Reading Miss Jane Pittman Now

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman put Ernest J. Gaines on the national literary map when it came out in 1971. It arrived amid public debate about literary representations of slavery. A few years earlier, white author William Styron published what has come to be called a neo-slave narrative with his novel The Confession of Nat Turner. Many readers found it offensive in its depiction of enslaved people and dubious in its historical claims about Nat Turner. Miss Jane Pittman offered a sort of corrective that grounded an entirely fictional main character in rigorous historical realism.

Preceding other well-known neo-slave narratives like Roots, Kindred, and Beloved, Miss Jane Pittman paved the way for urgent reconsideration of the historical legacy of chattel slavery in the United States. Gaines’s novel tells the life story of a 110-year-old woman born into slavery who lives long enough to see the Civil Rights Act of 1964 become law. The title character survives all manner of indignity and injustice, from the failed promise of Reconstruction to the assassination of her closest kin. The hundred-year narrative arc raises the question, did the Civil Rights Movement finally deliver on the promise of freedom? 

That question remains open even in 2022. Indeed, we are living through a historical moment with distinct echoes of the post-Civil Rights moment. After the police-murder of George Floyd in 2020, we saw the largest eruption of anti-racist protests since the 1960s, not just in the United States but all over the world. By the fall of 2022, however, the call to restructure the relationship between police and the people, to redistribute the wealth built through exploitation, and to repair the centuries-long impacts of racial violence gave way to corporate sloganeering. No longer even an assertion that Black lives matter, the movement became the anodyne hashtag #BLM. Yet, even now, the work toward justice continues, even if under new banners or in less-publicized venues.

The essays collected here reflect on Miss Jane Pittman from the perspective of our current moment. They consider not just the legacies of enslavement, Jim Crow segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement but also the possibility for a meaningful reckoning under our current social and cultural regimes. How is the racial past inscribed in our landscapes and our built environments? How does race intersect with gender, class, and religious belief? How do folkways and regional vernacular preserve otherwise marginalized cultural forms? These concerns and more organize this collection of critical reflections on Miss Jane Pittman. Despite all the reasons for a pessimistic view of the half-century since the novel came out, the contributors here find productive, even provocative reasons for revisiting this historically significant novel in our current moment. We hope these essays help other readers have a similar experience of reading Miss Jane Pittman now.