Mozart and leadbelly

Because I have lived in San Francisco most of my life, I have been asked many times about when I will write a novel or stories about California. And I always answer that I will write about California after I have written all of the Louisiana stuff out of me, which I hope will never happen.

I have tried to write about California; I was a young man living in California in the fifties when the Beat era was at its apex. I had read Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, and I could see some of the things going on in San Francisco in the fifties that Hemingway had described about Paris in the twenties. Hemingway said that if you were a young man in Paris in the twenties, Paris was a "movable feast." Many of us felt the same way about San Francisco in the fifties. So for a while I tried the wine parties, the regular Jazz-club scenes, and sleeping on the floor instead of a bed. After a while I got a bit tired of it. I think what hurried my decision was getting sick on too much salami, cheese, French bread, and white wine. I could see I was not cut out for the Bohemian life.

I tried to write a novel about an interracial affair with a San Francisco background. San Francisco was a cosmopolitan city, and I knew several interracial couples. I worked on this idea for about a year, and I think I went through a complete draft of the novel. But when I began to read what I had written, I saw that I was trying to rewrite Othello, and Shakespeare had done a much better job three hundred years earlier. About the same time I was reading a lot of ghost stories: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Beckoning Fair One by Oliver Onion, for instance. So I tried writing ghost stories with a San Francisco background. Eventually, I told other people that I put the story down because it was so real that it frightened me. But the truth is, it never got off the ground. I tried to write about my army experiences on Guam between the Korean and Vietnam wars, but I put my manuscript aside because I could see that I was trying to rewrite Mr. Roberts.

In the early sixties, many of my colleagues were leaving the United States for Europe, Africa, Mexico, and so on, where they planned to write their great novels. They felt that America had become too money-crazed for them to live here and concentrate on their work. I was supposed to leave in the summer of 1962 with a man and his wife for Guadalajara, Mexico. I had been working on a novel, Catherine Carrier, for three years but was getting nowhere with it. I had written it from an omniscient point of view, a first-person point of view, and a multiple point of view. I had changed the plot many times. Nothing seemed to work, and I figured it was because I needed to get away from the country as my friends were doing. I was working at the post office during the summer of 1962 when my friend and his wife left for Mexico; I told them that I had to make some more money first, and that I would join them before the end of the year.

But something happened that summer of 1962 that would change my life forever. James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi. Every night we watched the news - my family, my friends and I - and it seemed that we cared for nothing else or spoke of nothing else but the bravery of this one young man. It seemed that when we spoke of his courage, I felt family and friends looking at me. Maybe it was just my sense of guilt. One night in October or November, I wrote my friends in Mexico a letter: "Dear Jim and Carol, I am sorry but I will not be joining you. I must go back home to write my book. My best wishes, Ernie."

I contacted an uncle and aunt in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and they told me I could come and stay as long as I wanted to. So on January 3, 1963, a friend of mine drove me to the train station in Oakland, California, and fifty-two hours later I was in Baton Rouge. I had come back to Louisiana twice since leaving in 1948, but each time for only a week or two, and both times I lived with relatives out on the plantation where I was born. This time it would be for six months, and this time I would stay in town. I was determined to live as all the others did, and if that meant demonstrations and a runin with the police, then let it be so. But at that time very few civil rights demonstrations were going on in Baton Rouge. And if the police did show up, they stood back watching but never tried to interfere physically with the gathering.

Uncle George and my Aunt Mamie had a four-bedroom house, and there were other people living in the house: their son, Joe, and three other nephews. Each Sunday we would drive out into the country to the old place where I was born and raised until I left for California. We would visit the old people, who would have dinner waiting for us - chicken, greens, rice, beans, a cake - and we would have lemonade and all sit down in the kitchen eating and talking. Then I would leave them, and I would walk through the quarter back into the fields, and I would cross the rows where the cane had been cut looking for a stalk of cane that might have been left behind. On finding one I would peel it with my knife and chew it slowly, enjoying the sweetness of it. I would look back across the rows and remember back when my mother and father and all the others in the quarter used to work these same fields.

And I would turn and look back toward the quarter, back at the cemetery where my folks had been buried for four generations, and I would go into the cemetery and look for pecans. If I found some, I would crack them with my teeth as I had done as a small child, and I would feel very comfortable and safe there because that is where Auntie, who had raised me, was buried. I did not know the exact place because the grave had never been marked, but I would feel more peace at that moment than I ever did in California.

By eight o'clock each weekday morning, everyone except me would have left the house for work or school, and I would have the entire place to myself, along with my ballpoint pens, unlined yellow paper, and Royal portable typewriter. I would think about Catherine Carmier and Jackson and their families and loves and prejudices, and I would rewrite everything that I had written in San Francisco the last four years. I would work until about three or three-thirty and put everything away until the next day. Not long after arriving in Baton Rouge, I was introduced to a group of schoolteachers, and in the early evenings we would meet in restaurants, where we would sit and talk. When I was not with this group, I would go to a bar to join my uncle and his friends. My uncle worked as a janitor for one of the local oil companies near Baton Rouge. By my uncle's friends, I mean the hard laborers -- those who did the dirty work. I would join them in a bar, and we would have a setup, which was a pint of whiskey, a bowl of ice, a pitcher of water and maybe a bottle of 7-Up or Coca-Cola, and each man fixed his own drink. Many times when I reached into the bowl to get ice, I noticed bits of sand and gravel in the bottom of the bowl. At first I was apprehensive; maybe I did not need ice after all. But after looking at these guys, who appeared pretty healthy to me, I concluded that a little dirt would not kill me either.

Baton Rouge was a dry town on Sundays; so I, along with some of the younger men, would go across the Mississippi River into Port Allen, down to the White Eagle bar. The White Eagle was a tough place, and there were always fights, but I wanted to experience it all. One novel, Love and Dust, and a short story, "Three Men," came out of my experience at the White Eagle bar. I knew now why I'd had such difficulty writing my novel in San Francisco; I had lost touch with this world that I wanted to write about. After living in Baton Rouge for six months, traveling across Louisiana, fishing in the river, hunting in the swamps, eating in small cafes, drinking in bars, writing five hours a day, five days a week, I was ready to go back to San Francisco to finish my novel. By then I had received an education in Louisiana history, geography, sociology, and its people that my books in California never could have given me and my running away to Mexico would not have helped.

I started collecting blues records while attending San Francisco State College in the mid-fifties and inviting friends to my room to listen to the music. Most of the whites would listen to the records out of curiosity; this was before the Rolling Stones of England had made white America aware of the art and value of black blues singers. The white boys and girls of San Francisco would listen because it was "exciting." However, very few of my African American friends from the college wanted to listen to it at all because they wanted to forget what those ignorant Negroes were singing about. They had come to California to forget about those days and those ways.

A lady friend of mine in Washington, DC, once told me that she knew a young African American male who would always get in an elevator whistling a tune of Mozart. I, too, like Mozart; I like Haydn, Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin. I like Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughn Williams - I like them all. And though Mozart and Haydn soothe my brain while I write, neither can tell me about the Great Flood of '27 as Bessie Smith or Big Bill Broonzy can. And neither can describe Louisiana State Prison at Angola as Leadbelly can. And neither can tell me what it means to be bonded out of jail and be put on a plantation to work out your time as Lightning Hawkins can. William Faulkner writes over one hundred pages describing the Great Flood of '27 in his story "Old Man." Bessie Smith gives us as true a picture in twelve lines. I am not putting Faulkner down; Faulkner is one of my favorite writers, and what Southern writer has not been influenced by him in the past fifty years? What I am saying to that young man who found it necessary to whistle Mozart in the elevator is that there is some value in whistling Bessie Smith or Leadbelly.

After publishing Catherine Carmier, my first novel, I tried publishing my Bloodline stories. Bloodline in the title means the common experience of all the male characters from the youngest to the oldest; they were all part of the same experience in the South and that time between the 1940s and the 1960s. I thought that the stories were good enough and long enough to make a book. My editor, Bill Decker at the Dial Press, felt the same way, but he told me that I needed another novel out there before he would publish the stories. Catherine Carmier had not sold more than 1500 copies, which meant that hardly anyone had heard of the book. "Write a novel," the publishers told me, "and we will publish both the novel and the stories." "But those stories are good," I said; "they will make my name." "We know that," they said, "but no one knows your name now, and we need a novel first."

On the plantation where I grew up in the forties were some tough people and mean people and hard-working people; they could load more cane, plow a better row, control their women - most of them would brag about having more than one woman. When the plantation system changed to sharecropping, many of these people left the plantation for the big cities, and there was always news about them getting into fights and getting themselves killed or sent to Angola State Prison for life. H (yes, that is a name) was one of those tough guys; he was tall, very handsome, and tough. He was shot point blank when he was trying to climb through a window after hearing that his woman was with another man. Two or three months after this happened, I was back in Louisiana, and a group of us went over to the White Eagle bar. One of my friends pointed to a guy three tables away from us and said, "That is the fellow that killed H." "What the hell is he doing here," I asked; "shouldn't he be in jail?" "He was the good nigger," my friend said; "you don't have to go to the Pen when a good nigger kills a bad nigger. A white man can pay your bond and you work for him for five to seven years."

I could not get that image of this guy sitting there in his blue silk shirt, blue slacks, and twotoned shoes from my mind, and back in San Francisco one day while listening to Lightning Hawkins and "Mr. Tim Moore's Farm," I thought about this guy at the White Eagle who had killed H. Suppose now, just suppose, I said to myself, you take a guy like this and you put him on a plantation to work off his time under a tough, brutal, white overseer: what do you think would happen between the two of them? I wrote a first draft of this novel in three months and sent it to New York. My editor sent it back to me with this note: " I liked the first part of your manuscript; I liked the second part of your manuscript. However, the two parts have nothing in common but the characters. In the first half you have a tragedy; in the second, a farce. Go back and do it one way or the other; stick to tragedy." I wrote him back, "But the State of Louisiana did not see this as a tragedy; I have proof of that." Bill wrote back, "Too bad for the State of Louisiana."

And he was right about the novel; the first half was serious, the second was not. But I thought that if the State of Louisiana would not take the death of this young man seriously, why shouldn't I make a farce out of it? "Your Marcus killed another human being," Bill said; "you let him con the people on that plantation every way that he can, then you let him escape with the overseer's wife. No, that is not right; he should pay, or in this case let's take a different route." What happened in reality was that I rewrote the novel in three months and sent it back to Bill. He said that I had improved it 100 percent, but he told me to run it through the typewriter one more time, and he would publish both the novel and the Bloodline stories.

Bloodline is the beginning of going back into the past. I realized after writing Catherine Carrier that I had only touched on what I wanted to say about the old place and the people who lived there. My own folks are African, European, and Native Americans; they had lived in the same parish for four generations before me. My siblings and I are the fifth generation, and my brother's children are the sixth. There are no diaries, journals, letters, or any written words left by the old people, but there are people on that plantation who could tell me about my grandparent's grandparents and about the other old people of that time. Some of the stories were horrible, others were funny, but they were educational - another education, the one I did not get out of schoolbooks in California. And, I thought, not one that any other young people, white or black, received in their books in the South either.

Until I went to California at the age of fifteen in 1948, I was raised by a lady who never walked a day in her life - my aunt, Miss Augustine Jefferson. She could not walk, but she did everything for me, my brothers, and my sister. She cooked our food. We brought everything to her at the wood stove where she sat on a bench. She washed our clothes; we brought the tub, the water, the washboard, and a bar of soap to her, and she sat on the bench and braced herself on the rim of the tub while she leaned over to wash the clothes. She patched our clothes when they were worn out or torn. She disciplined us; when we did something wrong, of course, we had to break our own switch and bring it to her and get down on our knees and take our punishment. In the afternoon after she had her afternoon nap on the floor, she would crawl over the porch, down to the ground, and go into her vegetable garden beside her house there. With a short-handled hoe, she would work among her vegetables: beans, peas, cucumbers, tomatoes, mustard greens, cabbages - whatever she had in the garden that time of year. At other times she would crawl over the backyard to the pecan tree, dragging her flour or rice sack and sit there and look for pecans in the grass. Because my aunt could not go to other people's homes, the other people would come to our house, where they would talk and talk and talk all day - my aunt sitting on the floor in the doorway and the other people sitting on either the steps or at the end of the porch.

When there was no school and I was not needed in the fields, I often was kept at the house to make coffee or serve ice water. I also wrote letters for the old people. I have been asked many times about when I started writing, and for years I said I started at the age of sixteen. Now that I think back, I started writing on that plantation at the age of twelve. I had to be creative even then. Once the old people said "Dear Sara, how are you. I am fine. Well, I hope you are the same," it would take them the rest of the afternoon to finish composing that letter. So I learned to write what I thought they would like to say, and to write it fast, if I wanted to join my friends and play ball or shoot marbles.

After the Bloodline stories, I realized that in order to tell what I wanted to say about the people and the place, I had to go much further back in time. Catherine Cannier, Of Love and Dust, and the Bloodline stories were easy writing, and I was writing about things that could have happened in the South, but I wanted to go farther back now to a time before It my parents, even my grandparents were born.

In the fall of 1967, I visited a friend at Southern University in Baton Rouge. We sat in the living room while his wife prepared dinner in the kitchen. I said to him, "Al, what were those old people talking about when they visited my aunt and when they talked all day on the porch around the fireplace and at night. I can remember that they talked and talked, but I cannot remember what they talked about. You see, Al, I have this idea for a novel; it is about a 110-yearold woman who is born into slavery. I want the people to talk about her and in their rambling to reveal her story as well as their own. The story will happen between 1852 and 1962 - from slavery to the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. What do you think they would have talked about?"

Where to start? With slavery, what the old people could have heard from their parents and great grandparents about slavery. Next we discussed reconstruction, of the hard times. We discussed the Freedmans' Bureau. We discussed Lincoln, and Douglass, and Booker T. Washington because I could remember as a child a photo collage of the three hanging over the mantle in my aunt's room, just as I would see photo collages of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King hanging on the walls of other African Americans in the 1970s. We talked about national heroes such as Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and Jackie Robinson, about President Franklin D. Roosevelt, about the First and Second World Wars. After the national events we discussed state events - the great floods of 1912 and 1927, the cholera epidemic in New Orleans, Marie Leveaux the voodoo queen, Huey P. Long and his men, the insane asylum in Jackson, the state penitentiary at Angola.

So we covered the nation and the state; next we came to the parish. We talked about the towns, the sheriff, the river, the people who lived along the river; we talked about the black professor who had been killed in 1903 for trying to teach young African Americans to read and write and to look after their health. His grave is on the bank of the False River, about five miles from where I was born. My wife Dianne and I go by there all the time to stand in silence a moment.

After we discussed the parish, we discussed the plantation and the quarter. We discussed the crops and the seasons and the work. We talked about the big house where my own grandmother worked for so many years; we talked about the store where the people bought their food and clothes. We talked about long days, dark nights, little pay, and mean overseers. We talked about hunting and fishing and gathering fruit that grew wild along the ditches and bayous. We talked about the church, about baptisms, about the cemetery, about unmarked graves. We talked about one-room schoolhouses and the teacher who came to the plantation to teach us children six months out of the year. We talked about a distant sound, the marching of the men and women for civil rights and their spokesman, a young Baptist minister from Georgia.

Al and I must have talked eight or nine hours that day and on into the night. After dinner when I got ready to leave, Al said to me, "Now this is what they could have talked about; now you have to convince the readers that this is what they did talk about." I remembered that the old people spoke of seasons and not the name of the month. They spoke of cold, cold winters and hot, hot summers when it rained or did not rain, when the pecan and cane crops were plentiful and when they were not. When I asked them for the year, they would tell me "Well I ain't for sure." As a child I remember hearing them talk about the great flood and the boll weevils that came after the flood, but they could not remember the year. Yes, they knew the horror of the flood; they knew how swift the water moved one day, how slow the next. They could tell you the color of the water; they could describe the trash and the dead animals that the water brought, but they could not tell you what year except that it happened around the time that Huey Long was just beginning.

But I needed more; I needed dates, months, years. I needed to know whether it happened during the week or the weekend, whether it was spring, summer, fall, or winter. I had visited LSU in Baton Rouge several times to talk to professors in the English department and to give readings, but I had never been to the library. Louis Simpson at LSU recommended I go to the Louisiana room and speak to Mrs. Evangeline Lynch. When I gave Mrs. Lynch a list of all the information I needed, she said, "My God, are you sure?" I said, "Yes ma'am." She had heard of me through the Bloodline stories, and she was happy to meet me, but she thought I was taking on a task much too big for me to handle. "Well, let's start looking around," she said; "we have a lot in here, my, my." When I received the Louisiana Library Association Award for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1972, Mrs. Evangeline Lynch was in the audience. She stood and waved as I told the people how she had helped me find information and how she had sent information to me in San Francisco, where I was writing the book. Twenty-two years later, when I received the same award for A Lesson Before Dying, she was again in the audience. She had long since retired and was a bit frail, but she stood up and waved as I told the people what she had done for me so many years before.

Mrs. Evangeline Lynch helped me get material from books, periodicals, magazines, newspapers, but I still had to go to the people. I still had to go out to the field. Mr. Walter Zeno liked his vodka and he liked his wine, and whenever I came back to Louisiana from San Francisco I would rent a car in Baton Rouge and go out to the old place with one of his favorite bottles. He would squat, not sit, on the porch by the door and drink and talk while I would lean back against a post listening to him. He knew my grandparents' grandparents and all the others white and black who lived on that plantation the first eighty years of the twentieth century. Either by being directly involved or by getting this information vicariously, he knew everything that had happened in the parish during that same period. But he dated events by seasons, not by the calendar, and I had to go back to Mrs. Lynch or to one of the other libraries to find out exactly when it had happened.

Many of the local things you would not find in books or in newspapers. For instance, I have never found any written information about the professor who was killed in the parish in 1903; but when you asked about him the braver ones - white or black -- could tell you exactly how the weather was that day, and they could tell you it happened at the turn of the century, but they did not know the exact year. His tombstone, placed on the grave some seventy years after he was murdered, gave me that information.

Not very long ago in Mobile, Alabama, a reporter asked me about what I thought of the minority students who did not want to study dead white writers? I told him that I learned a lot from the works of dead white writers, especially dead white European writers such as Ivan Turgenev, Anton Chekov, James Joyce, and others. These are the writers whose work I studied as a student at San Francisco State in the fifties because there were no books in the curriculum by black, Asian, or Hispanic writers. And I told him I could understand the anguish of these young people for wanting to read the work of their own people. I said what the curriculum should include is works by live and dead African American writers, live and dead Asian writers, live and dead Hispanic and Native American writers, as well as live and dead white writers.

While I was a student as Stanford in the late fifties, my writing professor, Wallace Stegner, asked me, "Who do you write for? Who do you want to read your books?" "I do not write for any particular groups, Mr. Stegner," I said; "I have learned too much from other writers, American and European, writers who definitely were not writing for me or about me." "Maybe not for you, Ernie, but many had a particular reader in mind. Now let's say a gun was put to your head and that same question was asked, `Who do you write for?"' "Well in that case, Mr. Stegner, I would probably say that I write for the black youth of the South to let them know that their lives are worth writing about, and maybe in that way I could help them find themselves." "Suppose that gun was still at your head and you were asked for another particular group you wished to reach?" "Well, in that case I would say that I also write for the white youth of the South to let them know that unless they know their neighbor of three hundred years, they know only half of their own history."

Ernest J. Gaines is a prize-winning author, known best for his novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson Before Dying. He is writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana.

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