I knew at least two years before I started writing The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman that eventually I would write it. Maybe I had known it all my life, because it seems that I started writing it many, many years before, when I used to sit on the porch or the steps and write letters for the old people. But it took me at least two years after I first conceived the idea to start working on the book. I held back as long as I could because I knew I did not know enough. I had an idea of what I wanted to say—I wanted to continue from “Just Like a Tree”—where a group of people tell the life story of a single woman. But this woman in “Just Like a Tree” would live to be 100 years old—110, to be exact—with her life extending over the last half of the nineteenth century through the first half of the twentieth. But did I know enough to try such a project? The narrative technique would be easy—I had done it already in “Just Like a Tree”—but what in the world would these people talk about that could possibly fill five hundred pages?
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 farther back in time. Catherine Carmier, Of Love and Dust, and the Bloodline stories were easy writing, and I was writing about things that could have happened in the South during my lifetime, but I wanted to go farther back now, to a time before I, my parents, even my grandparents were born.
In the fall of 1967, I visited Alvin Aubert, 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-year-old 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, the hard times. We discussed the Freedmen’s 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 mantel 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, the voodoo queen Marie Levaux, 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 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 could not be found 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.
I started writing Miss Jane Pittman with this idea of narration in mind: that different characters would tell the story of her life in their own way. The story was to begin on the day that she was buried— the old people who had followed her body to the cemetery would later gather on the porch of a lady who had never walked in her life, and there they would start talking. In
the beginning there would be only three or four of them, but around midnight, when they were still talking, there would be a dozen or more. And by now they would be talking about almost anything—Miss Jane would be only part of their conversation.
I followed this multiple-point-of-view technique for a year—then I discarded it. (I should mention here—I should have mentioned earlier—that the original title was A Short Biography of Miss Jane Pittman, and that it was changed to The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman when I decided to tell the story from a single voice—Miss Jane’s own.) I decided to change the way of telling the story because I had fallen in love with my little character, and I thought she could tell the story of her life much better than anyone else. The others were making her life too complicated in that they had too many opinions, bringing in too many anecdotes. I thought a single voice (Miss Jane’s) would keep the story in a straight line. (Though, even here, I had trouble with her when she got wound up. Once the story really got moving, Miss Jane did and said pretty much whatever she wanted, and all I could do was act as her editor, never her adviser.)
Who is Miss Jane? What does she represent? I’ve heard all kinds of interpretations. More than one reviewer has said that she is a capsule history of black people of the rural South during the past hundred years. I must disagree, and I’m sure Miss Jane would, too. Miss Jane is Miss Jane. She is not my aunt, she is not any one person—she is Miss Jane. Maybe I had my aunt in mind when I was writing about her, but I had other old people in mind as well—those who sat on our gallery in the 1940s and those whom I’ve met on the road since then. You have seen Miss Jane, too. She is that old lady who lives up the block, who comes out every Sunday to go to church when the rheumatism does not keep her in. She is the old lady who calls a child to her door and asks him to go to the store for a can of coffee. She sits on a screened-in porch fanning herself in the summer, and in the winter she sits by the heater or the stove and thinks about the dead. Even without turning her head, she speaks to the child lying on the floor watching television, or to the young woman lying across a bed in another room. She knows much—she has lived long. Sometimes she’s impatient, but most times she’s just the opposite. If you take time to ask her a question you will find her to be quite dogmatic. You will say, “But that’s not it, that’s not it, that’s not it.” And she will stick to her beliefs. If you go to the history books, you will find that most of them would not agree with what she has told you. But if you read more closely you will also notice that these great minds don’t even agree with one another.
Truth to Miss Jane is what she remembers. Truth to me is what people like Miss Jane remember. Of course, I go to the other sources, the newspapers, magazines, the books in libraries—but I also go back and listen to what Miss Jane and folks like her have to say.
This I try to do in all my writing.
I begin with an idea, this point, this fact: sometime in the past we were brought from Africa in chains, put in Louisiana to work the rice, cane, and cotton fields. Some kind of way we survived. God? Luck? Soul food? Threats of death? Superstition? I suppose all of these have played their part. If I asked a white historian what happened, he would not tell it the same way a black historian would. If I asked a black historian, he would not tell it the same way a black field-worker would. So I ask them all. And I try in some way to get the answer. But I’m afraid I have not gotten it yet. Maybe in the next book, or the one after, or the one after. Maybe.
MOZART AND LEADBELLY
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 Catherine Carmier 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 Oak-land, 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 run-in 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 when my mother and father and all the others in the quarter used to work these same fields.
And I would turn and look 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 Aunty, 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 past 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 b
owl 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 rough place, and there were always fights, but I wanted to experience it all. One novel, Of 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 cafés, 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 wanted to 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.