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• 1 2019-11-19T23:08:59+00:00 Neo-Slave Narratives 31 Gaines led the vanguard of this new fiction genre when he wrote Miss Jane’s story. This entry tracks its development and Miss Jane’s relationship to actual slave narratives. image_header 2020-03-10T16:13:29+00:00 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.
• 1 2019-12-02T17:03:32+00:00 Introduction 30 plain 279 2020-03-12T02:42:42+00:00
  When Ernest J. Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971, it became the first neo-slave narrative authored by an African American writer (Rushdy 6). With emancipation a hundred years past and the Civil Rights Movement coming to an end, the novel came into a world eager to understand the legacies of chattel slavery in the United States. Gaines’s contemporaries would figure the on-going relevance of that traumatic past in various ways. Alex Haley represented the lasting grip of enslavement in a family lineage (Roots 1976). Octavia Butler dramatized it through time travel (Kindred 1979). Most famously, Toni Morrison figured it as a form of haunting (Beloved 1987). Gaines showed readers the closeness of slavery with a single woman, Miss Jane, who left the planation where she was enslaved as an adolescent only to navigate life under Lynch Law, the debt slavery of sharecropping, and Jim Crow segregation. The premise of the novel reminds readers that, a century after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, they could plausibly still speak with someone reared under the institution of slavery.
  
  Miss Jane’s experience comes to readers through an act of storytelling. She tells her story to a history teacher who records it for posterity, adding an element of what Alaine Locke once called “social document fiction” to Gaines’s historical realism (240). Gaines knew well how storytelling functioned as a form of historical transmission. He participated in it as a child growing up in Louisiana. As an adult, he returned to Pointe Coupee Parish several times in the 1960s and used those visits to talk with the people who still lived in Cherie Quarters on Riverlake Plantation, gather their stories, and take photographs. Gaines began writing Miss Jane’s story in 1968, but not from her perspective. The first draft of the novel was titled “A Short Biography of Miss Jane Pittman” and it began after her death. Her funeral became the occasion for other members of her community to tell stories about her life as a sort of memorial. That idea for a multi-voiced narrative produced a novella-length manuscript. By Gaines’s own account, however, that narrative method grew too complicated. “I thought a single voice, Miss Jane’s, would keep the story in a straight line,” he explained later (“Miss Jane and I” 37).
  
  Miss Jane’s single and singular voice became a point of celebration among critics. (See, for example, Barry Beckhman, “Jane Pittman and Oral Tradition.”) Many considered the authenticity of her voice to be the novel’s great accomplishment, conveying a perspective of American history otherwise occluded. Indeed, only a year after the novel came out, George P. Rawick began publishing his expansive, multi-volume collection of slave narratives under the title The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Those volumes included interviews conducted by the Federal Writers Project in the 1930s, some of which Gaines had encountered in an earlier volume titled Lay My Burden Down (Botkin 1945). That reading became an important supplement to Gaines’s field work. Library research helped him develop Miss Jane’s voice and imagine the historical context of her life. By populating his novel with historical events and figures—the Civil War, Reconstruction, the great floods of 1912 and 1927, Booker T. Washington, Huey Long, Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson—Gaines did for fiction what historians and folklorists were doing for American memory: remembering the everyday experience of suffering, survival, and perseverance that marked a century of emancipated life.
  
  Given the novel’s concern for rendering history from unexamined points of view, readers might approach it as a meditation on the question of how the people of Cherie Quarters could achieve freedom. The sharecroppers who lived and worked on Riverlake Plantation in the 1960s made their homes in slave cabins; they labored in the same fields their enslaved ancestors cultivated before them; their toil still benefited white landowners. Those circumstances existed across the Deep South where sharecropping persisted into the late twentieth century. The promise of emancipation hardly appeared actualized. Would the Civil Rights Movement fulfill those promises through social and legal action? The novel offers an equivocal answer. Miss Jane participates in a Civil Rights protest to desegregate Bayonne, but we learn from the novel’s introduction that she lives out the end of her days in the Quarters. And the novel ends with Jimmy’s murder, continuing the pattern of lethal anti-Black violence that begins the novel. If Miss Jane cannot tell a story of ultimate liberation, she can narrate the complicated relationship between emancipation and the push for civil rights. The narrative through line draws a picture of survival under shifting forms of economic exploitation and white supremacy.
  
  The literary archives held at the Ernest J. Gaines Center in Dupré Library document the work Gaines did to represent those historical shifts through Miss Jane’s eyes. The scope of the collections on The Autobiography cover the entire lifecycle of the novel, with materials from what genetic critic Pierre-Marc de Biasi identifies as compositional, prepublishing, publication, and postpublication phases of the novel’s existence (“What Is a Draft?”). The collection begins with a manuscript draft of “The Short Biography” and runs to a set of news clippings related to the CBS television movie adaptation staring Cicely Tyson. That series occupies over a hundred file folders, far more than this project features. Here we have featured archival materials that help illuminate aspects of the novel discussed in the keyword entries. Those seventeen entries make up the heart of this project and provide a synthesis of literary criticism, explication of particular scenes, and an overview of relevant archival holdings. In addition to the keyword entries, we have gathered the archival documents in a series of media galleries that display them in viewer-friendly sequences. The timeline following this introduction features primary materials and events that provide historical context for Miss Jane’s narrative, while the bibliography points readers to useful published materials.
  
  In response to an early draft of the novel, Gaines’s editor at Dial Press, Bill Decker, offered several pages of feedback. He concluded those notes by acknowledging that the editorial process often leaves authors disappointed. “I have to do this,” he wrote, “and even if it makes you mad, I hope it will be a tiny little bit helpful.” We echo his sentiment with our hope that this project proves a tiny little bit helpful to anyone interested in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.