Introduction to the Novel

Of Love, 1967

After publishing his first novel in 1964, Ernest J. Gaines wanted to publish a collection of stories he had been working on since his time as a graduate student at Stanford. However, The Dial Press wanted another novel first, so Gaines set to work on Of Love and Dust. As he explained later, the novel grew out of his experience living with family in Baton Rouge for six months in 1963. On Sundays, they would visit Riverlake Plantation in Pointe Coupée Parish, where Gaines was born and raised. Sometimes he would visit the White Eagle in Port Allen just across the river from Baton Rouge because Baton Rouge was dry on Sundays. There he heard a story about a guy who killed an acquaintance but did not end up in jail. “A white man can pay your bond, and you work for him for five years,” his friend explained (“Bloodline in Ink” 527). Back in San Francisco, Gaines conceived the scenario of the novel while listening to a Lighting Hopkins song: “Mr. Tim Moore’s man never stands and grins. / Say if you stay out the graveyard, I’ll keep you out the pen.” Between the song lyrics and his experience in Louisiana, Gaines had both a good story and a good example of slavery by another name.

By his own account, Gaines wrote the first draft of Of Love and Dust in three months. His editor Bill Decker pointed out how that draft started as tragedy but ended as farce. Decker asked Gaines to “stick to tragedy” (“Bloodline in Ink” 528). That meant rewriting an ending that had Marcus and Louise escape the plantation. Some of the transcriptions featured in this study guide reference that alternative ending; see the unpublished materials toward the end. In short, Gaines had to make Marcus pay for his indiscretions. Readers will have to decide whether the tragic ending illustrates a sense of morality or a sense of realism in Gaines’s fiction. While the revised ending marks a major change between drafts, other draft materials illustrate minor edits Gaines made along the way. In some cases, the hand-written draft appears very similar to the published version, with only slight edits to words or phrases. In other cases, Gaines reworks scenes more fully. For instance, the transcriptions feature four different drafts of the pivotal scene when Marcus starts to notice Louise. The drafts show how Gaines simplified and streamlined his description, even making Louise’s behavior slightly less suggestive.

Given the historical moment of its publication, the novel’s suggestive content might well have become a scandal. The interracial sexual drama that pits Marcus against his Cajun overseer Bonbon would have resonated with current events in the United States. That same year, the Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision on Loving v. Virginia that ruled Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 unconstitutional. That Act criminalized interracial marriage, codifying in law a taboo against the social recognition of relationships between Blacks and whites, or more particularly between Black men and white women. As the novel makes clear, white men could have sexual relationships with Black women so long as they remained an open secret. Despite touching on a topical issue of the day, the novel garnered little attention from the reading public. One favorable review ended with a lament that Of Love and Dust could not possibly find a popular audience: “Because the novel deals honestly, and from a black viewpoint, with the commonplace but nonetheless ‘delicate’ sexual relationships prevalent in the bayou country, it will be—must be—either downgraded or dismissed by the critics” (Fuller 52). Unfortunately for Gaines, the review turned out to be prescient.

Of Dust, 1948

If the taboo against interracial relationships made their representation in fiction “delicate,” the actuality of a love affair between a young Black man and a married white woman might well have met with so-called rough justice in 1948 Louisiana. Throughout the novel, Aunt Margaret worries about a lynch mob terrorizing the Quarters community if Bonbon finds out about the affair. Such concerns reflect real-life social conditions of the period. The Equal Justice Initiative reports 557 racial terror lynchings in Louisiana between 1877 and 1950, eleven of which took place in Pointe Coupée Parish. Characters such as Aunt Margaret and Bishop may let fear get in the way of change, but their fears appear justified by the force of racial violence that maintains racial hierarchy on the plantation.

By contrast, Jim appears to chafe against the indignities of the racial caste system, even if he hesitates to react to them. Much of the drama in the novel results from the conflict between Jim’s dignified but accommodationist viewpoint and Marcus’s defiant but dishonorable behavior. Marcus expresses their difference in severe terms when he tells Jim, “I just don’t look at things the way you do. You, you want care for everybody. Me, I don’t care for nobody but me” (225). Although their conflict does not map neatly onto historical debates, it does resonate with the difference between civil rights activists who championed reform and radical activists who wanted more sweeping social change. Desegregation of the United States military in 1948 marked a starting point to the reform movement that eventually culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The sorts of protests we associate with the Civil Rights Movement—marches, boycotts, civil disobedience—were a long way off from impacting rural Louisiana in 1948. Gaines left Riverlake Plantation that year to live with his parents in California, where he could continue his education. Coming of age in the Bay Area, Gaines acknowledged his awareness of the civil rights work taking place “back home” in the South, as he put it in a letter to friends (“Bloodline in Ink” 524). For instance, he claimed James Meredith changed his life forever by enrolling at the University of Mississippi in defiance of segregationist admissions policies. Meredith inspired Gaines to return to Louisiana to finish his first novel. The time he spent in Baton Rouge gave him the experience he needed to not only finish his first two novels but also to continue writing about Louisiana for the rest of his career.

Of Success, 1971-1993

Gaines’s first two novels and his collection of short stories did not quite make his name as he had hoped. However, having finished those stories of the post-WWII era, he started work on his first breakout success. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman came out in 1971 to much acclaim, eventually being adapted for a television movie that aired in 1974. The success of both the novel and the film helped Gaines reach a much larger audience. Unlike his earlier works, Miss Jane Pittman recounts the life story of an old woman who had been enslaved as a girl, survived Reconstruction and the Depression, and joined a civil rights demonstration at the end of her life. The hundred-year narrative arc moves readers from emancipation to the Civil Rights Movement through an epic of Black history condensed to the perspective of a single character.

Having achieved success with his historical epic, Gaines returned to the time period and location of his earlier novels, most notably in A Lesson Before Dying. Published in 1993, made into a television movie, and featured on Oprah’s Book Club, A Lesson turned out to be Gaines’s most successful novel. Like Of Love and Dust, it is set near Bayonne, where two men, one about a decade younger than the other, struggle to form a friendship and realize their understanding of Black manhood in a white supremacist society. With Gaines’s full career now available for critical assessment, it appears clear how his early works set the stage for his later successes.