Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, and Literature

CHAPTER 5. Parishes & Prisons: Ernest Gaines’s Louisiana & Its North Carolina Kin Space

257 chapter five Parishes & Prisons ERNEST GAINES’S LOUISIANA & ITS NORTH CAROLINA KIN SPACE i. plantations as remembered geographies If time unfolds as change then space unfolds as interaction. In that sense space is the social dimension. Not in the sense of exclusively human sociability, but in the sense of engagement within a multiplicity. It is the sphere of the continuous production and reconfiguration of heterogeneity in all its forms—diversity, subordination, conflicting interests. —doreen massey, For Space (2005) “Ghosts,” a Sybil Kein poem, asks the question that lingers in Louisiana memory: Who would embrace them even now, these gens de couleur of Louisiana? . . . . . . . . . . Despite the audacity of a third acronym, race, culture, African and European conjoined as bone, heart mind to produce this progeny.1 For Kein, there is little escape from the haunting legacy in Louisiana of “the perversion of color/as hoax, as cannon, as/dominion over the oneness/of all souls.”2 Creoles of Color “culled dignity/from a fragile freedom,” she recalls , and generations later, after emancipation, after Reconstruction, after world wars to safeguard freedom, the question of color remains in a place that could have emerged with a progressive vision of race based on the fluid- PARISHES & PRISONS|258| ity and mutability of available categories within Louisiana’s spatial and social history. While Kein’s aesthetic and poetics are anchored in Louisiana as a historical construct with global reverberations in the Créolité of the present, Ernest Gaines’s work is based on a conceptualization of Louisiana as a social geography whose localized configuration is interactive though not dynamic. Kein seeks racial and social equality for Louisiana’s people of color, while Gaines seeks racial and social justice. Both stances are necessary given the state’s history, and both utilize a spatial ground that follows from an understanding of racial constructions and residual contradictions from an earlier Louisiana. Gaines, not unlike Kein and other twentieth-century Louisiana writers, demonstrates a locational epistemology, shaped by a racial geography and an economic history that are still operational in the present. His repeated excavations of a specific Louisiana in his imagined Bayonne and St. Raphael Parish , however, have been more visible and have produced perhaps the major fiction to emerge from twentieth-century Louisiana. In it, Gaines engages the complexity of a racial hierarchy that is multitiered, and he explores the reality of a racial segregation that has been debilitating yet, from his standpoint, not debasing. Out of that reality, his narratives of a specific Louisiana space demonstrate why justice must be achieved. Modernist in their universalizing and humanistic discourses, his narratives foreground “becoming” as opposed to a static “being.” Gaines has articulated what may be called a geographical imagination. His readers have been unable to avoid the knowledge that he created Bayonne, Louisiana, and its surroundings to project that imagination and to preserve his memory of place. “I think one of the greatest things that has happened to me, as a writer and a human being, is that I was born in the South, that I was born in Louisiana,” he has reflected in one of his many conversations about his birthplace.3 Punctuating that early admission with additional descriptions of his particular South, he remembered his motivation for writing: “I wanted to smell that Louisiana earth, feel that Louisiana sun, sit under the shade of one of those Louisiana oaks, search for pecans in that Louisiana grass in one of those Louisiana yards next to one of those Louisiana bayous, not far from a Louisiana river.”4 He extrapolates the very name “Bayonne” from the French town in the Acquitaine, which sits where the rivers Adour and Nive meet. Bayonne is also the place that Roland Barthes identifies as “the perfect city.”5 Gaines’s Bayonne, however, has more frequently been related to William Faulkner’s Jefferson in Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi.6 PARISHES & PRISONS |259| The site of memory for Gaines’s space of narrative is Pointe Coupée, an oxbow cutoff of the Mississippi River; the oxbow forms False River, a lake of 3,212 acres that once was the region’s main channel of the Mississippi River. The land forms Pointe Coupée Parish, which is bounded on three sides by water: on the east, the Mississippi River; on the north, Old River; and on the west, the Atchafalaya. On the south, Iberville and West...