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Keys to the Archive: Miss Jane Pittman

Typescript Draft of Book II: Reconstruction, Page 134

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Neo-Slave Narratives By Lillian King

Neo-slave narratives are the fictional accounts of slave experiences written after the end of slavery by people who were never been enslaved but who wish to represent the lives and stories of those who were. Ashraf Rushdy discusses the beginnings of the neo-slave narrative, pointing to its origins in the Black Power movement of the late-1960s, as African American intellectuals navigated a new era after the Civil Rights Movement and their relationship to academia (4). William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner kick-started the tradition of writing from a slave’s point of view, but his methodology, his appropriation of black culture, and his relative conservatism in upholding troubling political ideas meant that the work was problematic for many readers. The resulting dialogue, in response to Styron’s work and also regarding the failures of the New Left, influenced the evolution of the neo-slave narrative form. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman stands out as an early step in that evolution because it is the first example of a neo-slave narrative written by a black author (Rushdy 5).

The neo-slave narrative was also popularized because of its revival of the autobiographical slave narratives it hearkens back to, as there was a general renewal of interest in oral history, women’s history, and working-class history in the 1960s and 70s (Newman 28). The parallel between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement (the latter being construed as fighting for rights that Reconstruction was supposed to guarantee) was clear to the authors writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By utilizing the autobiographies of slaves, even if they had been edited and overseen by others, these narratives could be, in some part, reclaimed. However, this cannot be done in its entirety, because the original slave narratives have a layer of distortion between the events as remembered by the author and how they are presented, imposed by time or white censors or the desired use of the narrative of as a tool of abolition. Neo-slave narratives, being fictional narratives, then, can say more directly what slave narratives did not. But this freedom is not uncomplicated, for if they stray too far from the style and methods of the format they are modeling their narratives after, they may lose the audience’s belief in the validity of the slave narrative. This mirrors, in some ways, the minefield that former slaves had to navigate when they presented their own narratives to a judgemental white public.

The Ernest J. Gaines Center provides an interesting look into how the neo-slave narrative developed during the writing process of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. When Ernest Gaines began writing what he called “The Short Biography of Miss Jane Pittman,” the novel was from the perspective of several different characters telling the story about Miss Jane. This group narration more closely mimicked one of Gaines’s prime inspirations and sources for the novel, Lay My Burden Down, a collection of short WPA interviews with ex-slaves recorded during the 1930s (Gaines, Conversations 94-5). This community-centric view of Miss Jane’s life was more strongly connected to Gaines’s source material through in a larger cast of voices, echoing the WPA interviews. A selection of pages from this short-lived version of the novel are represented below.

Another element of some neo-slave narratives, as utilized by Miss Jane Pittman, is the continuation of the “veil,” defined by Toni Morrison as slave narratives that skim over or obfuscate the most uncomfortable physical, emotional, and sexual degradations of slave life (91). Such passages were considered too political or sensational for the easily scandalized white audience historical slave narratives were often designed to win over. There are several examples of this sort of censorship in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Jane’s romantic and sexual interests are unaddressed until Joe Pittman, and even when he enters the narrative, her desires are described as plainly and unemotionally as possible. “Me and Joe Pittman started seeing each other,” Jane says of when she started the relationship, and the most physical description of that moment is when she says that previously, “We never looked at each other like we was interested” (80).

Consulting earlier drafts, it becomes apparent that, while Gaines changed much of the story throughout, as far as Joe Pittman and his relation to Jane’s sexuality goes, the narrative has not changed. In the published novel, when Joe and Jane successfully escape their plantation and move to a new home together, when they are finally alone, they look at each other and grin. “When we couldn’t find nowhere else to look we looked at each other and grinned. No touching, no patting each other on the knee, just grinning” (80). This scene exists in its nearly finished form throughout the drafts of the novel and is the same from the first introduction of the character Joe Pittman right through the finished work. The earlier drafts show that Gaines’s recreation of the veil was constructed at the beginning of the novel, and was maintained throughout—at no point was Miss Jane going to have a more descriptive or involved personal life.

As a genre, neo-slave narratives occupy a space between two worlds, attempting to represent both an unrepresentable past and communicating ideas about the present. Authors have to find a balance between misrepresenting those who can no longer tell their stories and transforming emotionless facts into a narrative that showcases the realities of slavery. This may be the function of neo-slave narratives as a whole: to add to the limited body of work produced by slaves by adding narratives that, if not historically provable, feel authentic to its readership. The archival collections can help us understand Gaines’s process of turning the voices of Lay My Burden Down into the narrative that became The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and help us understand Gaines’s recapitulation of the veil.