Mozart and Leadbelly by Ernest J. Gaines
Knopf 2005
ISBN 1-4000-4472-3
159 pages

I first fell in love with Ernest Gaines through his fiction, and readers of some of his more famous books — The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Lesson Before Dying — will certainly agree that he has an innate ability to convey authenticity in the voices of his characters. You read his words and you believe the story is true; that it could not possibly be the work of imagination. This belief is particularly common when it comes to Jane Pittman, who certainly seems to be a grandmother or great aunt or some elderly family member that told her history to Gaines and he then transformed it for his novel. The author acknowledges this all too often misconception in the opening essay of his delightful new collection, Mozart and Leadbelly, a book that offers the sources of his inspiration and commitment to Louisiana storytelling, along with a few new short stories as well.
In “Miss Jane and I,�? Gaines acknowledges that not only readers but reviewers have insisted Miss Jane is a real person — to the extent that Newsweek requested a photo to run with its review! (It does make it a lot easier to understand, though, how that whole WMD fairy tale could get past the press.) Many friends were certain that Gaines must have interviewed his grandmother and used those memories in creating Miss Jane, but she was, he writes, “absolute fiction.�? To explain where such a character came from and how she developed into a voice that transcended the novel form, he shares his own memories of growing up in “Miss Jane and I,�? giving readers a look into the Louisiana childhood that Gaines experienced and which has suffused nearly everything he has written since. “Who is Miss Jane Pittman?�? asks Gaines. “But first, who is Ernest J. Gaines? Because to get part of the answer to the former question we must go back, back, back — not to 1968, when I started writing the novel, but to 1948, when I had to leave the South.�?

Truly leaving the South behind, though, in this case for a chance at a better education, was something that Gaines found himself incapable of doing. Although he enjoyed his years in California, eventually attending college at San Francisco State and Stanford, it was still Louisiana that he longed for. As a teenager, he haunted libraries soaking up all the great literature, but none of it told him the stories he longed to read. He explains in detail what he was looking for and his frustration at not being able to find it:

“I wanted to smell Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river. I wanted to see on paper those Louisiana black children walking to school on cold days while yellow Louisiana buses passed them by. I wanted to see on paper those black parents going to work before the sun came up and coming back home to look after their children after the sun went down. I wanted to see on paper the true reason why those black fathers left home — not because they were trifling or shiftless, but because they were tired of putting up with certain conditions. I wanted to see on paper the small country churches (schools during the week), and I wanted to hear those simple religious songs, those simple prayers — that true devotion. (It was Faulkner, I think, who said that if God were to stay alive in the country, the blacks would have to keep Him so.) And I wanted to hear that Louisiana dialect — that combination of English, Creole, Cajun, black. For me there’s no more beautiful sound anywhere — unless, of course, you take exceptional pride in ‘proper’ French or ‘proper’ English. I wanted to read about the true relationship between whites and blacks — about the people that I had known.�?

Unable to find those stories, Gaines began to write, as he puts it, “a simple little novel about people at home.�? That first book was eventually published in 1964, almost fifteen years after he first started it, as Catherine Carmier. It changed a great deal over the years as Gaines worked on his craft, spent some time in the army and attended college. He details the way he became a better writer in those early years, while diversions from work and play constantly lured him from his stories. He remembers the lessons from his San Francisco State and later Stanford instructors: “time and work�? they told him again and again, “it will take time and work.�?

When Gaines returned to Louisiana in January 1963, it had been more than a decade since he lived there. He returned to work for six months to learn again about Louisiana so he could write better about it. It is in these lessons about knowing the place your books call home that Gaines truly conveys to his readers just how hard he worked at bringing Miss Jane Pittman and his other characters alive. When he went home, he found her there, along with the story that became his novel Of Love and Dust and also the short stories that filled a collection, Bloodline. Gaines did not “meet�? Miss Jane Pittman, or interview her, in Louisiana; he found her there, along with everything else he had missed so much, and needed to write about.

The reason Gaines returned home specifically in 1963 is explained in another essay, “Mozart and Leadbelly.�? In the summer of 1962, he had planned to earn some money and later join friends in Mexico, but then James Meredtith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, a move that commanded national attention and changed Gaines’ life forever. “It seemed that when we spoke of his courage, I felt family and friends looking at me,�? he writes. He went home to finish his book and, living with his aunt and uncle, he worked on it every day. When he briefly went back to San Francisco, he had everything he needed to make Catherine Carmier a reality, and he had also reconnected with a place that reminded him of the value of its stories — stories that only lived in that particular place. Gaines realized after that summer that he could be a young man who appreciated the sounds of Mozart and also those of Leadbelly:

“…although 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 as true a picture in twelve lines.�?

The stage was set by then for the author, and Louisiana was the place he would successfully write about, and live in, for the rest of this life.

Reading Gaines’ essays (and also the five short stories and interview included in Mozart and Leadbelly) provides an excellent look into the inner workings of a writer’s mind. The marketplace finds continuous attempts to cash in on the curiosity of young writers, but it is books like this one that do not promise you a “novel in sixty days,�? but rather show just how a writer thinks and plans and works, which can be truly inspiring. Gaines was told more than once that what he wanted to do, specifically what he chose to write about, was wrong. “My young friends did not want me to write about the rural South,�? he reveals, “but about New Orleans — which I knew absolutely nothing at all about [at the time]. Years later, when I was about to be discharged from the army, friends told me not to leave, because civilian life was pretty hard. In the army there was security ... what more could I want?�? But he was not dissuaded from the course he had set for himself or the place in which he would be immersed for the rest of his writing life. It had to be Louisiana, the Louisiana he knew best, that would be Gaines’s world and after returning permanently to the area in which he grew up, he proved that his Louisiana would provide more than enough inspiration for one writer.

There were many times while reading Mozart and Leadbelly that I was impressed with Gaines’ outlook, with his perspective on the world and the power that words can have within it. But his recent piece on New Orleans for National Geographic Magazine is probably when I felt most touched by his honesty and his true gift for capturing the South. Gaines knows the city now, has come to know it well in the decades since his return to the state, and can rattle off a laundry list of the places that are necessary to return it to some former glory. “New Orleans will come back when infrastructure is back in place on streets like Gentilly,�? he writes, “when trees and flowers like azaleas and camellias and magnolias are blooming again on Esplanade. New Orleans will come back when you can go to Dooky Chase and order your favorite Creole meal, and later visit Snug Harbor, where the bartender knows exactly how you like your martini.�? But in the midst of recounting what must be cleaned up and removed, what must be brought back and reopened, he also recalls a story or two about the people who used to live there and call it home, the people who were so critical to its long and glorious survival and now are strewn around the country along with all of their memories, all of their glories. “New Orleans, you will come back,�? writes Gaines. “But will you be my New Orleans, or the little boy’s New Orleans, or the woman’s New Orleans or the Joseph sisters’ New Orleans? I doubt it. Katrina and the politicians have made you a different New Orleans forever.�?

Although I hope that he is not completely right — that some crucial flavor or taste or attitude from before will linger on in the city forever, I cannot doubt that Gaines knows Louisiana and this city better than most of us. He has listened to the stories from down there, from the river and the gulf and the streets and plantations and cemeteries, for so very long that he has seeped it all somehow into his bones, into his most essential self. He has become the places that are gone now, and so perhaps it is only him and those like him who would recognize what can no longer be. Regardless, though, his stories will remain forever, and that is something to be grateful for. In the wake of such great loss, it is a precious thing to read of Miss Jane Pittman, both the story she has to tell, and now, in this wonderful new collection, the words of the man who found her voice.