Ernest J. Gaines’s Native Ground: Photographs from A Visitation

“Luzana must be the whole wide world.”
—The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

So the land is very important to me and to all the things I write about. It is one of the main characters in my work.
—Ernest J. Gaines, “The Last Regionalist” (Brister 550)

April 4, 2011
1:30 p.m., CST

Storm clouds chase me south out of Mississippi toward the Louisiana state line. I worry I might be in for a washout, but an hour or so into the drive, the sky starts to clear. For another thirty miles, under sunshine, I zig and zag west toward my destination, Pointe Coupee Parish, northwest of Baton Rouge. I’m going to find a cemetery.

After two days in Jackson, where I photographed Eudora Welty’s finely curated house and gardens under the close attention of a well-intentioned docent, it feels good to be alone in open country. The project I’m working on, called Native Ground, on depends on freedom to roam. It involves using my camera to ponder how the homes and places associated with writers I admire might have influenced their work. Making pictures this way, inspired by reading, I need space to get lost in imagination.

The idea for this particular trip formed a few months earlier, when I happened to see a CNN story on the writer Ernest Gaines and his preservation of a cemetery in a community called Oscar, near New Roads, Pointe Coupee’s parish seat. Gaines had grown up in the “quarters” on River Lake Plantation, where the cemetery is located. Over more than a hundred years, five generations of his family had lived and worked the land—first as enslaved people, then as sharecroppers—and were buried there. In retirement, Gaines and his wife had returned to Oscar and built a house on a six-acre parcel of the original plantation that they had discovered for sale and purchased. The cemetery site, an island in the middle of a vast cane field, was visible from their back yard, and they had set about restoring it (Drash).

At the time, I had begun planning the Welty house visit and carved out a couple of extra days to make the easy drive down to Oscar while I was already that far west. Marcia Gaudet, founding director of the University of Southwestern Louisiana’s Ernest J. Gaines Center, thought she might be able to meet me there for a brief orientation to the area, but that proved impossible. She had provided helpful information and suggestions in our numerous email exchanges, however, and I had been studying maps and local histories. I love an adventure. My first trip to Acadiana would just that, I said to myself.

*

Around 4 p.m., I find the local motel. I need to check-in but am anxious about getting my bearings before sunset. I am used to approaching these trips intuitively, but the late addition of this excursion to the schedule means I have barely twenty-four hours to make whatever photographs I can. Also, the weather from earlier has pushed southward after all, and the sky looks dicey. I find the proprietor in the adjacent restaurant, overlooking the False River, and think I’m in the place alone until she comes boldly from the kitchen and greets me. She makes much over the fact that I’m from Virginia, and I tell her I’m there on a project related to Ernest Gaines.

“How nice,” she says. She knows him and his wife. They get take-out from the restaurant on occasion.

When I ask whether she is familiar with the cemetery, known as Mount Zion and the place I want to go first, she gives me a look I don’t want to recognize.

“No, I’m not familiar with it,” she says. There’s a pause and meaningful shift in register.

“You realize, Mr. Gaines is a black man. He would know about things that I would not know about.”

“But let me give you his phone number,” which she writes out in an elegant hand on a piece of paper I find in my bag.

*

Ernest Gaines left Oscar in 1948, when he was fifteen years old. His parents had moved to California where his father was stationed in the Merchant Marine, and when it became evident that their son would not be able to get the kind of education he craved in Louisiana, they arranged for him to join them. He flourished, finding particular fulfillment in the stacks of the local public library. He got his own card—a privilege denied in Pointe Coupee—and worked his way through Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Cather, who all appealed to his rural upbringing. He later claimed he would read “any writer who wrote about nature or about people who worked the land . . . anyone who would say something about dirt and trees, clear streams, and open sky” (“Miss Jane” 178). But he found his passion when he discovered the great Russian realists: Chekhov, Tolstoy, especially Turgenev. He saw in their treatment of class issues the strongest connections to his own life. Explaining the attraction in a 1972 interview for Black Creation, “It’s really my background,” he said. “[I]f the Black man of this country is not the peasantry of this country, then there is no peasantry” (Beauford 18).

Given the era, Gaines might have become a different kind of writer, but polemics were not his focus. He could appreciate the spotlight those like Richard Wright or Amiri Baraka turned on black life in urban settings, but where was comparable treatment of the experience of those who still lived in places like Oscar? What he cared about was representation, in complex terms, of people and a place he found absent in the books he was reading. It was this realization that caused him to reflect on the direction he would take in his own writing. “The Russian steppes sounded interesting,” he said, “but they were not the swamps of Louisiana. Siberia could be as cruel [as the South], but it was not Angola State Prison” (“Miss Jane” 179). “[E]verything comes back to Louisiana,” Gaines realized. “I must write about what my roots are, really, and my roots are there” (Lowe 298).

The Mount Zion Cemetery was the primary symbol of those roots. Among those buried there was Gaines’s great-aunt Augusteen Jefferson, a disabled woman who took care of the boy when his parents left for California and to whom he dedicated his 1971 masterwork, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: she was a woman “who did not walk a day in her life but who taught me the importance of standing,” he wrote. Like many others, recognizable only by a sunken spot in the grass, her grave is unmarked, its exact location unknown. But individual plots are of less consequence than acknowledging what the whole half-acre represents. As Gaines told a New York Times reporter in 2010, “If I didn’t have those people [buried] back there, I would never have had anything to write about. That’s where I got all my stories from. My life is from them” (Seelye).

In his work, Gaines often invokes the land and specifically the cemetery to raise themes of responsibility or obligation. In the title story from the collection Bloodline, for example, the feeble last direct descendent of the land-owning Laurent family insists on adhering to certain rules of engagement with the black sharecroppers who continue to live on the place. When she cautions that newer generations won’t observe the old ways without question, he warns his house-servant that the cousin who’ll inherit everything when he dies will have no investment whatsoever in the land—or the people who have lived their whole lives in the plantation’s quarters. He could surrender it all now, walk away, but with consequences:

She would kick you off the place before I was cold in my grave. And she would let the Cajuns plow up the ground where your houses are now. And that cemetery back there, what do you think’ll happen to it? Do you think she would hesitate before she plowed that under too? Do you have another plot of land picked out for the bones, Amalia? (175)

In A Gathering of Old Men, the sheriff presses each man assembled to name the one who shot the Cajun bully Beau Boutan, found dead and bleeding near his still-running tractor in the quarters of Marshall Plantation. When Johnny Paul takes his turn in claiming responsibility, he explains that, at seventy-something years old, it was time to take a stand as a “man.”

I [killed him] for them back there [buried] under them trees. I did it ‘cause that tractor is getting closer and closer to that graveyard, and I was scared if I didn’t do it, one day that tractor was go’n come in there and plow up them graves, getting rid of all proof that we ever was . . . I am the last one left. I had to see that the graves stayed for a little while longer. (92)

The cemetery represents a stay against erasure.

In 1997, Gaines and his wife Dianne, an attorney, established the non-profit Mount Zion River Lake Cemetery Association. Each October, locals and descendants of the buried gather for a day of community, clean-up, and beautification. While Gaines was alive, the get-together ended with supper at his house. He’d reflect, “I picked cotton exactly where I’m sitting now.”

This was no boast, but a matter of honor and recognition. For in his mind, Gaines’s achievements—from profoundly literary works that lent themselves to popular movies and book club favorites to awards like the MacArthur (“Genius”) Grant and the National Medal of Arts—all of it came back, he said, to “a love for my ancestors who worked much harder than I did . . . Knowing that their spirit is here, their bones are here, their dust is here—these are the things that give me great satisfaction” (“An Interview”).

*

I’m rattled by the encounter with the motel manager, can’t shake the ease and assumption with which she delivered the lesson on realms of knowledge and experience. And volunteering the phone number? I hadn’t asked for it. Who would call Ernest J. Gaines out of the clear blue?

I’m still thinking about the exchange as I leave the motel.

The most concrete detail I have for direction is the name “Major Road,” which supposedly leads to the cemetery. Driving west out of New Roads toward Oscar, I pass picturesque Acadian homeplaces, some grand, many modest, a few in disrepair. These are all set in relief against great expanses of land prepared or already planted for the new growing season. I pause before one of the fine houses near Major Road and imagine that it might be (as it in fact is) the main house of River Lake Plantation, its pigeonnier intact out front. The visual richness causes my mind to wander back over Gaines’s fiction, and I get lost in associations. I’m moving so slowly, a tractor passes on my left, and the driver studies me, looking down, as he goes by. I’m suddenly and uncomfortably conscious of the Illinois plates and skinny tires on my compact fuel-efficient rental car.

To escape the farmer’s scrutiny—he’s still looking back at me—I  make an impromptu turn right at the next opportunity and pause to decide my next move. I look up, and there is the sign. Major Road. It’s hidden in the lacy leaves of an overgrown mimosa tree, but a fluttering of some sort reveals letters forming the name.

The road is partially paved, long and straight, stretching out into, and bounded by, beautiful fields of young sugar cane. The ground is wet from a recent shower, and the landscape appears freshened and limitless. Midway, I notice a peak of weathered board and find the outline of a collapsing structure. I stop to explore, but the area is overwhelmed by vegetation–volunteer saplings, tangles of honeysuckle and greenbriar, thick patches of poison ivy. I’d heard there was one cabin left from Gaines’s childhood years in the quarters. I suppose this sorry specimen is it.

The passable lane ends in a field of cane sets, and off to the right, surrounded on all sides by farmland, I see the grove that must contain the cemetery. There’s no sign, but it’s definitely the place. I drive a short distance over a grassy pathway and park at what appears to be the point of access. Masses of underbrush and mature trees encircle the site. The interior, I can see, is neat and maintained.

How do I credibly relay what happens next?

I park and check my camera and film supply. Walking toward the cemetery, however, there’s a perceptible shift in the atmosphere. The air, the light, both seem changing. I’m quite alert. There’s been a breeze all along, but heavy banks of gray clouds are moving low on the horizon, replacing the overcast sky that has held back rain since I left the motel. In moments, shards of sunlight break through, and the flat white headstones and above-ground tombs and vaults appear electrified. Anthropologists have said that the African American tradition of painting grave markers white symbolizes an inverse relationship between the living and the dead: From the underworld, a “pure white inversion of the living world, the ancestors stand behind the activities of the living, backing up their descendants against adversaries and jealousy, demanding respect” (Gundaker 45).

I am flooded again with the anxiety of intrusion.

Still, I find that I have exposed an entire roll of film and wonder if there is any possibility that what I’m sensing will be captured in even one of those twelve frames. I reload the camera, but decide it might be best to leave, rethink the entire trip. Maybe I should try to call Mr. Gaines after all, tell him what I’m trying to do, seek his blessing. Maybe I’ve presumed too much.

Walking toward the car, I start to put the camera away, but just then, the breeze becomes a gust, the sky resolves to black, and rain falls in a hard downpour. I hunker under a pecan tree and am mesmerized. Winds whip and howl, branches snap and fall, and, I hear a rocketing sound—shoosh—that I never locate.

Minutes pass and I step out into the open. The cemetery is luminous.

Walking backward toward the car, drenched, I make a few final photographs, open my journal and write, “Some sort of visitation?”

Just then, my wife rings the cell phone I have forgotten I’m carrying.

“Where are you,” she says.

“In a field, in the car. In a cemetery,” I say.

“In a field, a cemetery, where?”

“Oscar, Louisiana,” I say.

“I’m looking at the weather, and there might be a tornado or something around there.”

“Something,” I say.

*

An early version of this essay began with “Let me tell you a ghost story.” For better than a decade, I have wrestled, off and on, with how to reconcile the purpose of my travel and my experience of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana, that April late afternoon. Rationally, I know I was not met by a coalition of the undead, but I cannot let go of the idea that my presence in Mount Zion summoned a response. The images represent what I saw. What they don’t show is me moving about, not afraid, but awed, humbled.

Up early, I returned to the cemetery the next morning, made a few more photographs (without incident), and drove around trying to remember my goal of viewing the area through the lens of Gaines’s fiction. I even found the grand old tree known locally as Miss Jane Pittman’s Oak, presumably because it would date from somewhere around the year of the writer’s most famous character’s fictional birth.

How do I say, by that point, it was all merely interesting?

I left the motel key on the dresser so I wouldn’t have to see anyone for check-out and headed back to Jackson for the flight home to Virginia.

This past summer, Ernest Gaines’s wife, Dianne, petitioned the state to have the new house in Oscar, the cemetery, and portions of the surrounding landscape designated as an official Louisiana landmark. She is planning to move to New Orleans, closer to family and medical care, the story says. But first, she wants to finish the project Gaines began with his fiction. If the state concurs, significant traces of his professed lifelong “obsession”—“River Lake plantation, Pointe Coupee Parish, Oscar, Louisiana”—will be preserved and acknowledged in perpetuity (“An Obsession” 135).

Gaines is himself buried in the cemetery now, as he wished, with a modest headstone that reads: “To lie with those who have no marks.”

I would like to go back and see his final place among all those others whose lives inspired his life’s work. I have thought a lot about the theme of “native ground,” and I don’t know any writer more deeply connected to his, the spot in this world that shaped him and his view of what matters in this world. I’d like to make more photographs around Oscar, revisiting with fresh eyes whatever possibilities I abandoned that last morning.

But if I go again, believe this: I’ll take a witness.

*

Photographs from Oscar, Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana

 

 

Works Cited

“An Interview with the late Ernest J. Gaines from 2007,” Baton Rouge Area Foundation 5 November 2019. https://www.braf.org/stories/2019/11/5/an-interview-with-the-late-ernest-j-gaines-from-2007 Accessed 22 June 2022.

Brister, Rose Ann. “The Last Regionalist? An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines.” Callaloo 26.3 (Summer 2003): 549-564.

Beauford, Fred. “Conversation with Ernest Gaines.” Black Creation 4 (1972): 16-18.

Drash, Wayne. “Author Ernest Gaines comes home to where his ancestors were enslaved,” CNN 9 November 2010. http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/11/09/ernest.gaines.cemetery/index.html Accessed 11 September 2021.

Ferris, William. “Ernest Gaines.” The Storied South: Voices of Writers and Artists. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2013. 43-52.

Gaines, Ernest J. A Gathering of Old Men. New York: Knopf, 1983.

—. “An Obsession.” Three Minutes or Less: Life Lessons from America’s Greatest Writers. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. 135-136.

—. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Dial, 1971.

—. “Bloodline.” Bloodline. New York: Dial, 1968. 159-217.

—. “Miss Jane and I.” 1978. Dreaming Out Loud: African American Novelists at Work. Ed. Horace Porter. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2015. 173-192.

Gundaker, Grey. “At Home on the Other Side: African American Burials as Commemorative Landscapes.” Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. 25-54.

Levasseur, Jennifer, and Kevin Rabalais. “An Interview with Ernest J. Gaines.” Missouri Review 22.1 (Winter 1999). https://www.missourireview.com/article/an-interview-with-ernest-j-gaines/ Accessed 16 December 2013.

Lowe, John. “An Interview with Ernest Gaines.” 1994. Conversations with Ernest Gaines. Ed John Lowe. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 1995. 297-328.

“Preserving Legacy: Widow of Ernest Gaines wants historic designation for his home, land,” Plaquemine Post South 15 June 2022. https://www.postsouth.com/story/news/2022/06/15/earnest-gaines-widow-wants-his-home-designated-landmark/7610591001/ Accessed 8 October 2022.

Seelye, Katharine Q. “Writer Tends Land Where Ancestors Were Slaves,” New York Times 20 Oct. 2010. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/21/us/21gaines.html Accessed 7 January 2021.