A Gathering of Old Men

Ernest J. Gaines's novel, A Gathering of Old Men, is set in the black rural Louisiana parish where all his stories take place - in the cotton and cane fields northwest of Baton Rouge, near the bayous. It is the land where Gaines was born and where he spent the first fourteen years of his life. City people and Northerners may have a hard time understanding the codes of this place, for, in many ways, its inhabitants still live in the house slavery built. They work, usually as sharecroppers, on plantations; the "quarters," as they call the black housing area, look very much like a scene from slavery days-rows of rickety log cabins lined up on a flat, treeless plot of ground; nearby is the "big house," surrounded by magnolias, where the plantation owner lives.

On the way to the little nightclub in town, one passes long, gray, lonely cane fields, almost as isolated as the little cemetery where Gaines says "many, many of my people are buried." These images, from a photo essay called "Home" which Gaines compiled between 1963 and 1969, show the bleakest existence, and yet one can see in them all the themes that motivate Gaines's fiction and from which he has created such powerful books as Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), Bloodline (1968), In My Father's House (1978), and the beautiful folk novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). Change happens very slowly in this world; codes of behavior are rigidly observed; people live near one another for a lifetime and their kinship networks, like nothing else in their lives, are lasting and dependable. It's not an easy world for readers to enter. The most powerful moment to include in a research paper occurs when the old men, each claiming to be the murderer almost as though he wants to assert that right, stand up to recite the wrong done to them, to acknowledge their complicity in a system of oppression and, in a sense, to reverse that history of themselves as failed men.