Into the home and mind of author Ernest Gaines

Just northwest of Baton Rouge near New Roads, there is a small hamlet called Oscar that is located along the False River. On the first day of fall, the air is a bit drier and a bit cooler there, although the sun still beats down on the blue water and sugarcane fields that surround the Gaines’ house.

It is Dianne Gaines who welcomes visitors into the home, but it is her husband people usually ask for.

Ernest Gaines says there was once a time when he wouldn’t welcome visitors at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. That time was dedicated to writing. But these days he spends about five hours per week writing instead of five hours per day.

Ernest and Dianne Gaines designed the house to their specifications and moved in 10 years ago, a day before their wedding anniversary. The house blends the old with the new — cozy nooks with ornate furniture juxtapose with a chef’s kitchen filled with the latest finishes. The sweet scent of a pear crisp in the oven fills the entire home with warmth, and classical music echos throughout the rooms. Books aren’t limited to the library but are found throughout the house, even on the bathroom’s wallpaper design. A gray cat named Sir Thomas and a golden dog named Didi greet visitors warmly. A third pet, a colorful cat named Fifi, hides.

In the backyard is the restored schoolhouse and chapel building from Ernest Gaines’ childhood. Across the street is their camp on the False River where Ernest Gaines does his writing.

It’s been 50 years since the publication of his first novel, “Catherine Carmier,” which tells the love story between a dark-skinned black man and a light-skinned Creole woman in a Louisiana countryside where blacks, whites, Cajuns and Creoles coexist in a complex way.

Fifty years ago, Ernest Gaines could not have owned a house on this property, where he once worked in the fields as a child born to a sharecroppers. Five generations of his family have lived on this land in Pointe Coupée Parish, first as slaves at the River Lake Plantation, then as sharecroppers, and now, Ernest Gaines lives freely on the land of his people as a celebrated writer.

“I used to write for the old people on this plantation, the same place we’re sitting right now,” Ernest Gaines said. “This is the same land my people have been living on for five generations, right here. Right here in this place.”

‘The soul stayed here’

At 81, Ernest Gaines now moves slowly and deliberately, using a walker to steady his steps.

There was a time when he walked several miles each day at Girard Park when he served as writer-in-residence at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He began his residency in 1981 and stayed at the university until he retired in 2004. It was during those years that Ernest Gaines wrote and published the critically acclaimed novels “A Gathering of Old Men” and “A Lesson Before Dying.”

He has since slowed down.

Ernest Gaines has been working on two novellas “just a little bit at a time” for the past four years. One he calls “Daughters of the Creole Lady,” and the other he calls “The Man who Whipped Children.”

Although now recognized as one of the most influential writers of African-American and Southern literature, it took many years for Ernest Gaines to see success. It took many more for his family, friends and neighbors to understand his need to write.

“They all thought I was nuts because hardly any of them had read a book, a novel. Back in a place like this, you read the Bible,” Ernest Gaines said. “Nobody in the country had books. They didn’t know what you were talking about, and even if they did, they had not read black writers.”

At 15, Ernest Gaines moved to the San Francisco area where his mother and step-father lived so he could continue schooling. His Pointe Coupée Parish community high school did not allow African-Americans.

The libraries in California captivated Ernest Gaines, but he found no books written by or about blacks. That’s when he began writing a version of what would one day become his first novel, “Catherine Carmier.” At only 17, Ernest Gaines sent the manuscript to New York City, but it was rejected.

He burned it.

So he focused on school, served in the Army and enrolled in San Francisco State University, where began publishing short stories in the university’s literary journal. He earned a spot in Stanford University’s graduate program for creative writing, then settled into a studio apartment in the San Francisco area.

Though he had been writing short stories and working odd jobs, a mentor told Ernest Gaines that publishing a novel was the only way to publish a book of short stories or make money as a writer.

“And the only novel I could think of is what I had tried to write about 10 years earlier,” he said. “And of course, I’d burned the draft I sent to New York.”

Ernest Gaines started writing a new version of the novel, winning the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award in San Francisco for submitting a few chapters of the novel.

He struggled to finish the book and decided to return to Louisiana for six months in 1963. Following his stay, he returned to his San Francisco apartment where he finally completed the novel.

Ernest Gaines says his 1948 move to California and his 1963 trip back home are the two most important dates of his life.

“I had to go for education, but I had to come back here to be the writer that I am today,” he said. “The body went to San Francisco but the soul stayed here.”

Published in 1964, “Catherine Carmier” received favorable reviews but did not sell well. He kept writing.

Ernest Gaines said he always wanted to write. There was no alternative, even though teachers, family members and even editors discouraged him.

“I just always said I was going to write,” he said. “Had I not succeeded, I don’t know, suicide?”

‘Greatest living writer’

Although “Catherine Carmier” isn’t one of Ernest Gaines’ most celebrated works, the themes and characterization in the book can be seen in the writer’s later works.

Matthew Teutsch, interim director of the Ernest J. Gaines Center on the UL-Lafayette campus, calls the book an “important step” for Ernest Gaines.

“He doesn’t write about New Orleans. He doesn’t write about Baton Rouge,” Teutsch said. “He writes about rural African-American life, specifically in South Louisiana. And it gives insight into our history.”

Many of Ernest Gaines’ first-edition books and original manuscripts can be found at the Gaines Center, which has become a place for scholars to study the writer’s work in many different forms.

While everything from old ink pens, a typewriter, speeches and notebooks of all sizes have been donated to the center, Ernest Gaines still keeps about two-thirds of his craft items in an archival room in his home.

Ernest Gaines says he appreciates that there is an academic center that bears his name and that he has received so much recognition for his life’s work while he is around to enjoy it.

“A famous artist once said that they always gave artists a steak after he had lost all his teeth,” he said. “And I still have mine — most of mine — and so I enjoy the steak now. I’m enjoying the steak very much now.”

Friend and literary scholar John Lowe is writing a biography on Ernest Gaines, which Lowe began about a year ago and expects to work on for two to three years more.

A biography is something Ernest Gaines only recently desired, said Lowe, who will speak about Ernest Gaines at a Nov. 21 event in Lafayette to celebrate the 50th anniversary of “Catherine Carmier.”

“The people in Lafayette and Baton Rouge and Louisiana in general need to be very proud of our greatest living writer and the honor he has done to Louisiana and the South and this nation in terms of telling a story that goes to central issues of the human condition,” Lowe said.

Every October on the Saturday before All Saints’ Day, Ernest Gaines leads family, friends and locals to a small cemetery near his home in Oscar. There, the group cares for grave sites before gathering for a celebratory meal. It is in that graveyard where many of Ernest Gaines’ relatives rest and where many slaves and free blacks from the plantation are buried.

Ernest Gaines spends a lot of time these days with the folks he grew up with.

“We get together and we just talk, have dinner, sit around and talk and laugh and joke,” he said. “Talk about the old days, talk about the old people and how we lived.”

Some things changes, others stay the same

Although much has changed in South Louisiana and throughout the nation during Ernest Gaines’ lifetime, he says there are still some of the “same old, sore, cancerous ideas” around in terms of racism.

“You know, I think things are going to continue to get a little better, a little better, a little better,” he said. “But I don’t think that man will ever, ever, ever just live happily together.”

People have asked Ernest Gaines to write a sequel to “Catherine Carmier,” and he has told them that the sequel is that he married his wife, Dianne, who is a Creole from New Orleans.

The two met at a folk festival in Miami, where Dianne Gaines worked as an attorney. She told Ernest Gaines that he was her favorite African American male writer.

“We talked about food, talked about gumbo,” Dianne Gaines said. “I like to tease him that he lived in California all that time, and he had to come to Miami to find a Louisiana girl.”

The two married in 1993.

In his home’s kitchen, Ernest Gaines eats spoonfuls of his wife’s pear crisp. The pears come from trees in their backyard.

Ernest Gaines allows his gaze to drift to the kitchen’s window, through the screened-in back porch and into the yard, where the restored school house and chapel from his childhood stands. Beyond the white chapel, sugarcane fields where he and five generations of his family once worked border the six acres of property.

“I think some things have changed, but other things remain the same,” Ernest Gaines said. “You have a lot of racism and prejudice here, but I live in this place here. I could have never owned something like this place here 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. People wouldn’t have allowed it.”

Events celebrating the 50th anniversary of “Catherine Carmier”

• Nov. 1: Discussion with Ernest Gaines at the Louisiana Book Festival at the State Capitol in Baton Rouge.

• Nov. 2: 4 p.m., reading by Gaines in Moody Hall, room 103, on the UL-Lafayette campus.

• Nov. 8: Pointe Coupee Book Fair.

• Nov. 21: 1 p.m., second annual Ernest J. Gaines Lecture by John Lowe at the Gaines Center at Dupre Library on the UL-Lafayette campus.

For more information about these events, visit ernestgaines.louisiana.edu, call (337) 482-1848 or email gainescenter@louisiana.edu.

Books by Ernest Gaines

1964: “Catherine Carmier.”

1967: “Of Love and Dust.”

1968: “Bloodline.”

1971: “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”

1978: “In My Father’s House.”

1983: “A Gathering of Old Men.”

1993: “A Lesson Before Dying.”

2005: “Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays.”