This page is referenced by:

• 1 2021-01-14T21:24:46+00:00 Introduction 30 plain 461 2021-05-26T20:40:49+00:00 A Gathering of Old Men is the last novel Gaines wrote while living in San Francisco. By the time it came out in 1983, he was living and teaching in Lafayette, LA. The novel marks both a culmination and a turning point in his career. It completed an extraordinarily productive two-decade period that saw the publication of five novels, a collection of short stories, and a novella for children. The novel also shows Gaines grappling with his contemporary moment—late 70s, early 80s Louisiana—in a way that his other novels do not. While most of his fiction takes place in the Jim Crow era, A Gathering of Old Men dramatizes life in South Louisiana in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. If Gaines’s classic novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman narrates a singular life lived from emancipation to desegregation, A Gathering narrates a singular moment in a Black community’s existence after achieving nominal legal equality. It tells the story of a group of old men who come together to stage a reckoning. Through a series of confrontations with the law, with each other, and with the local white folks, the old men of the novel’s title work through internal and external conflicts to realize their own sense of manhood. Legal rights aside, they develop a sense of Black pride that lets them stand together, as evidenced by Mathu’s comment, “I look up to you. Everyman in here. And this the proudest day of my life” (181).
  
  The iconography of Black Pride movements rarely if ever visualized the rural South. Black Power appeared in the streets of urban centers like Oakland, CA where Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party. But Gaines, writing across the Bay, could envision the implications of Black Power for a small community of Black folks who lived off the land as hunters, fishers, and farmers. In fact, an early draft of the novel featured a character named Bernard who, visiting from out of town, encouraged the old men toward armed resistance. The premise of the novel presents some clear echoes of the Black Power movements, from the strategy of assembling for self-protection to a willingness to use firearms. In 1964, Malcolm X famously declared the nonviolent tactics of the Civil Rights Movement outdated. In the founding objectives of the Organization of Afro American Unity, X advocated for freedom, justice, and equality “by any means necessary.” The Black Panther Party carried X’s philosophy forward, arguing for self-defense and armed revolution. “When the people move for liberation,” wrote Newton, “they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun” (5). The gun became as much a symbol of Black Power as a tool. It signaled a willingness to defend the legal rights granted by the Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in the face of on-going police brutality, social discrimination, and cultural marginalization.
  Much as the image of armed Black Panthers startled many white Americans in the 1960s and 70s, the sight of old Black men with guns startles white characters in the novel. Lou Dimes notes his shock first when he stops in his tracks in front of “a wall of old black men with shotguns” (59). Later, Gil’s friend Sully compares their gathering to a Twilight Zone episode: “You would be driving through this little out-of-the-way town, and suddenly you would come upon a scene that you knew shouldn’t be there” (118). Sully’s comment suggests that such demonstrations of Black Power appeared out of place in the rural South. Yet, as historian Akinyele Omowale Umoja has documented, a Southern tradition of armed resistance against white supremacist terrorism played a key role in “protecting Black communities, their leaders, allies, and institutions,” including many of the organizations that fought for voting rights during the 1960s (2). Groups such as the Deacons for Defense and Justice, founded in Louisiana, practiced armed self-defense to deter KKK harassment and lynching, providing a historical precedent for the fictional old men in the novel who assemble to protect Mathu from Fix Boutan.
  
  Fix’s youngest son Gil registers white shock as well as the historical weight of the Black men’s self-defense strategy. In describing the old men at Mathu’s house for his father, Gil says, “I saw something over there, Papa—something you, I, none of us in this room has ever seen before. A bunch of old black men with shotguns, Papa” (136). His surprise echoes Lou Dimes and Sully, but Gil goes further to hint at the pride and determination motivating the old men. “Old men, Papa. Cataracts. Hardly any teeth. Arthritic. Old men. Old black men, Papa. Who have been hurt… Tired old men trying hard to hold up their heads” (137). Gil’s comment about the men having been hurt points to the historical fact of their oppression under Jim Crow laws and their exploitation as sharecroppers. In addition to their trauma, however, he also recognizes their gathering as an act of self-respect. As we learn from their monologues in Rufe’s chapter, each of the old men has experienced not just racial violence, oppression, and exploitation, but also a sense of degradation. Holding up their heads in this context means resolving the internal conflict driven by feelings of fear and guilt. As Rufe puts it, “we had all seen our brother, sister, mama, daddy insulted once and didn’t do a thing about it” (97). They acquiesced as a strategy of survival. As old men, without much left to lose, they decide to stand together to enact their own self-worth.
  
  That Gil does not see their act of self-respect as a threat to him or his family marks an important generational and class divide in the novel. Gil reminds his father that “the day of the vigilante” has passed. “Those days when you just take the law in your own hands” Gil says, “those days are gone” (143). Gil represents a new generation of Southerner who accepts integration and trusts the law—both constitutional law and law enforcement—to effect justice and preserve the peace. That generational change has its limits, as evidenced by Luke Will, who assembles a mob to carry out a lynching. The other key component of social change, the novel suggests, is education. Gil is Fix’s youngest son and his most educated. As a student athlete at LSU, Gil clearly aspires to more than sugarcane farming and more even than Louisiana. As he explains to his father, he hopes to become a nationally recognized football player, which depends on cooperating with Cal, a Black teammate who is key to his success. This detail in the novel also has an historical precedent in LSU players Charles Alexander and Robert Dugas who earned All American status in 1978. The dramatization of interracial athletic excellence in the novel makes clear how the perspective of a new generation depends on class aspirations and education. In that sense, Gil is both a product of his family background and a deviation from it.
  
  The novel balances individuals against their community by representing characters through the unique perspectives of fifteen different narrators. An early draft of the novel, titled “The Revenge of Old Men,” told the entire story from Lou Dimes’s perspective. The published version, however, has no frame to gather these voices together or to explain how they’ve been transmitted to readers in the form of a novel. Instead, they appear as unmediated accounts of the day’s events, reported directly by eye witnesses. The impressive collection of points of view gives us a sense of several communities existing within the geographic space of Bayonne, a fictionalization of New Roads, LA. Those communities overlap, creating affiliations and tensions in a complex network of relationships. Candy, for instance, owns Marshall Plantation with her aunt and uncle, but feels more affinity for Mathu and the former sharecroppers who live in the quarters than her own relatives. Yet, she also maintains her social position as a landowning white woman, which makes her a fraught ally to the men as they undergo a process of self-actualization. Similarly, the old men represent a collective unit, but they come from different areas around Bayonne to gather at Mathu’s. Each has his own perspective, background, and family relations, ensuring that each contributes to the collectivity as an individual. The multiple perspectives give readers a sense of how racial segregation, class hierarchy, and gender norms produce a variety of experiences that make it hard to construe any narrator simply as representative of a Black or white point of view.
  
  The multi-perspective narrative structure of this novel makes it one of Gaines’s more experimental works. Although it maintains his characteristic literary realism, drawing heavily on the area where Gaines grew up, it mixes genres and styles as it pieces together the plot from different perspectives. Commenting on the novel’s unusual form, Ash Green, Gaines’s editor at Knopf, wrote, “It is both who-done-it and a sort of tragi-comedy-folk opera sort of thing combined. Quite unique. Keep it that way all the way through. Never mind if it’s different from all the other books you’ve ever seen or done.” Part of the uniqueness derives from what Gaines leaves out. The archival collection related to this novel, housed at the Ernest J. Gaines Center, includes chapter drafts from the perspective of key characters, such as Candy and Mapes. Cutting those perspectives from the published novel leaves their characters to the description of others, decentering the landowning class and law enforcement from the narrative construction of the story. They occupy plenty of space on the page, but they do not have their interior perspectives represented. That choice helps shape a narrative that centers voices otherwise lost to history—voices that rarely had a say in organizing the society that produced them.
  
  In the process of gathering to protect Mathu, the old men in this story carve out a brief moment in time and a small place in the world to voice their experiences. That insistence on recognizing the truth as they lived it goes some way toward memorializing proof of their lives. In the novel, we see the cemetery as one site of memorialization at risk of destruction as industrialized agriculture threatens to plow it under. As Johnny Paul puts it, modernization threatens to destroy “all proof that we ever was” (92). His emphasis on the importance of the cemetery as a site of memory echoes Blind Lemon Jefferson’s most famous song, “See That My Grave’s Kept Clean,” which asks those who come after him not simply to remember him but to respect his memory in a material form. Given the existential threats faced by the sharecropping community Gaines memorialized in his fiction, one can imagine this novel as preserving the experience and the voices of his childhood at the moment of their potential disappearance, the same way grave sites memorialize lives when they are lost. In that sense, the gathering this novel stages moves toward the shared horizon of Black Pride and cultural memory, a revolution in attitudes about what deserves recognition, representation, and preservation. Much like the famous Blind Lemon Jefferson song, A Gathering of Old Men gives voice to characters at the moment of their imminent death. Yet it also voices hope for a continued legacy. Certainly, Gaines ensured his literary legacy would remind readers of the places he cherished in South Louisiana, the places he called home.
• 1 2020-11-08T22:05:29+00:00 Lynching in the South 3 An overview of lynching as a form of extralegal violence, including its origins and its function in South Louisiana. plain 2020-11-10T23:00:20+00:00 One of the historical atrocities that shapes the narrative of A Gathering of Old Men is the practice of lynching. Though this practice began as a form of perceived nonlethal “order” in the American West, the practice is most widely recognized for the way it developed in the American South in the postbellum period. Here, lynching might be defined as extralegal, lethal violence exercised by white vigilante groups against African Americans for the purported purpose of “justice.” In actuality, lynching was used to institute and maintain racial hierarchies following Reconstruction. In the absence of de jure slavery, white people in the South implemented this alternative form of violence—as well as convict leasing, Jim Crow laws, and other racist practices—to prop up white supremacy as an organizing doctrine for society and assert themselves as the superior form of the human race.
  
  Following the end of the Civil War, Reconstruction ushered in a wave of civil rights activists and saw the enfranchisement of male African American voters. Previously enslaved people became elected officials, and Louisiana was no exception. The state saw the first African American governor in 1872 with P.B.S. Pinchback. However, the ascension of African Americans to elected office and the overwhelming power of the black vote threatened white people’s established white supremacist hierarchy. Thus, Reconstruction was followed by “Redemption,” a period during which Southern Democrats and others passed legislation to disenfranchise African American voters again, ensuring that the nation would not see another black governor for a very long time.
  
  Lynching was part of this white retaliation against Reconstruction era policies. The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) has compiled reports of over 4,000 lynchings of black people in the American South between 1877 and 1950. Most notably for understanding Gaines’s novel is that 549 of those lynchings took place in Louisiana, which was among the top three states with the most reported lynchings after Mississippi and Georgia. Point Coupee Parish where Gaines lived had 11 reported, while the bordering parishes collectively had 49.
  
  The reasons cited for lynching an African American varied, though it should be noted that white people in the South did not necessarily require a reason beyond the perceived need to enforce racial control over black people who they viewed as subhuman. Nonetheless, many lynchings occurred as purported “justice” for accusations of extreme crimes such as murder and rape. Impatient with the justice system, white people often took accused black people from jails and lynched them in the streets, often by hanging. In many cases, the victims’ innocence was proven following their deaths, underscoring the fact that all the white people had to go on was an accusation or suspicion. No investigation or trial took place. Other times, African Americans were lynched for nothing more than a perceived social transgression such as bumping into a white person or not using the title a white person wanted them to use when speaking to them. For public spectacle lynchings, thousands of white people—including men, women, and children—gathered to watch and participate in the torturing and killing of an African American person and then commemorated the day by purchasing souvenir ropes or body parts and posing for photographs with the bodies.  
  
  In South Louisiana specifically, the racial hierarchy that white people used lynching and terror to uphold formed the backbone of the sugar economy. While white members of the planter and merchant classes held real control, lower class white people such as white Cajuns often felt like they were in competition with African Americans for land and money on the sugar plantations and, thus, perceived themselves as having a vested interest in the destruction of blackness in order to retain their place above black people in the hierarchy.
  
  Many of the documented lynchings in South Louisiana occurred in response to what white people perceived as slights against the sugar economy such as alleged attempts to burn down parts of plantations or alleged affronts to sugar plantation owners. In general, though, there were fewer lynchings in South Louisiana than in the North where the primary crop was cotton. However, they did occur and the fear of them was ever-present. One reason lynchings were less common in South Louisiana is that the white planter and merchant classes there had more trust in the legal system to dispense lethal justice. In the North, where executions were rarely ordered, lynchings occurred often. In contrast, South Louisiana conducted many more public executions of black people, often sans sufficient evidence or fair trials.
  
  This connection helps explain why in A Gathering of Old Men, there are two primary fears simultaneously at work in the black residents of Marshall. The most overwhelming seems to be fear of lynching by Fix and his family. Many of the black characters such as Billy, Ding, Johnny Paul, and Tucker list ancestors who were beaten or lynched. Alongside this fear of extralegal violence is a fear of legal violence or execution, which Mapes threatens the men with when he describes what happens to men who face the fate of the chair they bring up from Angola. This history of lynching clarifies that both legal and extralegal violence were used to uphold racial hierarchies and that the black residents of Marshall had every reason to fear both. Despite this fear, of course, they gather and prepare to face Fix or whoever else might come their way.
  
  
  Equal Justice Initiative. “Lynching in America.” EJI, www.lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2020.
  
  Pfeifer, Michael J. “Lynching and Criminal Justice in South Louisiana, 1878-1930.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 40, no. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 155-177. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4233571. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.
  
  Pfeifer, Michael J. “The Origins of Postbellum Lynching: Collective Violence in Reconstruction Louisiana.” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, vol. 50, no. 2, Spring 2009, pp. 189-201. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25478643. Accessed 5 Nov. 2020.