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Keys to the Archive: Miss Jane Pittman

Student Protests at Southern University

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Contents of this tag:
1. Oprah Links Miss Jane and Obama
2. Emancipation Proclamation
3. Louisiana Code Noir of 1724
4. Second Wave Ku Klux Klan The parade pictured here contributed to the second, and largest, wave of Ku Klux Klan activity, which emerged in the 1920s. This event took place just outside of Washington D.C. The KKK elected hundreds of officials into every level of government in every region of the United States. They were known as the “Invisible Empire” during this time and worked to terrorize Blacks, Jews, Catholics, and immigrants. The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is an organization founded by a small group of former Confederate soldiers in Pulanski, Tennessee in 1866. Originally the group was created to invoke fear into freed slaves and the white people that helped them, but it expanded into much more. They are known for horrendous acts like the bombing of the church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young girls. They are also known for their symbols and strange titles (Grand Duke, Imperial Wizard, Grand Cyclops, etc). The use of these symbols was “to pose as ghosts or ‘spectral’ figures, drawing on then-resonant symbols in folklore to play ‘pranks’ against African Americans and others” (David Cunningham). They used hoods, masks, and burned crosses. The symbol of the burning cross was only added in to their symbols after The Birth of A Nation depicted a cross burning scene and the KKK adopted it to spur membership. Scandals and the rigidity of the KKK caused for membership to have difficulty increasing. However, they remain affiliated with other, similar groups (Neo-Nazis, and other organizations that use the Klan name). Today, though some continue to be blatant in their approach, others try to disguise their racist tactics through rhetoric (“rights for whites”). The KKK continues to be relevant today in many ways including through support of the current president.
5. Loving v. Virginia
6. Creole Slave Owners Creoles of color emerged in antebellum Louisiana as a distinct group of free people who enjoyed some of the same rights as whites, including the right to own slaves. For instance, thirteen members of the Metoyer family collectively owned 215 slaves in Natchitoches Parish. Augustine Metoyer issued this bill of sale, written in French, to M. In. Baptiste Florantin in 1818. The matriarch of the family was notable medic, planter, and business woman Marie Thérèse Metoyer.
7. Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
8. Jackie Robinson Breaks the Color Line
9. Slave Auction
10. Segregated South
11. Beginnings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
12. Miss Jane Pittman Adaptation Airs
13. Huey P. Long Assassinated
14. Ernest Gaines Born Gaines was born in Oscar, LA on January 15, 1933. He wrote about sitting on the porches of Cherie Quarters as a child, drafting letters for his elders. His exposure to their stories informed much of his writing and provided a link to slavery in the United States. Although his family moved to California when he was a teen, he visited in the 1960s to see his people and take pictures of the area, such as this image of “The Quarters” of Riverlake Plantation. He later described it as “where we lived for five generations.”
15. The Spanish-American War
16. Frederick Douglass's First Speech
17. Marie Laveau Baptismal Certificate Marie Laveau was baptized on September 16, 1801 (no birth certificate exists). Known popularly as “the Voodoo Queen” of New Orleans, she is, arguably, the most famous practitioner of folk magic in American history. She was born at the end of Spanish control of Louisiana, shortly before the Louisiana Purchase, which explains why her baptismal certificate appears in Spanish. Her entry appears at the top of the page, under entry 320.
18. Student Protests at Southern University
19. Plessy v. Ferguson
20. Booker T. Washington
21. The Confessions of Nat Turner William Styron’s 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner initiated the genre of neo-slave narrative. Styron, a white author, came in for criticism because the novel perpetuated racial stereotypes, sparking controversy about how to represent slavery in literature. Some scholars read Miss Jane Pittman, along with contemporaries such as Roots, as a response to Styron’s vision of kindly slaveowners and a blundering revolutionary.
22. Reconstruction Ends
23. Brown v. Board of Education

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Three Ways to Frame Miss Jane Archival evidence suggests that Gaines worked through some of those questions in earlier drafts of the introduction. His papers include three distinct drafts of the introduction, the last of which looks almost identical to the published version. The earlier two suggest the process of composition began with a much more elaborate version of the framing device. After editorial feedback, Gaines appears to have revised it twice with concision in mind. The early drafts also tend toward dramatization whereas the published version tends toward exposition, suggesting the initial structure hewed closer to the story-within-a-story tradition of frame narratives. Some of the excised material specifies details that remain vague in the published novel, such as the date of Miss Jane’s death (June 6, 1964). Their value, however, lies in how they elucidate questions the published version raises more subtly and how they frame aspects of Miss Jane’s story otherwise untouched by the published introduction.

Interracial Relations

While the published introduction treats Miss Jane’s story as historically relevant, the first draft treats Miss Jane herself as history and imagines an interracial audience for her narrative. The narrator, named in this version, interviews Miss Jane with three other friends: his classmate at Southern University and two white students at LSU who hail from the Northeast. After the narrator mentions Miss Jane, the white students lead the charge to record her story, reveling in the opportunity “to touch history.” The narrator feels conflicted, expressing genuine affection for “the old people” while recognizing a potential for exploitation. “She’s not a freak,” he reminds his new white friends, but the lure of living history overcomes his protective instincts. All four students pursue the project of recording Miss Jane’s testimony, recasting the narrative negotiation along racial lines rather than generational differences.

We see other racial tensions expressed in this early draft as well. The main point of resistance to the interviews comes from Gertrude, a white woman who manages the Samson Plantation big house. She asks the students if they are “some of these goddamn freedom people.” This comment serves as a reference point for the final framed story of the novel—the story of Jimmy, who is murdered for attempting to desegregate Bayonne. Readers sense the upheaval of that event still causing friction within the plantation community. Gertrude goes on to call one of the white students a “Steiner,” suggesting her racism extends to anti-Semitism. (The slur also makes an oblique, perhaps unintentional, reference to Gertrude Stein, a writer Gaines claimed as an influence. See “Miss Jane and I”). We see the concern over racial tension from the slightly gentler perspective of Mrs. Samson, who worries the students hope to turn Miss Jane into a spokesperson for civil rights, what she calls “The Freedom thing” (22).

Gaines's editor at Dial Press, Bill Decker, disliked the interracial frame of the first draft. In addition to writing that the introduction went “on much too long,” he asked, “wouldn’t Miss Jane do a better job if she had just black people to talk to rather than these stupid eager beaver white liberal quaker youths?” Decker imagined without the white students present, Miss Jane “could really let herself go then and use some strong words!” Adjusting the framing device, he reasons, would have consequences for the narrative as a whole, down to the narrative voice Gaines developed for Miss Jane. Decker’s vision of an unburdened storyteller, however, does not come to pass. Instead of interracial tension, the second draft shifts the narrative negotiation toward the problem of community belonging.

Cross-Class Contact

The second draft dispenses with the narrator’s three friends, simplifying the framing scenario. With a more socially secluded narrator-editor, and one more closely identified with Gaines, the introduction explores the implications of recording and publicizing the life of a private woman. Rather than assuming a life lived makes history, the narrator wonders what risks accompany writing someone’s life into history. Having doubts about his project, he asks himself, “Who was I to intrude into these people’s conversation? To invade this old ~~lady’s~~ woman’s life? Why was I doing it? For my own personal, selfish reason?” His doubts find their match in Mary’s pointed questions: “What you want know about Miss Jane for? Sell her story? Make money? Miss Jane don’t need no money” (4). Here readers can see how correcting the whitewashed historical record might make Miss Jane vulnerable to unwanted public attention. Her story might profit others more than her, since, like the ex-slaves that inspired her invention, she would have little control over its transmission or reception. Framed this way, the story invites readers to wonder about their own complicity in creating a market for problematic representations of Black life in America.

Gaines seems to have entertained his editor’s request for “strong words.” The second draft includes a paragraph describing how Miss Jane expressed disdain. “If she did not like a black person, she introduced him as ‘that nigger’… If she did not like a white person he was introduced as ‘white trash’ or ‘cajun’” (8). This addition appears to cater to a desire for supposed real talk from Miss Jane. As a frame for her narrative, it rings hollow because she does not introduce characters that way. The mention of Cajuns, however, does lead to interesting commentary on the relationship between Cajun and African American communities that the other drafts avoid. “Sometimes all whites she did not like ended up being ‘cajuns,’” we learn. “The reason for that was that the Cajuns were the ~~black people competitors~~ main competition on this in her area” (8). Here the draft instructs would-be readers on social hierarchies in South Louisiana, suggesting how Cajuns mediated class antagonisms between Black sharecroppers and white landowners. The explanation frames Ned’s assassination plot in Book II, which gets no treatment in the published introduction.

Authorial Voice

The published version mutes concerns about economic exploitation that appear clearly in the second draft. However, one node of those concerns establishes the tension between the narrator and Mary, Miss Jane’s caretaker, as a major point of negotiation. The end of the second draft resolves that tension in the final paragraph when the narrator thanks Mary. They become good friends “once she found out [his] sincerity.” In this case, his sincerity is measured by an absence of “commercial reasons” for paying attention to Miss Jane (11). The third and final draft of the introduction attempts no such resolution. The tension between the narrator and Mary remains in play as readers begin the journey of Miss Jane’s life. Without an economic edge, however, that tension takes shape as a negotiation between the young editor and his elders. Who will shape the form of African American history and whose voice will tell it? How will an oral tradition of storytelling enter into literary culture?

The final typescript draft includes no editorial markings and appears as published. It represents a further contraction of the framing device, excising most the dramatized scenes that show the narrator encountering Miss Jane in her community and further reducing the exposition of method and style to under three typed pages. The extra distance from the scene of storytelling heightens the sense of editorial intervention, leaving the focus on how the narrator—identified here only as editor—prepared the interview for publication. What we lose in fictional world building, then, we gain in redolence. The final draft suggests far more than it narrates. The result is no less complicated a commentary on the negotiation of literacy and literary value than the earlier drafts. In each case, the frame of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman asks readers to take seriously the possibility that a woman who could not read or write might nonetheless contribute to American letters.