The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ends, famously, with the title character joining a Civil Rights protest. Somewhat less famously, the book also opens with the centenarian protesting. The unnamed editor who records Miss Jane’s life story informs readers at the outset, “I had been trying to get Miss Jane Pittman to tell me the story of her life for several years now, but each time I asked her she told me there was no story to tell” (vii). That first sentence frames the autobiographical narrative told from Miss Jane’s perspective, introducing her self-effacing style of storytelling and hinting at the strong will that carried her across the scope of the story, from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement. Structurally, her personal narrative arc then frames the stories of Ned, Joe, Tee Bob, and Jimmy—all men history might otherwise neglect. Her repeated protests against pleas to hear her life story draws readers into the middle of a negotiation that produces the narrative to follow.

The narrative readers encounter in the novel is, of course, fictional. Yet some contemporary readers, according to Gaines, mistook the novel for non-fiction and asked to know more about Miss Jane Pittman (see "Miss Jane and I" below). That confusion extended even as far as the television movie audience. The sense of realism derives not only from the compelling voice Gaines developed for Miss Jane but also from the title and the brief introduction that frame the story. The frame draws the novel into relation with non-fictional modes of writing, actively negotiating the status of historical truth. For instance, it may strain credulity to imagine a one-hundred-and-eight-or-nine-year-old Black woman who survived the horrors of slavery, Lynch Law, and Jim Crow, but the unnamed editor turns that unlikely premise into a sign of the Miss Jane's historical import. He insists on an interview over her objections, readers learn, because her story will help him teach. Miss Jane’s protective caretaker Mary asks what’s wrong with textbooks. “Miss Jane is not in them,” he answers (vii). His gentle indictment of institutionalized history persuades Miss Jane, simultaneously instructing readers in the significance of her autobiography, fictional as it may be.