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Keys to the Archive: Miss Jane Pittman

Typescript of Cut Tee Bob and Mary Agnes Scenes

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Community By Melanie R. Johnson

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.
Tragic Mulatta Trope By Melanie R. Johnson

The term mulatto has been used in English to refer to mixed race people since at least the late sixteenth century. The mulatto as a trope in American literature, however, developed in the mid-nineteenth century with popular works such as Lydia Maria Child's "The Quadroons" (1842) and William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853). Child and Brown used the trope to dramatize the evils of slavery, narrating the tragedy of characters who embodied American racial divisions. Both the term and the trope are considered offensive today due to the essentialist assumptions about race that they convey. The tragic mulatta has the perceived purity of white women and the perceived sexual immorality of black women. This version of the biracial woman is completely stripped of her autonomy and often commits suicide because of the threat of sexual violence or actual sexual violence.

Kimberly Snyder Manganelli's Transatlantic Spectacles of Race: The Tragic Mulatta and the Tragic Muse provides historical background of where the trope originates. She states, “My study of the Tragic Mulatta begins with British and French travelers’ accounts of concubinage between white colonists and mixed-race Creole women in Jamaica and Saint-Domingue” (13). Manganelli goes on to write that while the British travelers were dismissive and disgusted by the biracial woman, the French travelers considered her to be something of an “‘American Venus’” (13). She argues that the various authors create a voice for the biracial woman without actually giving her one. The biracial woman is defined entirely by her body. One important point Manganelli makes in her exploration of the trope is the idea that travelers resented the biracial woman's potential power to upset social hierarchies. In the West Indies, the biracial woman was able to prosper economically without a problem. Her very existence undermined the patriarchy as a woman independently wealthy and in charge of her sexuality. The writers threatened by her power transform her into someone with virtually no power at all in novels like Sandition, Vanity Fair, and The Woman of Color. Later Manganelli shows how these biracial women in literature were between worlds. She frames her starting point in this way because in the tradition of the tragic mulatta trope, the biracial woman is always idolized for her beauty and physique, demoralized by jealous white women rivals for this very thing, or taken advantage of because of her perceived sexual immorality by men.

Mary Agnes in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a character rooted in the tragic mulatta tradition as Manganelli describes it: “Represented as being both white and black, chaste and wanton, free and enslaved, the Tragic Mulatta’s mixed race blood was believed to imbue her with the fair skin and refined manners of her white sisters, but beneath the surface lingered a trace of Africa that supposedly incited passion and sexual wantonness” (39). In the novel, Gaines shows how Mary Agnes is a virtuous woman. Mary Agnes forsakes her relative privilege as a mixed race woman by living in the quarters among the black workers and teaching their children. That said, Gaines also shows that even though Mary Agnes is pretty and virtuous, she is still thought of as socially subordinate, which is evidenced by Jimmy Caya’s denigration of her: “Africa is in her veins, and that make her nigger” (182).

In line with the trope, Gaines strips Mary Agnes of her agency. She has no real choice in the matter of whether or not to love Robert "Tee Bob" Samson Jr., the son of the plantation owner. She knows that the best she could ever do is to become his mistress, never his wife. This reinforces the idea that the biracial woman is completely without options due to her existence between worlds. Unfortunately, being left without options often leaves the biracial woman subject and vulnerable to sexual violence which is exactly what happens to Mary Agnes in one of Gaines's earlier drafts at the hands of Tee Bob, a man who man who claimed to love her. Authors who use the tragic mulatta trope often make the argument that the biracial woman's liminality is her fatal flaw.