San Francisco Film Critics Circle Awards 2010

Transcription

When do we get to "A Lesson Before Dying"? Could be a while. Once like this? There's a lot of young people who are just being introduced to literature. I don't--I didn't have any favorite books as a child, sorry. Hello, my name is Ernest J. Gaines, and I'm here to talk about my novel, "A Lesson Before Dying." I think Nietzsche said, "Without music, life would be a mistake." To me, without books life would be a mistake. I was born on a plantation in 1933. I was taught at a small school here on this plantation, but most of the children did not go much farther than about the sixth grade. Well, the generation before them didn't go to school at all. I attended school about five months to five and a half months out of the year. The rest of the time, I had to work in the fields. You worked there from early in the morning until late in the afternoon. It was the hottest time of the year. So, it was very tiring, very hard work for a child. For anyone, but especially for a child, it was very hard work. I used to write letters for old people as long before I started reading, long before I discovered books. I was about 12 years old and I could write and read as well as anyone else on the plantation, except for the teacher. I had to create their letters for them. Because once they had said something like, "Dear so and so, how are you?" I had to create that letter. They would pay me for writing a letter maybe a nickel, or a small tea cake. I left Louisiana in 1948 to go to California. My folks brought me there because I could not get the kind of education here my folks wanted me to have. I was not allowed to go into a library here. Libraries here were for whites only. I had nothing here, I didn't have any books. I didn't read a novel until I went to California, or a short story, or poetry, or plays, or anything like that. It was there in California that I visited a library for the first time. I started reading, and reading, and reading. I fell in love with books. The library there in Vallejo, California. And the reason why I went there was because I had gotten beaten up in a boxing ring by a guy who really knew how to box and I did not know. And I was too embarrassed to go back to this YMCA where I'd gotten beaten up, so I ended up in the library there in Vallejo, California. I discovered in a library lives of different people other than my own. I was looking for something about myself. I was looking for something about the rural life. Why they settled in the rural South. I'd read any writer who wrote about the South. 'Bout peasant life or any area where people worked in the fields. And I did find those books, especially among the 19th century Russian writers and many 19th century French writers. I read Chekhov because I was told that he was a great short story writer. And I was told that by librarians. I'd like reading Tolstoy's stories. He had these little tales, little stories about peasant life. Later, I would read War and Peace. I was a young man who had just come out of military service. So much what he talked about, I somewhat experienced some of it. I think I started reading Grapes of Wrath before I went to college. Pushkin, I think I fell in love with Pushkin because I heard that-- Someone told me that he's part black, so I began to read Pushkin. What was missing from the books that I read were that, uh, they were not talking about my people. Should I continue talking? But I was not finding me in the books that I was reading, because I was reading novels by white writers, European writers, American white writers. But they were not about my people. I think that I've learned so much from the great novels and the great short stories of the white writers, I've learned so much. However, they taught me form, but...I had to go somewhere else for source. They could tell me how to write a paragraph, how to construct a chapter, how a narrative should work. But what do I put in there? They're showing me how to build a house, but I have to put the furniture in the house. I need my black poets and preachers and blues singers to give me the furniture that must go into the house. I remember once, I had an interview with someone from Reader's Digest, and he asked me, he said, "What one book influenced you most in that library in Vallejo, California?" And I thought and thought and thought, and he said, "Maybe it was the one that was not there and you had to put it on the shelf." And I said, "Hey, that maybe it was the book." It was then that I thought I would like to be a writer. I thought, "Look at all these books in here, that must not be hard to do, I should be able to write a book." I didn't know how hard it was, at that time, to write a book. I published my first short story at San Francisco State in 1956. The only thing I could think about was to write about the South, about the home I'd come from. But I didn't want to come back to the South. Jim Meredith had gone into the University of Mississippi in 1962. This young man had to tolerate so much hatred and hostility toward him at that university. If he put up with that then I would come back to spend some time here. But in order to write the book about Louisiana, I had to come back to Louisiana. I didn't want to write about Bohemian life in San Francisco, I tried that. I tried to write about my army experience. I tried to write ghost stories. Only when I tried to write about Louisiana that I'd really put everything I had in my soul, everything into it. During that time I traveled all over the state. I went into the swamps and hunted. I fished in, in the bayous, I went to run-down bars, I went to the restaurants, little cafés both in Baton Rouge and well as in New Roads and Lafayette, because I needed that kind of experience in order to write my book "A Lesson Before Dying." I'd met people like Jefferson on the way. I visited a church school where Grant would teach. I'd gone to that church school as a child. All of this experience would get into all of my books. It was then that I tried to write something that I call "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman." And my intention at that time was to try to put down what these old people had talked about all those days and those nights. My aunt was crippled. I was raised by a lady who was crippled. She never walked in her life, but she raised me, she raised my brother, my sisters, all my siblings. Because she couldn't travel, the people on the plantation, you would come to our house. They come there and talk to her all the time. And they would talk about the past, they would talk about the present, and things, I'm pretty sure, they didn't know a thing about. What did they talk about? What did they talk about all this time? I wanted to write about the slavery, because they talked about it. They knew it from their parents. I wanted to write about Reconstruction period, because they talked about that. I wanted to write about The Great Flood of 1912 and 1927. I know they talked about that. I wanted to write about Huey P. Long, the governor of Louisiana. They thought Long was the greatest man in the world. And I wanted to write about the Civil Rights Movement. Through my writing I began to grow, I began to think. San Quentin is just across the bay from San Francisco. I was horrified by executions at San Quentin. They'd always happen on a Tuesday at 10 o'clock in the morning. I used to just leave the house-- my apartment--and walk to the ocean, I lived about four, four and a half miles from the ocean. And so I'd go to the ocean, just to get away from everything. I didn't want to see anybody, talk to anybody, until I'm sure that the execution was over. And then I would come back home and just sit there all day. And I think this is what drove me to writing "A Lesson Before Dying," because of these nightmares and nightmares about execution. What did a person go through that week before, the day before, the night before, he was to die? What was in his mind? What I tried to do in "A Lesson Before Dying" was to show the growth of two people. Both a student as well as a teacher. This was the main theme of the book. Grant is someone who hates teaching. He teaches in a small school plantation church, and he hates it, he wishes to run away. Run away to what, he doesn't know. Jefferson, from the time he was sent to be executed, was five months. I wanted to parallel those five months with the five months that he'd gone to school. Within those five months, he had to grow. Some way or another, Grant the teacher had to teach him. A man has to go to the electric chair, but he was a man. Whether you live two months, two weeks, or whether you live 40 years, you have a certain responsibility to yourself and to others around you. So it is Grant who must convince him, during those five months, to have him die properly. At the very end, when Jefferson really, really needed him to walk to the chair, he failed. And I wanted to show in a way that the minister, Ambrose, was stronger than Grant. I wanted to show that the minister, because he believed in God, he had some faith in something that he could do-- He could be there, that's what I was trying to do. Because of what happened, Grant will become a better teacher and he will remain there to teach, to marry Vivian, and he will teach the children. I think without Jefferson's death, none of this could've happened. I don't think it would've changed-- Grant wouldn't've changed. When he walks back into the church, that little church back there, and turned around to face those kids, and they're standing tall, their shoulders back, their head high, waiting for some answers, and he looks back at 'em and he starts crying. And I think that meant he, uh, "Okay, this is it." "I'm gonna be here with ya, I'm gonna do whatever I can." He did that and that made him... made him a man. The book was published in 1983. It won the National Critics Award. That same year I received a MacArthur Award for all of my work. That same year, I got married. Not long after that Oprah chose the book as one of her books. Of course, after Oprah pick up a book you know, the book, it--it sells. It went up to the best sellers list on New York Times best sellers list; for six weeks it was there. They were number one. I have six words of advice to any writer: to read, read, read, write, write, write. You must read in order to be a writer. And you must have a love for literature. You must be ready to sacrifice everything if you want to be that writer. I try to create characters, with character, to help improve my own character, and maybe the character of the person who might read me. And I just hope that my-- that book has helped me become a better person, and anyone else who's read it might become a little bit better than he was before they read the book. And that's what I tried to do. Some people have compared me to Grant, I don't think I'm quite like Grant. A few of us had chances to get away and do things with our lives. I was one of those fortunate person. Not all African-American male are like Grant or like Jefferson. There are many who are, but there are many who are not. These men came out whole, they came out strong, they came out like Martin Luther King did. They stood their ground, did not go away. They stayed here and raised their families. I should wish the black youth of the South to read my book, because--to show him that characters in a book are no better and no worse than he is. I wish the white youth of the South to read my book. To let him know that unless he knows his neighbor of the past 300 years, he knows only half of his own history. I think what made me a man was that I didn't want to leave here because I loved my aunt, I still love my memories of her, more than anyone else who's ever lived. I didn't want to leave her, but she also knew that I had to go, because nobody in our family, no male in our family, had gone beyond high school. So, I had to go, but I had this love of the place. Oh, and I think about the fields, sometimes it's good memories, other times, you know, hard, tough remembrance of these fields. I look out of my office, I can see all of that. Trees are in all of my books. I can see these trees from the office window all the way back to the cemetery. Most of the people buried back there in that cemetery have no marks. Such as my aunt, who raised me. There is no stone, nothing. I don't even know the exact place where she's buried, because we were too poor to put up anything. We've already picked out our place to be buried back there, both Di and I. My epitaph, I've already written it out: "To lie with those who have no marks." I wanna be with those who are too poor to have a marking place. That's where I want to be. I read every day, I have to read something every day. Books have been the history of man, his life, his dreams, his hopes, his mistakes. Shows us his courage, also shows us his cowardice. Someone asked me once, "Do you read all these books?" I said, "Once." I was wondering where my aunt is buried, I know approximately where she's at, but I don't know exactly, because there's no marker for a grave. And this butterfly kept coming back to the place where we were, where we were standing. Another butterfly would chase it away but it would come back again. This other butterfly came up at the end of the story, because I wanted something to show Jefferson's soul going into the quarters, to the people, lying in the quarters. "If I were a book which book would I be?" Maybe "Don Quixote", maybe "Don Quixote." A bit crazy anyhow so I might as well go with a book about a crazy guy.