Ernest J. Gaines's new novella revolves around a courthouse shooting that leads a young reporter to uncover the long story of race and power in his small town and the relationship between the white sheriff and the black man who "whipped children" to keep order.
After Brady Sims pulls out a gun in a courtroom and shoots his own son, who has just been convicted of robbery and murder, he asks only to be allowed two hours before he'll give himself up to the sheriff. When the editor of the local newspaper asks his cub reporter to dig up a "human interest" story about Brady, he heads for the town's barbershop. It is the barbers and the regulars who hang out there who narrate with empathy, sadness, humor, and a profound understanding the life story of Brady Sims-an honorable, just, and unsparing man who with his tough love had been handed the task of keeping the black children of Bayonne, Louisiana in line to protect them from the unjust world in which they lived. And when his own son makes a fateful mistake, it is up to Brady to carry out the necessary reckoning. In the telling, we learn the story of a small southern town, divided by race, and the black community struggling to survive even as many of its inhabitants head off northwards during the Great Migration.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman has sold over a million copies nationwide since its publication in 1971, making the fictional character of Miss Jane so real many people don't know she exists only in the imagination of Louisiana-born author Ernest J. Gaines. Miss Jane is 100 years old when she is interviewed by an area high school teacher looking to teach his students more about plantation society in the deep South. Her story is not only a vivid picture of the South before the dawn of the civil rights era, but also a story of one woman's survival against overwhelming odds. A stunning autobiography of a courageous woman who won her battles with grace and dignity. Born a slave and freed when she was ten, Jane leaves the plantation of her childhood and heads in the direction of Ohio in search of a white abolitionist who once befriended her. Accompanied by Ned, a young orphan, Jane struggles to get out of Louisiana. What happens in the years that follow is a tale of loss and heartache and renewed hope, imprinted on its aged teller's face like furrows in a russet field. Now, in the racial upheavals of the '60s, Miss Jane brings closure to one generation, and inspiration to the next.
This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. In this woman, Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has seen and "endured" almost everything, and foretold the rest.
"Stunning. I know of no black novel about the South that exudes quite the same refreshing mix of wit and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and poetry. And I can recall no more memorable female character in Southern fiction since Lena of Faulkner's Light in August than Miss Jane Pittman herself." -Life
Stirring, heroic, and wonderfully laced with the musical languages of the Bayou, Ernest J. Gaines-the foremost voice in contemporary African American literature-adds another breathtaking saga to his canon with A Gathering of Old Men. When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime. Mapes finds himself powerless, however, when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder. Can justice be served, or will the dead man's brutish father pass judgment his way? Building to a climax that is as stunning as it is inevitable, A Gathering of Old Men powerfully describes the racial tensions in 1970s Louisiana. Narrators Peter Francis James, Michelle-Denise Woods, Sally Darling, Graham Brown, Murphy Guyer, Tom Stechschulte and Mark Hammer bring Gaines' masterful prose to vivid life. This insightful novel takes its place among Gaines' thought-provoking classics, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and In My Father's House.
Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns, and whites maintain an uneasy coexistence. When Jackson returns home to his family after an absence of ten years, he discovers that his bonds to them have been irreparably rent by his absence. In the midst of his alienation, he falls in love with Catherine Carmier, setting the stage for conflicts and confrontations which are complex, tortuous, and universal in their implications.
"[Gaines'] best writing is marked by what Ralph Ellison, describing the blues, called near-tragic, near-comic lyricism." -Newsweek
