Renown Pointe Coupee Parish Pulitzer-nominated author, and former UL Lafayette Writer-in-Residence Ernest Gaines passed away yesterday at 86.
Gaines was born on a plantation into a rural sharecropping family during the Great Depression and told Jim Engster during an interview in 2008 that it wasn’t an easy upbringing.
“Education was poor, but at least we have vegetables to eat, we raised a few chickens, we have False River fish, and so we could survive that way,” said Gaines.
Gaines would eventually move to California in his teens because African Americans did not have a high school at that time in Pointe Coupee. Gaines returned home in the 80s after living in San Francisco.
“When I left in 48 I could not have gone into UL expect for with a mop bucket after the white students had left, and when I came back, I was Writer-In-Residence there. So, something had changed,” said Gaines.
Gaines studied Literature at San Franciso State University before serving in the Army for two years.
Gaines found mass critical acclaim with his works The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman and A Lesson Before Dying but saw a lot of himself in a protagonist from his 1963 short story, The Sky is Gray.
“He is arguing with this minister, and this preacher is talking about god this and god that, and the other guy says I question all of this I question everything,” said Gaines.
Much of Gaines’ work focuses on the experience of African Americans living in the Jim Crow south.
