Gaines Interview on Pelican Island

Literature, the Latin-speaking old timers used to say, is for delight and instruction. Galveston Countians should get plenty of both from Ernest J. Gaines at Galveston College (4015 Ave. Q) on Tuesday night. The author of A Lesson before Dying will be visiting via an interactive videoconference in the auditorium, Fine Arts-207 at 7:00 pm. This high-tech conversation--admission free-- concludes a stimulating season of discussions for Galveston County Reads.
At 75 Gaines is one of the strongest African American presences in American literature. Probably the best-known of his many books is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. His characters, many white, are mostly black. “We have more in common than in difference,” he says. He proves that in smooth-reading yet sophisticated tales that are never soft or “sentimental.”
To get ready for the face-to-face, three local professors and a staff expert from the Rosenberg Library talked by speaker phone with Mr. Gaines and his wife at their home in Louisiana. What does he want from his readers? “I try to put you in a jungle, in a swamp, with a good machete. I try to let you strive and get out of there the best you can.”
The tangled growth in A Lesson involves family, love, race, justice (or its opposite) and the roles of godmother, preacher and teacher. The time is 1948 in rural Louisiana. A very young man, numbed by the battering he has taken in life, approaches death in the electric chair.
Gaines says that, while he is often asked about capital punishment, it is a structuring tool in his book, not a personal cause. “I was trying to write a novel about two men growing up.” Jefferson, the younger man, will die. Grant, who had paid little attention to Jefferson when he was his pupil at a small plantation school, either will or won’t go deeper into the role of teacher, one he doesn’t entirely want. The double tension draws readers relentlessly.
How does Gaines do this to us? “I write and rewrite and rewrite.” he says. “A friend of Flaubert asked, ‘What did you do yesterday?’ he said, “That comma we were talking about yesterday, I took it out.’ “What did you do this afternoon,” the friend asked. “I put it back in there.”
Though he’ll mention the great French novelist and remark, after his own style is praised, “the Bible is simple that way too,” Gaines wants readers to stay in the time and place of his books. As a young man he went to California, spent 15 years and returned to Louisiana. “The food, the color, the culture, music, our jazz, our blues just everything. You can’t stay away.”
Thanks to A Lesson before Dying, and an interlocking body of other novels and stories we can always go there. We can feel the universal human drama in a perfectly rendered local world. There are too many aspects of Gaines’s book to point to in a short article. Come to Galveston College and meet (electronically, but for real) the man himself.