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1 / “Is He the One?”: Civil Rights Activism and Leadership in Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman The lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but white people. “They don’t know when to stop,” she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever. —toni morrison, beloved The publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) defined Ernest Gaines’s position as a national and international literary historian,1 for the text makes a self-conscious effort to record African American women’s and men’s leadership in civil rights struggles from Emancipation to the middle of the civil rights movement. Like other fiction that emerges between the mid-1960s and the late 1970s, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman employs a “long” civil rights historical framework to establish a continuous, ongoing history of black freedom struggles in the New World and to emphasize that the civil rights movement occurring in the 1950s and 1960s did not emerge in a vacuum.2 This engagement with historical events and leaders that have shaped black freedom struggles has earned its classification as a historical novel.3 Yet unlike most historical novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is not a mere fictionalized re-creation of history; instead, it diverges from master narratives to explore in new ways the roles of black men and women in events like the Spanish-American War of 1898 and the 1963 March on Washington. Historiographies of the Spanish-American War of 1898 have not fully examined how African American men’s participation in that war altered black people’s attitudes toward civil rights. Relatedly, historiographies of the civil rights movement have not fully addressed how black women’s leadership in the movement reconstituted the movement’s goals. By defamiliarizing these events, Gaines uncovers significant moments that shape civil rights discourses. 34 / exodus politics Whereas master narratives of black civil rights struggles that emerged in the late 1960s and flourished into the 1980s reinforced the paradoxes of exodus politics by suggesting that only black men had fought and won the black freedom struggle, Gaines brings nuance to the politics of gender in historiographies of the civil rights movement. Not only does he call into question the efficacy of male formal leadership that social movement theorists have privileged in evaluating the success of the movement’s organizational and mobilization tactics, but he disrupts the related notion that normative black men’s political interests are those of the entire community.4 At a time when black nationalism’s emphasis on black unification contributed to the proliferation of discourses that promulgated sameness, Gaines’s text foregrounds difference, underscoring the need for a liberatory politics that will consider black community members’ sometimes competing political interests. In making this choice, he exemplifies the beginnings of a post–civil rights era development in black politics and culture later described by Cathy Cohen as the shift from an emphasis on “consensus issues construed as having an equal impact on all those sharing a primary identity based on race” to an increasing exploration of “cross-cutting issues structured around and built on the social, political, and economic cleavages that tear at the perceived unity and shared identity of group members.”5 Black studies, black feminist studies, and black queer studies have taken cross-cutting issues as their disciplinary points of departure and have spent the late twentieth century theorizing the discontinuities within black identities in order to foreground the multiplicity of black political concerns.6 When Gaines published The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, however, he entered territory that had been of particular interest primarily to black feminist critics and cultural producers. Around that same time, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) and Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970) were upsetting black aestheticians’ notion that black art would best serve black politics and civil rights attainment by depicting positive (and idealistic ) images of black life and family;7 but even more important, they were demonstrating how a political agenda that privileged the normative black subject’s concern to regain his putatively rightful position as the head of the black household undermined the struggle to collectively enfranchise black communities. During this black women’s literary renaissance, black women writers depicted black heteropatriarchy as an institution that created as much...

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