This page was created by Melanie R. Johnson. The last update was by David Squires.
Community
Miranda Joseph considers community to be "an organic, even necessary, outgrowth of place, culture, position or interest" (205). Furthermore it "has been analyzed as gaining its halo through its positioning as the name for a nostalgically viewed past and a yearned for future of particular, intimate, affective authentic relations and of security in opposition to the abstract, alienated, rationalized relations of modernity, society, and capitalism" (206). This analysis of community coincides with what is seen in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. It is also the reason I have defined this entry through the terms of communal disruption, communal control and communal recognition. Tee Bob and Mary Agnes's potential union both threatens and undermines the Samson Plantation economy and culture, something the white and black inhabitants internalize the need to protect. The community is disrupted by Tee Bob and Mary Agnes. The community pushes back against this disruption and exercises its control over Tee Bob and Mary Agnes. After Tee Bob's tragic demise as a result of his inability to live under the community's control, Jules Reynard speaks for the community in the way that he is able to recognize how the situation might have turned out otherwise.
Communal Disruption
The moment Robert "Tee Bob" Samson meets Mary Agnes LeFabre, the Creole schoolteacher, is considered a disruptive moment in Miss Jane Pittman by the community itself. This moment is significant because it threatens to disrupt the illusion of racial superiority and that illusion is what keeps the Samson Plantation community in order. Everyone in the community lives under that illusion. Both white and black occupants of the Samson Plantation are firmly against Tee Bob and Mary Agnes's would-be display of racial harmonization. Tee Bob’s violation of the boundaries that are imposed upon him shows that he wants to leave everything and everyone behind, including his birthright, to marry Mary Agnes, something that would not be legal in Louisiana for at least another couple of decades. Because Tee Bob can never have what he wants, he realizes he cannot live in the world as it is. The knowledge that he will never realize his true desires leaves him no choice but to take his own life.
Communal Control
The white supremacist community structure does not permit anyone to tell Tee Bob that his feelings are okay. Everyone in the community tells him the exact opposite. Tee Bob is crushed under the weight that he cannot live and love the way he would like to. Adding to this tragedy, his love is not truly unrequited because that would require Mary Agnes to make an active choice. Mary Agnes has no real choice in the matter of whether to love Tee Bob or not because she knows the rules of the community as well as the broader society. Mary Agnes knows that even if she does love Tee Bob, she cannot actually marry him due to it being illegal. Furthermore, a marriage to Tee Bob would require her to pass as white, something she is unwilling to do. Mary Agnes knows that the best she could ever do is to become his mistress, never his wife.
Communal Recognition
Gaines provides a moment where the community speaks to Tee Bob's tragic death through Jane’s conversation with Jules Raynard. Raynard says, "‘Somewhere in the past, Jane,’ he said. ‘Way, way back, men like Robert could love women like Mary Agnes. But somewhere along the way somebody wrote a new set of rules condemning all that. I had to live by them, Robert at that house now had to live by them, and Clarence Caya had to live by them. Clarence Caya told Jimmy to live by them, and Jimmy obeyed. But Tee Bob couldn’t obey. That’s why we got rid of him. All us. Me, you, the girl—all us’" (Gaines 204). This moment of consciousness is where Raynard realizes exactly how pointless Tee Bob’s death is. Raynard says that everyone has a hand in Tee Bob’s death because everyone enforces these false rules without thinking to challenge them. Interestingly enough, in Gaines's typescript, he shows Tee Bob succumbing to the communal pressure that his disruption causes in an even darker way.