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Keys to the Archive: Miss Jane Pittman

Beginnings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

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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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Diaspora By Nonah Cagney Palmer
The term diaspora originates from a Latin or Greek word (diaspora in Latin, διασπορά in Greek) which refers to the Jewish people living outside of the nation of Israel (OED Online). It is related to the ancient Greek word διασπείρειν, meaning “to disperse.” The word diaspora is now much more broadly applied to “any group of people who have spread or become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin (OED Online).

In literature and cultural studies, diaspora (and its discipline, diaspora studies) has become a focal point for scholarly investigation, especially in the sphere of African-American studies. For example, Vanderbilt University launched their Callie House Center for the Study of Black Cultures and Politics in 2012, a research organization which highlights and sponsors scholarship in African American and Diaspora studies; the center was named after Callie House, a slave born in Tennessee in 1861 and a figure who championed reparations to slaves and their descendants during Reconstruction.

African (and African American) diaspora is a tricky subject. Scholar Paul Zeleza calls diaspora
a process, a condition, a space and a discourse: the continuous processes by which a diaspora is made, unmade and remade, the changing conditions in which it lives and expresses itself, the places where it is moulded and imagined, and the contentious ways in which it is studied and discussed.
If, for Zeleza, diaspora is a process, then for other scholars it is almost as significant as national affiliation or cultural identity. H. Adlai Murdoch highlights the reality of African dispersal into the New world:
....paradoxically what has undergirded the sameness of the black experience of transportation, transnationalism, and diaspora has been the similarity of first world perspectives regarding blacks and blackness.
Murdoch’s argument suggests how global power structures shape the continuity of diasporic experience. If blackness connects groups of people across geopolitical distances, that's in large part because the so-called first world has treated black people with remarkable consistency since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade. One consequence of the identification with a global diaspora is that local black communities begin to take shape as if they were nations within nations—that is, social units simultaneously within and beyond their particular locality.

Connecting Diaspora and Ernest J. Gaines
Gaines published his essay "Miss Jane and I" in special issue of Callaloo in 1978, not too long after the publication of The Autobiography of Jane PIttman itself. He writes of instances where his first readers and eventually even newspaper reporters, understood Jane Pittman, the heroine of the novel, to be a real person:
A representative of Newsweek asked me to send the editors of the magazine a picture of Miss Jane Pittman to be used with a review of the novel. I had to inform her that I could not, since Miss Jane is a creation of my imagination.
Others also mistook Pittman to be real, either a pseudonym or alias that Gaines had invented for someone or an actual person the book was based on:
One lady accused me of using a tape recorder, then calling the interview a novel after I had cut out all the inconsequential material. A good friend of mine who writes for one of the leading newspapers in San Fransisco feels that Miss Jane is definitely a novel, but he also feels that I must have, at some time in the past, interviewed my grandmother or my aunt who raised me when I lived in the South.
While Gaines has insisted in essays that Jane Pittman is a fictional creation, she might be more. Gaines has written that, for many of his stories (including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman) that he spent his youth sitting on the porch and listening to people talk. There were no televisions in his childhood, and radios were difficult to come by. It is here that Gaines would gather the raw material, the grain and grit of historical realism, for his short stories and novels.

Gaines, in his lived experience and his research, has managed to partially distill hundreds of stories, events, and anecdotes of African diaspora since the emancipation of the slaves in after the Civil War. When he mentions the "other old people in mind as well" he provides not only a link to his 1940s childhood, but to the mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers that stretch back into a sliver of African diaspora. Returning to Zeleza, if diaspora is indeed a process, then that process of diasporic identity is chronicled, in a small way, through The Autobiography of Jane Pittman. Gaines created Pittman but did not invent all of her; he did not invent the real, historic events that also thread through the novel, and he did not necessarily invent every granular detail of Pittman's journey through her life.

Gaines begins the novel with an introduction, of an editor seeking to interview Jane Pittman so that her knowledge and experience would, in some form, be preserved. Gaines' authorial motivations and the motivations of his fictional editor are the same: to gather and preserve the collection of disbursed, diasporic history. Gaines assembled that history and funneled it into one remarkable woman. The fact that the woman is fiction is immaterial. The Autobiography of Jane Pittman is her autobiography but is also, perhaps, the autobiography of one branch of the African American diaspora.