He told me about the graveyard where generations of his ancestors were buried, saying “I just hope that the place where I was born and raised, that I can be still be buried there.” 

The next week, back at the Press, I told Charles East about the interview, which I transcribed longhand into an examination blue book. Charles told his friend Lewis Simpson, co-editor of LSU’s literary quarterly The Southern Review, and Simpson asked to take a look at it. 

“A Conversation with Ernest Gaines” was later published as the lead article in the Winter 1974 issue of The Southern Review. I wrote a brief introduction that concluded, “In conversation, Ernest Gaines’s simplicity and humanity shine steadily; he considers his words carefully, and beside him more facile talkers sound shallow. It is this quality—his essential human-ness—which I hope is conveyed here.”

That Saturday over coffee was the first of my many interviews with Gaines, the beginning of an association that lasted until his death on November 5, 2019. Publishing that first interview encouraged me to later embark on a career as a writer and reporter.  

Meanwhile I read Gaines’s other published books, the novels Catherine Carmier and Of Love and Dust (which remains my favorite), and the short-story collection Bloodline, from which he read the day I met him. 

The following October, I went out to the St. Francisville set of the CBS television adaptation of Miss Jane. That night, I wrote in my notebook:

“I spotted Ernest Gaines in the ever-present brown beret, red shirt, and green baggy pants. He was shooting some film of his own with an 8 mm Vienette camera. He recognized me at once (I was surprised) and was terribly cordial to me. 

Again I was struck by his essential humanity. He introduced me to everyone who came up to speak to him . . .

We talked about writing; he asked me when was I going to write my own novel. I told him when I could afford to quit working—‘It’s hard to come home after eight hours working and write.’ He said, ‘Yes, but not for those possessed people.’ 

He said his first job after he graduated from San Francisco State College was in an insurance firm—he was the mailman. Had to open and sort the mail. He said he used to sneak in the bathroom and write—the story was ‘A Long Day in November’. He said he’d write on the rough paper towels in the bathroom until they [his coworkers] came to drag him out. He wrote on his lunch hour and coffee breaks, too. At night, he’d go home and redo what he’d written that day.

He is totally modest and self-effacing. I think he is the most natural person of any achievement that I’ve ever met. I wish that I could become his friend, but I suppose that is too much to ask. I know he’d be a good friend.”

In fact, we did become friends. I treasure the letters and Christmas cards I received from him and the people I met through him, including his agent, his publisher, and especially his colleagues at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. 

One of those colleagues was Darrell Bourque, who taught English at UL with Ernie, as we all called him. When Darrell spoke at Ernie’s funeral on November 16, he recalled “a night [when] we all gathered at my house and . . . had lots of brandy . . . and then we began to dance.” 

I was at Darrell and his wife Karen’s house that night, along with another UL colleague of Ernie’s, my dear friend Jane Bonin. As Ernie sat on the couch with his glass of Courvoisier, a bluesy jazzy tune wafted through the room, and Darrell asked the ladies to dance one by one. Ernie didn’t dance, but he approved of others doing so. Once I took him to Tabby’s Blues Box in Baton Rouge. We sat at a small, tipsy table, drinking dollar beers (he probably had brandy), and he chuckled at the antics of a decked-out woman and her young partner, stepping to the blues on the tiny dance floor.    

It was not until 1982 that I visited Cherie Quarters, the place he had left at fifteen. I was on assignment for Louisiana Life magazine, and photographer Philip Gould wanted to shoot Ernie at his “home place.” 

On a cold gray February afternoon, Philip and I accompanied Ernie to the place where he grew up. We parked in a clearing near a small wooden church and strolled up Major Lane, the road that divided the quarter, passing the old cypress cabins, smoke curling from their chimneys.  

Cherie Quarters was then still home to many residents, most of them old people and children. Several came out onto their porches to greet Ernie. 

As we arrived at the last cabin before the lane gave way to cane fields, Gaines spotted a familiar face. “Reese!” he called. An elderly man blinked uncertainly in our direction, and Ernie added, “It’s E.J.” 

Reese Spooner broke into a smile of recognition as we entered his yard.  He was a tall thin man in his eighties, ramrod straight, dressed in work pants and shoes, a red-plaid wool shirt, and a cap. At his heels, tail wagging, was a small dog that was missing a leg. Reese Spooner referred to him as “that little sweet-leg-ged dog.”  

We talked of one thing and another, and I felt fortunate to meet Mr. Spooner, who had known Ernie’s family for generations back and was a source of stories about the history of Cherie Quarters, stories Ernie had borrowed for his books. 

The idea of making a television documentary about Gaines came to me in 1985. I broached the subject to Louisiana Public Broadcasting producer Rick Smith. He and I met once or twice a year to discuss the project and got serious after Gaines won the Humanist of the Year award in 1989. We started working in 1990. On a shoestring budget, we videotaped scholars talking about Gaines’s work and negotiated the rights to use clips from TV adaptations. We interviewed Ernie’s brother Lionel and his wife Ada Mae, as well as Ernie’s good friend Ben. We flew to San Francisco to interview Ernie, his mother, two sisters, and three brothers. We shot footage of his daily walk in Golden Gate Park and of his flat on Divisadero Street. 

Back home, we captured the still-standing cabins and church in the quarter. In the cemetery, we interviewed Ernie, who told us, “This is where I hope to be buried some day.” We realized that for him the graveyard was sacred ground.  

We held a premiere for Ernest J. Gaines: Louisiana Stories in 1993, which turned out to be a banner year for Ernie. The doc premiered in February, his novel A Lesson Before Dying was published in April, he married Dianne Saulney in May, and in June he won a MacArthur Award “genius grant”. 

After Ernie died, I sat down and watched our doc again. I found myself thinking of how truly amazing his story is. Schooled in the plantation church for only five or six months a year, forbidden to attend public school or enter the library in nearby New Roads, he left for California at the perfect time. He was old enough to have absorbed the life around him, and young enough to find teachers and mentors to help him develop his gifts (I want to call it genius). 

He learned how to use those gifts, and he worked at his craft. He memorialized Cherie Quarters in his books; his readers feel what it was like to live there. All the cabins that once housed him, his aunt, his brothers and sister, have long since bowed to the tractor. But when all the plowing under is done, there will still be his books, bearing witness. 

Ruth Laney is at work on a book, Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People, about the community where Gaines grew up, which is the setting for his fiction.