MG: Yes, I think that was always an outside judgment, because the artists saw that some of their inspiration for the blues and jazz came from the deeply spiritual.
GAINES: Yes, he must—he has to use both of them.
DB: The minister—and that’s so beautifully drawn in your various works—has a narrower mission.
GAINES: Right. He’s there to save the soul, but what about the everyday life? And that’s what the artist must deal with. He must deal not only with the soul but with both. That’s Grant and the minister’s argument. It’s Reverend Moses’ argument—just as the nihilist and the minister in “The Sky Is Gray.”
MG: What you’re saying reminds me of the ideas about the nature of religion and the sacred and profane—Émile Durkheim’s concept of sacred and profane and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane. It’s all part of life, and you can’t completely separate it.
DB: And if you start thinking that there is a separation, then you’ve in some way desecrated the sacred, and elevated the profane in a way. This may be a silly question, Ernie, but I’ve often wondered if I were a filmmaker—I remember that scene in the café in “The Sky Is Gray” where the man asks the woman to get up to dance and so forth, and when they make the film, of course, the filmmaker has to put a song in there for them to dance to. And this is just speculation, and as I said, this may be silly, but if you were consulted by the filmmaker, what are some of the possible songs that you would have had them have on the jukebox? Because I think that’s an important way that you—
GAINES: Oh, I don’t know now if I could just come up with any song. I’m sure if I would think about it for a while, about jazz and stuff, I would come up with the right song, but I can’t think of any specific song. I know it should be a sort of slow beat, but I couldn’t think of a particular title. You know what happened about this particular scene? The tune that this guy played on that record was written by a friend of the director. That’s the music played in the film. It was not a tune that was a traditional one that I knew about, or anyone else knew about. But it was written for this specific film.
MG: One of the things I wanted to ask you about—and again this is in relation to the idea of how art forms express things about life that we perhaps don’t see in other media. And again I’m quoting you, and this was in John Lowe’s book Conversations with Ernest Gaines. In one of the interviews there, you said, “. . . we all are naïve about the true history of blacks in this country. We have DuBois, Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, but we don’t have the story of the average black who has lived to be that age.” How does art (as opposed to straight history) broaden that perspective? How does art, literature, music sort of fill in that story? Do you see art or literature or music as giving us that history that the written historical record doesn’t include?
GAINES: I think so, because you get so much more of the experience of the everyday man, of the common man, in music—especially music, and music is so much out there that you can hear music all the time. You can hear music on the radio, on recordings, so it’s always there for you. And it tells you much more about yourself than history books because so many people were not able to read the history books. And music just filled in for them. Literature, I think, was the same thing for those who had the chance, who were able to read. I think now all across the country, in eight or nine different cities, people are discussing A Lesson Before Dying. And wherever I go I find people, most often white people, saying, “I did not know this” or “I did not know that, and this changes my life.” Someone told me about a year ago, at graduation night, “I just read your book A Lesson Before Dying, and it changed my life.” Someone told me the same thing in Richmond, Virginia. “It changed my life.” Just writing about the everyday people, and literature does that, or literature can do that. A person like Jefferson or a person like Tante Lou or a person like Miss Emma—those people are never written about in a history book. And quite often are never written about in a newspaper, and so literature can bring that to life.
MG: In some ways, that sort of unwritten history, or unwritten in the history book, that sort of thing would have been in oral tradition. In some ways, we always had the stories in the culture about people like Tante Lou or people like Jefferson, but that often didn’t leave that community. That was very local. So it was not known to those people who did not have access to the story in oral tradition. In some ways, the writer gives those stories access to a wider audience (or a wider audience access to those stories), so the writer is more important to the outsider than to the person in the community who at least might have gotten a version of those, who knew more about these. Do you think that’s still true for the younger generation? Do they get those things through oral tradition?
GAINES: I don’t—maybe they get it through that rap. Maybe that’s what they’re talking about. Maybe—I almost feel that that’s what they’re talking about. They’re communicating something out there for people to be so much impressed by it. As you said, the white kids are doing it. You go to France, you find French kids are doing it. I’m pretty sure they’re doing the same thing in Japan. So, it is going on. It’s something that I cannot understand, but they wouldn’t understand—well, I can’t say they don’t understand me, now, because the book is being read from the middle years in school to the university level, and I’m constantly getting letters from the students—teachers make them write the letters—but letters from the students about the book.
DB: I think one of the things that great art always has the potential to do is sort of crack us open in a way—to crack us open and to show us something that we didn’t know before, and I think that person at the graduation or that woman in Richmond, you know, were saying that. Because I think we live in a time where we’re not aware that we’re living in a time where there’s a great need for spiritual rootedness, and I think when they pick up the book and read A Lesson Before Dying or “The Sky Is Gray,” or one of your other stories, that’s one of the things that it puts them in touch with—that spiritual rootedness, or being rooted in something that is sacred. And I think one of the things that your works do so well is to show that there is a sacredness in the everyday life.
MG: We haven’t touched upon the influence of visual art.
DB: And you’re a photographer.
MG: Yes, and we’ve talked about how music has influenced you. But what about the visual arts? I know that you’re a really great photographer, and the photographs you took, especially at River Lake Plantation, serve as documents in a way. How do you think art, paintings, and pictures, and photographs, both by other artists and the things you’ve done—how do you see that and what does that bring to your whole idea of art?
GAINES: Well, the photographs remind me of a time, remind me of a place, and of a people, that I write about. Without those photographs, I don’t know that I could recall as accurately the things that I’d like to write about. And seeing the paintings by someone like Van Gogh. I’m thinking about The Potato Eaters now. People sitting around the table. That awakened something in my mind, and I can recall that I did the same thing. There’s a lamp on the table, people sitting at the table, blessing the food, eating, and the place. That brings it back to my memory—to what I saw as a child. A workman’s shoes, those all-muddy shoes, you know, brogans, that snaps my mind back to the past where we wore those same kind of shoes, and I’ve seen the people kick them off their feet and leave them out on the porch or something like that. Those kind of things that just remind me of my own past, so I can draw from that.
MG: You’ve talked about Vincent’s Room, and how that sort of gave you an image of the order, of arrangements—
GAINES: Yes, I have a picture of Vincent’s Room in my study out there. Yes, of the minimum of things you actually need—you can get by with so little. And I try to do that with my work. You don’t have to overblow things. I mean, I’m incapable of writing using a broad stroke. I have to use a smaller pen, be very selective. I think I prefer to rep
eat something three times to get it over, than to use a broad pen to get it over.
DB: I’m reading a book right now on Vincent van Gogh, and what you’re saying reminds me of something he’s saying in that book. He says that he doesn’t—he can admire the beautifully finished and the well-finished painting of the seventeenth century, but what he loves about Rembrandt is that there are parts of it that are unfinished. There are parts of it where you see the brush of the real man in there. And that strikes me as sort of close to what you’re saying about your stories. That they’re about the little things, about the brogan that can bring you to a particular memory, or about the potato eaters. And it occurred to me, too, that as you were describing The Potato Eaters, when he talks about that painting, he says— you were talking about blessing the food, eating the food and blessing the food—and he says that one of the influences for that painting was Christ at Emmaus, where Christ has to deal with a few of his followers after the Crucifixion and before he is actually ascended. So he sees that as a sacred painting, and I thought that was interesting that in what you said, up to this point, about the job of the artist to marry the sacred and the everyday, the sacred and the ordinary.
MG: You mentioned the lamp, and I’m sort of fascinated with—we called them coal oil lamps—
GAINES: Right, coal oil lamps.
MG: And it’s almost a nostalgic thing I have about coal oil lamps. My dad used to sell coal oil in his drugstore. When you have a drugstore in a rural area you sell lots of different things. And one of the big things that people would come to get every day was coal oil to fill the lamps. The coal oil lamps—was that something you had in your home when you were growing up?
GAINES: Definitely so. I learned to read with a coal oil lamp. You see, we had no electricity on the plantation until after the war, so that was about ’45 or ’46, about two years before I left. But for my first twelve years, I’m pretty sure, there was no electricity, so we read by the lamp on the table or the fire in the fireplace.
MG: You know, I was thinking, too, when you were talking about the lamp on the table, and often the coal oil lamp was on the table.
GAINES: Right. It was set on the mantel until you had to read or to study, and then you read like that. But when you were there just for illuminating the room, it was on the mantel. The clock would be there, too.
MG: Maybe I’m romanticizing this too much, and I’m thinking of The Potato Eaters, where you saw the images, you saw the objects that the light touched, and you didn’t see the whole picture.
GAINES: Right, the place was transformed by that light. These are the kinds of things that I find in the movies as well—and I see what the camera can do. I’ve been influenced by all of these things. Not one thing or two things, but all of these things. I remember I used to do a lot of walking in San Francisco in the morning, and there was this old man who used to sweep the streets before we got the motorized street sweepers in San Francisco. He used to sweep the streets, and whenever I’d come back from my walk in the park, I’d see him pushing his broom. And, you know, I’d talk about baseball or football or whatever. But he would never leave a piece of paper or a piece of anything without brushing it up and moving it along to pick it up. And I thought, it’s a wonderful thing that this man, this street sweeper, that he’s so particular about everything that he does. That little piece of trash—to be sure that it’s done. I feel the same way with my writing. The little things—you be sure that they’re corrected. Don’t leave it there if it’s not necessary. So I learned—you asked if I learned from the visual arts and from music—but I also learned from watching the everyday person, what he does, how he does something. Or watch a great athlete—see how they place themselves, how they do things so smoothly. So writing, for me, is not just learning from novelists or short-story writers, but from all the things around us.
DB: Talking about visuals, it seems to me—and I don’t mean in any way to make a statement about your story—but it seems to me in so many of your stories, you get the story right out there right away. You know, like the basic parts of the story—in A Lesson Before Dying, right away we know what happened. And it seems like so much of the rest of your story is about drawing characters.
GAINES: Yes, right, that’s what it is about. Yes, in the beginning, in the first chapter, you know what has happened, and the people that are going to be involved, but the rest of it is, ah—I said one time— Oprah asked me who I was trying to reach, and I said I tried to create characters with character to improve my own character and the character of that person who might read it. So it is what happens to the characters after this tragedy has happened. And the rest of it is—portraits.
DB: When we were talking about visual art, I couldn’t help noting that one of the things you use to make a story is drawing these portraits. In that book I’m reading about Van Gogh, he said that was the thing. He said, “Portraits—that’s what I want to do, portraits.” And it reminds me of you because that’s what you do. In A Lesson Before Dying, you know, from the beginning to the end with Miss Emma, for instance, you don’t have the complete portrait until the end of the book, and there’s the drawing of that portrait, the drawing of Jefferson’s portrait, and it’s just this beautiful collection of portraits. And I felt the same way about A Gathering of Old Men.
GAINES: Yes, yes. I know when I was writing The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, I was thinking about titling it Sketches of a Plantation. I think what I’m possibly doing is sketching and writing letters. Writing letters is like sketching.
DB: Yes, and you know I feel that those kinds of group portraits that Rembrandt was so famous for. I know that you’re working in a completely different place and you have a different objective, but to me, A Gathering of Old Men is a beautiful collection of group portraits. I don’t know who did the cover art, the dust jacket, but it seems to me that they had the idea in mind—of that old seventeenth-century Dutch masters group portrait.
GAINES: Right, yes.
DB: Can you talk a little bit more about—I remember you told us one time about listening to classical music and you talked about the music, the Mussorgsky, that you were listening to when you were writing Miss Jane Pittman.
GAINES: Right, Miss Jane Pittman. I was writing about Miss Jane, and I was listening to Pictures at an Exhibition. The structure or frame is of this guy at an exhibition, and he was observing these pictures. And the motif would be as he moved from one picture to another, there was a motif and repetitive theme. At that particular time I was thinking about writing Miss Jane from the single point of view. It wasn’t really Miss Jane Pittman yet. It was just Sketches of a Plantation. That was the original idea. But in order to have a common theme to connect those sketches, well, there would be this little old lady. Just sketches and sketches, and after each book, there would be this huge ending. There are four books—the War Years, Reconstruction, The Plantation, and The Quarters. And each one almost ends up in violence. And if you listen to the sketches in Pictures at an Exhibition, all of these characters are going through this piece of music. And at the very end, it’s loud, loud Russian crazy music. “At Hell’s Gate,” I think it’s called. But then I realized that music could only take me so far, and then without anything else, it wasn’t going to work. With music, you can learn so much from it, but you could not repeat it in literature exactly as it was there. So I went over it, the sketches of the plantation that I did, the short biography of Miss Jane Pittman that I did, and I realized that I still was not getting the real character that I had to get. So I had to put all of that aside, and go back and do Miss Jane Pittman. But I started off with that Pictures at an Exhibition as the first influence on what I wanted to write about.
DB: I remember, Ernie, that one of the great thrills that I had in listening to Pictures at an Exhibition after you talked about what you had done and what your experiences with it had been and everything was to hear the walking music in Pictures at an Exhibition, and to realize how much walking that little w
oman did. Because she walks, yes, and that was so exhilarating for me to realize that.
GAINES: Well, I got that from—that walking stuff—so much I got from Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.” The walking and walking and walking. And that was also a good influence on “The Sky Is Gray.” The walking and walking and going back and forth.
MG: You both have commented that blues was a good influence on the form you put “The Sky Is Gray” in.
GAINES: Oh, yes. “The Sky Is Gray” as well as Of Love and Dust. Especially Of Love and Dust, the blues form that’s used in Lightnin’ Hopkins there. And just one verse from Lightnin’ Hopkins:
The worse thing this black man ever done
Was move his wife and family to Mr. Tim Moore’s farm.
Mr. Tim Moore’s man never stands and grin.
[That’s the overseer.]
He said, “You stay out the graveyard, nigger,
I’ll keep you out the pen.”
And so I took that and dealt with Marcus. He would not go to the graveyard. I mean he would not be killed, and this guy here would keep him out of the pen. And the next verse was like:
But he wake you up so early in the morning.
You catch a mule by his hind leg [to go to work].
So those two verses were really what pushed the story. And, of course, I knew all the things I could bring in because I had lived on a plantation and I had seen things that happened around me, so I could bring other things into the story—government affairs, and all that stuff.