Eventually, I would discover the great European writers. My favorite at this time was the Frenchman Guy de Maupassant—de Maupassant because he wrote so beautifully about the young, and besides that he told good stories, used the simplest language, and most times made the stories quite short. So for a long time it was de Maupassant. Then I must have read somewhere that the Russian Anton Chekhov was as good as or better than de Maupassant, so I went to Chekhov. From Chekhov to Tolstoy, then to the rest of the Russians—among them Pushkin, Gogol, and Turgenev, especially Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches and his Fathers and Sons. The nineteenth-century Russian writers became my favorites, and to this day as a group of writers of any one country, they still are. I felt that they wrote truly about peasantry or, put another way, truer than any other group of writers of any other country. Their peasants were not caricatures or clowns. They did not make fun of them. They were people—they were good, they were bad. They could be as brutal as any man, they could be as kind. The American writers in general, the Southern writer in particular, never saw peasantry, especially black peasantry, in this way; blacks were either caricatures of human beings or they were problems. They needed to be saved or they were saviors. They were either children or they were seers. But they were very seldom what the average being was. There were exceptions, of course, but I’m talking about a total body of writers, the conscience of a people.
Though I found the nineteenth-century Russian writers superior for their interest in the peasants, they, too, could not give me the satisfaction that I was looking for. Their four- and five-syllable names were foreign to me. Their greetings were not the same as greetings were at home. Our religious worship was not the same; icons were foreign to me. I had eaten steamed cabbage, boiled cabbage, but not cabbage soup. I had drunk clabber, but never kvass. I had never slept on a stove, and I still don’t know how anyone can. I knew the distance of a mile—never have I learned the distance of a verst. The Russian steppes sounded interesting, but they were not the swamps of Louisiana; Siberia could be as cruel, but it was not Angola State Prison. So even those who I thought were nearest to the way I felt still were not close enough.
I wanted to smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking to school on cold days while yellow Louisiana buses passed them by. I wanted to see on paper those black parents going to work before the sun came up and coming back home to look after their children after the sun went down. I wanted to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers left home—not because they were trifling or shiftless, but because they were tired of putting up with certain conditions. I wanted to see on paper the small country churches (schools during the week), and I wanted to hear those simple religious songs, those simple prayers—that true devotion. (It was Faulkner, I think, who said that if God were to stay alive in the country, the blacks would have to keep Him so.) And I wanted to hear that Louisiana dialect—that combination of English, Creole, Cajun, black. For me there’s no more beautiful sound anywhere—unless, of course, you take exceptional pride in “proper” French or “proper” English. I wanted to read about the true relationship between whites and blacks—about the people that I had known.
When I first started writing—it was about when I was sixteen or seventeen—my intentions were not to write polemics or anything controversial. At that time I had not read much writing by black writers, so I did not know what especially a black youth trying to write his first novel was supposed to write about. (I still don’t know what a black writer is supposed to write about unless it is the same thing that a Frenchman writes about—and that is what he feels deeply enough inside of him to write about.) No, when I first started writing, I wanted to write a simple little novel about people at home. I think the first title I gave it was A Little Stream, because it dealt with two families, one very fair, one dark—separated from each other by a stream of water. But I gave the novel at least a dozen different titles before I was finished with it. Whenever the plot took a sudden change—a direction beyond my control—I erased the original title and gave the manuscript one that was more fitting.
The book I started in 1949 or 1950 was finally published in a completely different version in 1964 under the title Catherine Carmier. I had changed the title many times in those fifteen years. When it came time for publication the book was simply called Catherine. My editor wrote me a letter saying, “Listen, you ought to give it another title.” I said, “Catherine sounds all right to me.” Once I had been in love with a girl named Catherine, and, too, I had just finished reading Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, whose heroine’s name is Catherine. I figured what was good enough for Hemingway was good enough for Ernie Gaines. So I said, “What’s wrong with Catherine ?” My editor said he thought something else ought to go with it. I said, “All right, her last name is Carmier, call her that. Call her anything—as long as I don’t have to think up another title. Because then I’d have to write a new book—and I’m tired.” So in 1964, it was called Catherine Carmier. It was published in Germany, and they called it It Was the Nightingale. And that came after they had even left out one of the main chapters in the book.
But let’s go back to ’49 (’49 or ’50), when I first started writing. I wrote the manuscript out on sheets of paper about half the size of regular notebook paper. Where I got paper that size I’ve forgotten. Whether I typed the manuscript in single or double space I can’t recall either. I do know that it was not typed well, because I had rented a typewriter for that single project without knowing where the letters A and B were located. I worked twelve hours a day at times, typing with two fingers until I got tired. Then I would lean on one hand and type with the index finger of the other. Finally, it was done—it had taken me all summer to do it. (I should mention here that before trying to type the novel, I had written the novel out in longhand. So it took me that entire summer to type it up and send it out.) After sending the manuscript to New York, I expected any day to receive a telegram telling me that I had written a masterpiece, and I thought a check of several thousand dollars would soon follow. But nothing of the sort happened. I supposed after the editors had shaken the little package, which was about half the size of what a manuscript ought to be, and found that it was not a bomb, and after they had smelled it and found that it was not a fruitcake, they quite possibly played football with it a few weeks when they had nothing else to do. Then they sent it back to me in the original brown paper, tied with its original broken and knotted strings. Only by now the paper and strings were a little dirtier than they were when I sent the manuscript out. I broke the strings and paper loose, found the blue or pink or yellow rejection slip, and took the rejection slip and manuscript out to the incinerator. Of course I felt the great letdown all beginning writers do. I had envisioned thousands of dollars, a nice place to live, a car, clothes of all kinds, and money to send back to my younger brothers, my sister, and my aunt. I was let down when it did not go that way. But between the time that I sent the manuscript out and the time it came back—a couple of months, at least—I had decided no matter what happened I would continue to write. So when the manuscript came back in its original wrapper, tied with its original string, yes, I felt let down, but I was determined to go on. I had only lost the first battle; I had not lost the war—yet.
From then on, school and working in summers kept me from writing another book, so I did not try again until I went into the army. I tried to write one in my off-duty hours, but I found that I liked shooting pool, playing pinochle, and playing softball too much to stick to the pencil. All I got accomplished was a short story that was good enough to take second place on the island of Guam, where I was stationed. The story was sent to our command headquarters in Japan to compete with all the other short stories by GIs in the F
ar East. There it got honorable mention. So I made fifteen dollars for second prize on Guam and ten dollars for honorable mention in Japan. I cashed the ten-dollar check as soon as I received it, but the fifteen-dollar check is at the house in a little glass bank that belonged to my aunt, who died in 1953. After her death, the bank was given to me to remember her by.
I was discharged from the army in 1955, and I enrolled at San Francisco State College. When I told my adviser that I wanted to be a writer, he asked me what else I wanted to be. I told him nothing else. He broke down the percentage of those who made their living writing. It was frightening. Then he told me the percentage of blacks who made their living writing. This was ten times as frightening. I told him I didn’t care how hard it would be, I could not think of anything else I wanted to do. He saw that I was not going to change my mind, and he said, “You can’t study writing here because you cannot get a degree in writing.” (I should note here that you could take writing classes at San Francisco State at the time, but you could not major in writing. You can do either now.) He said, “You can’t study writing here because you can’t get a degree in writing. And in order to stay in college you must study toward a degree. So there.” “All right,” I said. “What is the closest thing to writing that I can study here?” “I would say English,” he said. “When you fail at your writing, you can always teach English.” “All right, I’ll take that,” I said.
For the next two years at San Francisco State and a year at Stanford, I tried to write about Louisiana. I wrote every free moment I had, and many times I disregarded my textbooks in order to write. There was something deep in me that I wanted to say—something that had been boiling in me ever since I left the South—and maybe even before then. My instructors at San Francisco State and Stanford thought I would say it all one day—but it would take time. “It will take time and work, time and work,” they said. “Now you ought to read this,” they said, “and read it carefully. Do you see how Turgenev handles this same kind of situation? Bazorov’s relationship to his old people in Fathers and Sons is the same as what you’re trying to do to Jackson and Aunt Charlotte. Now, take Joyce—see how he handles Stephen and his discussion with the priest. Sherwood Anderson—how he handles his people of Winesburg, Ohio. Faulkner—and his Yoknapatawpha County. Read, read, read it carefully. You’ll get it. But it will take time—time and work. Much work.”
In 1962, I realized that to write a novel about Louisiana, then I, too, should go back to the source that I was trying to write about. It was then that I decided to go to Baton Rouge to stay awhile and to work. I stayed six months, beginning in January 1963. I’d work five or six hours during the day, then take a nip or two at night—and I had much fun. I met some of the most wonderful people in the world. I talked to many people, but most of the time I tried listening—not only to what they had to say but also to the way they said it. I visited the plantation that I had tried to write about while I was in San Francisco. Many of the people whom I had left nearly fifteen years before were still on the plantation. Some were dead, but the ones living could talk about them and did talk about them as though they had simply walked into another room only a few minutes before. I stayed in Baton Rouge six months, and six months after I went back to San Francisco, I finished the novel that I had been so long trying to write. The novel was Catherine Carmier.
In the beginning the novel was twice as long as it was when it was finally published. I had put everything into those seven hundred pages that I could think of. I wanted everything that I had experienced, that I knew or had heard of about Louisiana. There were house fairs, with gumbos and fried fish, soft drinks and beer; there was much lovemaking, and, of course, there had to be illegitimate children; there were deaths, wakes, funerals, baptisms, even threats of race violence. But my editor thought I had a little too much and that the book ought to be cut in half. Stick to the simple love story between the boy from the North and the girl in the South and leave everything else out. After we had exchanged a few bitter words through letters and over the telephone, and after I had called him a few choice names that I think all writers call all editors, I finally took his advice. The book was then published, but just as soon forgotten.
Now where would I go from here?
Most of what was published in Catherine Carmier had taken place in the late fifties or early sixties. But what about my life before then? What about the people I really loved and knew? And what about the language—that language that is like no other?
It seemed that I could not think of another novel about Louisiana no matter how hard I tried, so I tried to write about San Francisco— the bohemian life in San Francisco, which I knew a little about. I wrote one novel in six months, another in about the same amount of time—and another novel about six months later. Within a year and a half or two years, I had written three of the worst novels that have ever been written by a published writer. I realized from those efforts that I was not a San Francisco writer—or at least not yet. And if I was not, then what—what then? Since I could not think of another Louisiana novel, what could I do? I got a job working with a printer. And when anyone asked me what I was doing, I told them I was learning the printing business. “What about your writing?” they asked me. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll put it down,” I said. But even when I was saying this, my mind was only on writing—writing something else about Louisiana. I knew that I had more to say—and eventually it would come—but when and how, I didn’t know.
Then one day I was playing some of my records, and a particular verse caught my attention. I should note here that I’m an avid record collector. I have over five hundred LPs of all kinds of music— jazz, blues, spirituals, European and African folk music, American Indian music, etc., etc. I think I have learned as much about writing about my people by listening to blues and jazz and spirituals as I have learned by reading novels. The understatements in the tenor saxophone of Lester Young, the crying, haunting, forever searching sounds of John Coltrane, and the softness and violence of Count Basie’s big band—all have fired my imagination as much as anything in literature. But the rural blues, maybe because of my background, is my choice in music. So, I was sitting around listening to a record by Lightnin’ Hopkins, and these words stuck in my mind: “The worse thing this black man ever done—when he moved his wife and family to Mr. Tim Moore’s farm. Mr. Tim Moore’s man don’t stand and grin; say ‘If you stay out the graveyard, nigger, I’ll keep you out the pen.’ ” These words haunted me for weeks, for months—without my knowing why, or what I would ever do with them.
Then I came back here in 1965, and a friend of mine and I were talking, and during our conversation he told me that someone we knew had been killed by a man in Baton Rouge, and that the person who had killed him was sent to prison for only a short time and then released. When I heard this, I had no idea that this incident could have any connection with Lightnin’ Hopkins’s blues verse. But the two things—the murder and the song—stayed in my mind, stayed in mind so much that I began to wonder what I could do with them. Then I recalled hearing about two other incidents in which blacks had murdered blacks. In Case One, when a white lawyer offered his services for a small fee, the prisoner told him that he would rather go to the pen and pay for his crime. But in Case Two, the prisoner left with his white employer. Remembering the first incident, I wrote the long story “Three Men,” which was published in my Bloodline collection. But the second incident would require much more time and thinking. What would I do with my young killer once I got him out of prison? It took about a year, I suppose, before it all jelled in my mind, and then I started writing, in the summer of 1966, the novel Of Love and Dust. The novel takes place the summer I left the South. The action takes place on a plantation along False River. I used that particular place and that time because I knew more about them than I did about Baton Rouge. And I think I also used that time and place because, again, I was trying to say something about my past, something of what I had left out in Catherine Carmier
. I wanted to talk about the fields a little bit more, about the plantation store, the river, the church, the house fairs, etc., etc., etc. And yet, when that novel, Of Love and Dust, was finished, I realized that I had done only a small part of what I had intended to write. I still had not gone far enough back. Jim, my narrator—who was a man thirty-three years old—though good, was not able to say all that I wanted him to say. Even when I brought Aunt Margaret, someone twice his age, to help him out, they, both together, could not say it all.
Before I wrote Of Love and Dust—sometime around 1963 or 1964—I wrote a short story titled “Just Like a Tree.” The story was about an old woman who had to move from the South during the civil rights demonstrations. The story was told from multiple points of view—that is, several people telling a single story from different angles. Most of the people were her age, and while they were telling you the reason she had to leave, they were also telling you something about themselves. But they were only touching on their lives; they were not going into any great detail. In the case of Aunt Fe, the protagonist in the story, you only hear snatches of conversation about her life. You know that she must leave the South because they are bombing near her home and she could be killed. But you don’t know her life—where she comes from, her children, her husband— her life, in general, before that particular day.
Now, I did not know when I wrote the short story “Just Like a Tree” in 1963 or 1964 that four years later I would start out from that idea and write a novel, The Autobigraphy of Miss Jane Pittman. As I’ve said before, at this time I still had not published Catherine Carmier; nor did I have any idea that I would write another novel, titled Of Love and Dust. But after these two books had been published, as well as the collection of stories Bloodline, I realized that I was writing in a definite pattern. One, I was writing about a definite area; and two, I was going farther and farther back into the past. I was trying to go back, back, back into our experiences in this country to find some kind of meaning to our present lives. No, Miss Jane is not the end of my traveling into the past—she is only another step back so that I can see some meaning in the present.