Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays - Hardcover

Ernest J. Gaines

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1400044723 ISBN 13: 9781400044726

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005

Synopsis

In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares with us the inspirations behind his books, how he came to choose the vocation of a writer, the childhood in rural Louisiana that he continually re-creates in his fiction, and his portrayal of the black experience in the South.
Told in the simple and powerful prose that is a hallmark of his craft, these writings faithfully evoke the sorrows and joys of rustic Southern life. They begin with Gaines’s move to California at the age of fifteen to complete school. Missing the Louisiana countryside where he was raised by his aunt propelled him to find books in the library that would invoke the sights, smells, and locution of his native home. Gaines never agreed with the authors’ portrayal of black people: “either she was a mammy, or he was a Tom,” he explains in “Miss Jane and I.”

From that initial disappointment stemmed a literary career that has spanned forty years and includes five novels, which in the words of USA Today reviewer Suzanne Freeman have “made the smallest truths, the everyday sorrows of hard choices, add up to moments of pure illumination.” These are cherished and popular books like The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and the 1993 blockbuster A Lesson Before Dying, which has sold more than two million copies around the world, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and in 1997 was picked for Oprah’s Book Club. It has been continually selected for City Read programs and praised by critics as “an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives” (Charles R. Larson, Chicago Tribune). In the essay “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” Gaines describes the real-life murder case that gave him the idea for his masterpiece.

Included here are short stories that transport us to the rural Louisiana of the 1940s and the influences that shaped him–most lastingly, the people and the places of Gaines’s own past. This wonderful collection of autobiographical essays and fictional pieces is a revelation of both man and writer.

About this title

About the Author:

Ernest Gaines was born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which is the Bayonne of all his fictional works. He is writer-in-residence emeritus at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 1993 Gaines received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his lifetime achievements. In 1996 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of France’s highest decorations. He and his wife, Dianne, live in Oscar, Louisiana.

Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, A Gathering of Old Men, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Bloodline, and Of Love and Dust are available in Vintage paperback.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Mozart and Leadbelly

In the early sixties, many of my colleagues were leaving the United States for Europe, Africa, Mexico, and so on, where they planned to write their great novels. They felt that America had become too money-crazed for them to live here and concentrate on their work. I was supposed to leave in the summer of 1962 with a man and his wife for Guadalajara, Mexico. I had been working on Catherine Carmier for three years but was getting nowhere with it. I had written it from an omniscient point of view, a first-person point of view, and a multiple point of view. I had changed the plot many times. Nothing seemed to work, and I figured it was because I needed to get away from the country, as my friends were doing. I was working at the post office during the summer of 1962 when my friend and his wife left for Mexico; I told them that I had to make some more money first, and that I would join them before the end of the year.

But something happened that summer of 1962 that would change my life forever. James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi. Every night we watched the news--my family, my friends, and I--and it seemed that we cared for nothing else or spoke of nothing else but the bravery of this one young man. It seemed that when we spoke of his courage, I felt family and friends looking at me. Maybe it was just my sense of guilt. One night in October or November, I wrote my friends in Mexico a letter: "Dear Jim and Carol, I am sorry but I will not be joining you. I must go back home to write my book. My best wishes, Ernie."

I contacted an uncle and aunt in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and they told me I could come and stay as long as I wanted to. So on January 3, 1963, a friend of mine drove me to the train station in Oakland, California, and fifty-two hours later I was in Baton Rouge. I had come back to Louisiana twice since leaving in 1948, but each time for only a week or two, and both times I lived with relatives out on the plantation where I was born. This time it would be for six months, and this time I would stay in town. I was determined to live as all the others did, and if that meant demonstrations and a run-in with the police, then let it be so. But at that time very few civil rights demonstrations were going on in Baton Rouge. And if the police did show up, they stood back watching but never tried to interfere physically with the gathering.

Uncle George and my Aunt Mamie had a four-bedroom house, and there were other people living in the house: their son, Joe, and three other nephews. Each Sunday we would drive out into the country to the old place where I was born and raised until I left for California. We would visit the old people, who would have dinner waiting for us--chicken, greens, rice, beans, a cake--and we would have lemonade and all sit down in the kitchen eating and talking. Then I would leave them and I would walk through the quarter back into the fields, and I would cross the rows where the cane had been cut looking for a stalk of cane that might have been left behind. On finding one I would peel it with my knife and chew it slowly, enjoying the sweetness of it. I would look back across the rows and remember when my mother and father and all the others in the quarter used to work these same fields.

And I would turn and look toward the quarter back at the cemetery where my folks had been buried for four generations, and I would go into the cemetery and look for pecans. If I found some I would crack them with my teeth as I had done as a small child and I would feel very comfortable and safe there because that is where Aunty, who had raised me, was buried. I did not know the exact place because the grave had never been marked, but I would feel more peace at that moment than I ever did in California.

By eight o'clock each weekday morning everyone except me would have left the house for work or school, and I would have the entire place to myself, along with my ballpoint pens, unlined yellow paper, and Royal portable typewriter. I would think about Catherine Carmier and Jackson and their families and loves and prejudices, and I would rewrite everything that I had written in San Francisco the past four years. I would work until about three or three-thirty and put everything away until the next day. Not long after arriving in Baton Rouge, I was introduced to a group of schoolteachers, and in the early evenings we would meet in restaurants, where we would sit and talk. When I was not with this group, I would go to a bar to join my uncle and his friends. My uncle worked as a janitor for one of the local oil companies near Baton Rouge. By my uncle's friends I mean ride hard laborers--those who did the dirty work. I would join them in a bar, and we would have a setup, which was a pint of whiskey, a bowl of ice, a pitcher of water, and maybe a bottle of 7 UP or Coca-Cola, and each man fixed his own drink. Many times when I reached into the bowl to get ice, I noticed bits of sand and gravel in the bottom of the bowl. At first I was apprehensive; maybe I did not need ice after all. But after looking at these guys, who appeared pretty healthy to me, I concluded that a little dirt would not kill me either.

Baton Rouge was a dry town on Sundays; so I, along with some of the younger men, would go across the Mississippi River into Port Allen, down to the White Eagle bar. The White Eagle was a rough place, and there were always fights, but I wanted to experience it all. One novel, Of Love and Dust, and a short story, "Three Men," came out of my experience at the White Eagle bar. I knew now why I'd had such difficulty writing my novel in San Francisco; I had lost touch with this world that I wanted to write about. After living in Baton Rouge for six months, traveling across Louisiana, fishing in the river, hunting in the swamps, eating in small caf*s, drinking in bars, writing five hours a day, five days a week, I was ready to go back to San Francisco to finish my novel. By then I had received an education in Louisiana history, geography, sociology, and its people that my books in California never could have given me and my running away to Mexico would not have helped. I started collecting blues records while attending San Francisco State College in the mid-fifties and inviting friends to my room to listen to the music. Most of the whites would listen to the records out of curiosity; this was before the Rolling Stones of England had made white America aware of the art and value of black blues singers. The white boys and girls of San Francisco wanted to listen because it was "exciting." However, very few of my African American friends from the college wanted to listen to it at all because they wanted to forget what those ignorant Negroes were singing about. They had come to California to forget about those days and those ways.

A lady friend of mine in Washington, D.C., once told me that she knew a young African American male who would always get in an elevator whistling a tune of Mozart. I, too, like Mozart; I like Haydn, Bach, Brahms, Schubert, Chopin. I like Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, A Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams--I like them all. And though Mozart and Haydn soothe my brain while I write, neither can tell me about the Great Flood of '27 as Bessie Smith or Big Bill Broonzy can. And neither can describe Louisiana State Prison at Angola as Leadbelly can. And neither can tell me what it means to be bonded out of jail and be put on a plantation to work out your time as Lightnin' Hopkins can. William Faulkner writes over one hundred pages describing the Great Flood of '27 in his story "Old Man." Bessie Smith gives us as true a picture in twelve lines. I am not putting Faulkner down; Faulkner is one of my favorite writers, and what Southern writer has not been influenced by him in the past fifty years? What I am saying to that young man who found it desirable to whistle Mozart in the elevator is that there is some value in whistling Bessie Smith or Leadbelly.

After publishing Catherine Carmier, my first novel, I tried publishing my Bloodline stories. Bloodline in the title means the common experience of all the male characters from the youngest to the oldest; they were all part of the same experience in the South at that time, between the 1940s and the 1960s. I thought that the stories were good enough and long enough to make a book. My editor, Bill Decker at Dial Press, felt the same way, but he told me that I needed another novel out there before he would publish the stories. Catherine Carmier had not sold more than fifteen hundred copies, which meant that hardly anyone had heard of the book. "Write a novel," the publisher told me, "and we will publish both the novel and the stories." "But those stories are good," I said; "they will make my name." "We know that," they said, "but no one knows your name now and we need a novel first."

On the plantation where I grew up in the forties were some tough people and mean people and hardworking people; they could load more cane, plow a better row, control their women--most of them would brag about having more than one woman. When the plantation system changed to sharecropping, many of these people left the plantation for the big cities, and there was always news about them getting into fights and getting themselves killed or sent to Angola State Prison for life. H (yes, that is a name) was one of those tough guys; he was tall, very handsome, and tough. He was shot point-blank when he was trying to climb through a window after hearing that his woman was with another man. Two or three months after this happened, I was back in Louisiana, and a group of us went over to the White...

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 1400044723
• ISBN 13: 9781400044726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 158
• Editor: Marcia Gaudet, Reggie Young