Ernest J. Gaines: I was born on a sugar cane plantation in South Louisiana, 1933. So that makes — I’m 68 years old today — I mean 68 years old now, and at that time, we lived in cabins, of course, and those cabins had been built during the time of slavery. Additions had been added to the cabins, but they had been built, the frame — the main part of the cabin — had been there since the time of slavery. And my folks had lived there on that plantation at least three or four generations before I came along. So we lived in that one plantation, about six generations of us. Yes.

I had folks there who had been slaves on that plantation. This in Pointe Coupee Parish in Louisiana. I went to school. We did not have a school. We had a church, and we attended the church, the same church where my folks worshiped on Sundays and where my ancestors had worshiped. There were grades from primer to the sixth grade, and classes were about five and a half months a year. Because the people had to go into the fields, children who were old enough to go to school were already heading for the fields at seven, eight years old, already going to the fields, and so we went to school between the crop seasons, between the planting of the crops and the harvesting of the crops, whatever it was, cotton or Irish potatoes or onions or whatever small children could do at that time. I attended that school for six years, my first six years, through the sixth grade.

Ernest J. Gaines: My great aunt was probably the greatest influence in my life. She was crippled. She never walked in her life. She crawled over the floor all her life. When my mother had to go out into the fields when we were smaller children, and then later go to California, she left us with my aunt, and my aunt could do everything except walk. She cooked the food for us, would bring everything to the stove. We had an old wood-burning stove. She cooked the food for us. She washed our clothes on this old washboard. We had to bring all the stuff there, the water, the soap, the washboard itself. She also disciplined us. So we had to break our own switch to get our punishment if we did something wrong. So we’d go out and break our own switch and come back and take our punishment.

We had a little vegetable garden beside the house. From the time of slavery, they always gave the slaves a little place to plant the vegetables. So even when I grew up, there was still a little vegetable garden beside the house or behind the house, wherever, and when it was cool enough in the afternoon, she would crawl over the floor, down the steps, and she’d work in our vegetable garden. She had to put her hand into the earth, and she had a little short-handled hoe. She would work around the different plants in the garden. Beans or okra or tomatoes or whatever we had growing in the garden during that time. We had a pecan tree in our back yard, and during the fall, September, October, and Novembers too, I suppose, she would crawl over the yard and gather pecans in a little sack and bring them back to the house, and crack the pecans and make candy or cookies, whatever.

In all the time that I knew my aunt — and she raised me until I was 15-and-a-half years old — I never heard her complain once about anything, never complain once about her condition and the things that she had to do for us. Never once. So I think it was she who has had the greatest influence on me, both as an artist, as well as a man. Many times in my early age, when things were not working right for me in my writing, I wanted to give up, but I could not afford to give up because I remembered her and the things that she had to go through in her lifetime.

What I was trying to do in the beginning was to write from a multiple point of view. A multiple point of view, after some little old lady had died, a group of people gather at the home of — someone’s home — and after a funeral, they’d gather there for a repast, to eat and to talk and whatever, drink and whatever. And so I’d thought I would write a novel like that, because I had heard the old people who used to visit my aunt, because my aunt could not travel. They used to come there, and they used to talk all the time. They’d talk out on the porch during the day — or if it’s cold, around the fireplace at night — they were always talking, and I knew they talked about all kinds of things. They talked about what they had heard — knew — about slavery, vicariously, of course. About religion or politics. They were always talking.

I said, “Well, I have this idea about this. I want someone that lived from slavery to now. But to make it real, I have to bring in different things about history or whatever,” and I said, “Let’s start with 12 national things.” Of course, they did not experience these things, but they may have heard about these things. So we talked about things like slavery. We talked about the Reconstruction period. We talked about, oh, the Depression era, many things. So after we dealt with 12 things nationally, about 12 things nationally, then I dealt with 12 things statewide. This is what could have happened in the state between 1862, say, until 1962. What could have happened in the state that they could have heard about from someone else, from other sources? They didn’t know anything about it, really. They couldn’t read. So they did not know anything about it directly. So let’s deal with that. So we must have come up with ten, 12 things there. Then we dealt with the parish, need something here. She knows more about — she has to know something about the parish. So we dealt with the parish. Then we came to the plantation. So the circle becomes smaller and smaller, and there are four books there in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. After I had gotten all this information, then I tried to put it into the voices of these different people who are going to tell the story about this little old lady, but they talked so much about her that I fell in love with her, and it was then that I decided to write the book from her point of view.

Then I retitled it A Short Biography of Miss Jane Pittman, when we were talking about it, and I worked on it about a year, and my editor — who was Bill Decker, he was at the Dial Press at the time — Bill called me one day and he says — because I sent him drafts of it — he called me one day and he said, “Listen, Ernie, I think this book has to be told from the first-person point of view. She has to tell the story. These people are not telling the story right.” I told him, “Well, forget it. I’m going to go and continue to do what I’m doing,” and I must have done that for another month or so. And then I realized he was right. So I started in Chapter One: “It was a day something like right now,” she says. “Hot, hot, and dusty, dusty” were my first lines in it, and then she talks about how the Secessionist army came in, and then the Northern army behind them, chasing them and so on, and it just started there, and things began to move to move to move. I continued to read and read and read about the Civil War, and then I read about the Reconstruction period, and then I kept reading. I would write in the morning from — oh, I’d say from about 9:00 to about 2:00, and I had to go to work. I had part-time work, and then I’d work about four hours. Then I’d come back home, and I’d read. I was always a few years ahead of the time I was writing about. If I was writing about the Civil War, I was already reading about the Reconstruction period. If I was writing about that, I was reading about some other period in time. So I’d keep reading and reading and reading. So by the time my little character would get here, I have already gotten all the information or most of it.