“When you get through with your work, there, tomorrow,” Pap said to me, “dig us up a good cup of worms.”
“He can’t go with you tomorrow,” Mom said. “Want him to go somewhere with me.”
“Yes?” Pap said. “Where at?”
“Ohhh, just somewhere,” Mom said.
“Well,” Pap said. “Guess I’ll have to make it all by myself.”
“Yes,” Mom said. “You do that.”
So the next day, right after dinner, Pap went out in back and dug him a cup of worms. He hollered in at us he was leaving, then I saw him going out the gate with that little bent fishing pole.
“Get your hat,” Mom said.
I put on my hat and went on the gallery to wait for her. After she had closed up all the windows and doors, we left the house. At first we started out the same way Pap had gone, but after a little while we turned down another road. We walked and walked, neither one of us saying a word. If there’s anything I’m not supposed to ask Mom, that’s Where we going? If she wants me to know, she tells me. If she don’t tell me, I’m supposed to wait and see.
So we walked and walked. Passing patches of cane after patches of cane. Then patches of corn, then patches of cotton. We went farther and farther back in the fields.
Then we came up to a house. I had heard plenty about this house, but I hadn’t ever come there. Madame Toussaint, an old hoodoo lady, lived in it, and none of us children wouldn’t go nowhere near it.
The house was old and leaning to one side, and the fence and the gate was all broken down. They had a big pecan tree right in front of the door, and the yard was covered with weeds.
I pulled the gate open for Mom, since she couldn’t jump over it, and we went in the yard.
“Stay here,” she told me.
I sat on the steps and Mom went up on the gallery and knocked three times. I heard a dog bark three times. He must been a big dog, ’cause I know he had a heavy voice. Then I heard Madame Toussaint ask who it is. Mom said it was her, and Madame Toussaint unlocked her door, and Mom went in.
I felt a little scary out there all by myself, ’cause I had heard the people say Madame Toussaint could do all kinds of strange things. C. Hugh said one time he passed by here and one of Madame Toussaint’s chickens spoke to him. The chicken said, “What you know, C. Hugh?” C. Hugh said he looked over his shoulder and there was nothing standing there but that chicken, grinning at him. C. Hugh said that’s the last time he seen that chicken, the last time he seen that house, and the last time he ever passed by here day or night. C. Hugh said by the time he reached that road that took you to the quarters, he was running so fast, he ran over in Montemare cane field. Said he knocked down almost a whole row of cane ’fore he got on the road again. Said when he hit that road, he started praying. Said he said, “Lord, don’t let me meet up with nothing, ’cause anything I meet up with go’n have to die. Mule, horse, cow, or tractor, I’m going over it.” But said he didn’t meet nothing, thank God, till he got home.
The dog barked again and made me jump. That dog had the loudest voice I ever heard on a dog. Then after he had barked, Mom came out and told me let’s go. I was sure glad to get away from the place.
The next time Pap asked me to go fishing with him, Mom said I couldn’t ’cause she had something for me to do. Pap said that was too bad, and he went outside and dug his worms and got his little bent pole and headed toward the back. I watched him go, and I felt a little sad. Eggs or no eggs, Miss Molly Bee or no Miss Molly Bee, I liked fishing with Pap.
After he had gone, Mom took me by the arm and led me on the gallery. She told me to sit on the steps and keep my eyes on that woodpecker in our mulberry tree. We had a mulberry tree right in the front yard, and, sure enough, there was a woodpecker up there pecking.
“What for?” I said. “I wish I had my slingshot. I’ll keep my eyes on him. I’ll—”
“Boy?” Mom said. She looked at me in that mean way she got of looking when she wants me to pay attention. She glanced at the woodpecker and looked at me again. “When he fly away, you count to thirty and let me know.”
“Suppose he don’t fly? I want to go shoot marbles.”
“If he peck there all day, you stay there.”
“Suppose he stay there all night?”
Mom looked at me again in that mean way.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“I hate what I’m doing,” she said. “But I can’t help it. Letting that yellow woman make a fool of him like that.”
She went inside, and I sat on the steps watching that woodpecker. Then when I got tired sitting, I lay back and looked at him. Then when I got tired lying there, I sat up again. When Lucius came by and asked me to shoot marbles with him, I told him I had to watch that woodpecker. Lucius asked me what I had to watch a woodpecker for. I told him for Mom. Lucius didn’t know what I was talking about, but he sat there and watched him with me. Then after a while, he got tired and left. That doggone woodpecker was still up there, pecking and pecking away. Once he stopped for about a second, then he started all over again.
Then ’round five-thirty he gave it up and flew over the house. I counted to thirty right fast and ran inside to tell Mom.
“Get your hat,” she said. “Let’s go down to Mr. Étienne.”
We went down there, and Mr. Étienne was in the back just getting ready to unhitch his mules. Mom asked him could she borrow his wagon for a while, and Mr. Étienne looked at her kind of funny-like. But when Mom promised to take good care of the mules, he said all right.
She told me to get in the wagon and take the lines, and she went and opened the gate. When I drove out in the road, she made me turn right. She locked the gate and climbed in, and we headed into the field.
Mom didn’t say another word to me. Every time I asked her which way, she pointed her finger. I’d pull the lines, and the mules would go in that direction. The mules were tired and didn’t want to go at all, so every now and then I had to give ’em a little pop. Mom didn’t say anything to me, but I could feel she wanted to.
We went on and on, and then I seen we was headed toward Miss Molly Bee’s house. I looked at Mom ’cause I still didn’t know what was going on. But she just sat there quietly and looked straight ahead.
When we came up to the gate that took you in the pasture, Mom stood up in the wagon and started looking ’round. She looked right, she looked left. Then as she was getting ready to look right again, she jerked her head back the other way.
“There he is over there,” she said.
I stood up to look, and, sure enough, there was Pap lying over there all tangled up in the wire fence. Mom opened the gate, and I drove over where Pap was. Pap was mumbling something to himself, but he wasn’t moving. Mom told me to get down and help her get him in the wagon. We had a hard time untangling Pap out of that barbwire, but we managed to get him free. Then we got him in, and I gathered up the line and the string of fishes and laid them beside him. Pap was mumbling so much, Mom had to sit in the bed of the wagon and hold him in her arms.
“It’s all right,” she kept whispering to Pap. “It’s all right.”
When we got home, the sun had gone down. I helped Mom get Pap inside, then I took the mules back to Mr. Étienne. When I got back home, Pap was really mumbling. Over and over—“Get him away from me. Get him away from me.” Pap mumbled like that all night. “Get him away from me. Get him away from me.”
When Pap was able to talk, about a week later, he told us what had happened. He really got excited when he told us about it. I had never seen Pap get so excited before.
“My way home from fishing—” he said.
“From where?” Mom cut him off.
“Fishing. My way home from fishing—”
“From where?” Mom said.
Pap started to say he was on his way home from fishing again, but he stopped and looked at Mom.
“You know?” he said.
“I know,” Mom said.
Pap looked at her a good while, then he nodded his head.
“You right. I was on my way from her house. I was walking slowly, walking slowly. Then all a sudden I heard this cissing. Didn’t know what it was at first. Never heard nothing like it before—hope to never hear nothing like it again. Looked over my shoulder, couldn’t see a thing. Soon as I start walking, could hear it. Cissing, cissing. Coming from back in the woods. Look back; nothing. Go little farther, then it get closer, and I hear it plainer. Look back. They got a snake there ten foot long. Never seen one like that before. Crawling on just half his belly. Head part straight up in the air. Looking straight at me—just cissing. I start running. Thing cissing—coming after me. I stop. He stop. I start walking. He come little bit, too. I stop. Thing stop. I break at him. Thing break back. I stop. He stop. I look at him. He look at me. I move my head one way. He move his head. ‘Lord have mercy,’ I say. ‘This the devil? This the devil?’
Thing just look at me, going ‘Ciss-ciss.’ I start walking. Here he come. I stop. He stop. I break at him and swing my pole at his head. Thing duck. I swing the other way. Thing duck again. Must hit fifty times at him, ain’t hit him yet. ‘This ain’t no real snake,’ I say. ‘This ain’t no real snake. This must be a haint.’ And when I said that, I headed for home. Me, that haint, and that road. Faster I run, faster that haint run. Haint right behind me, going ‘Ciss-ciss.’ Getting close to the gate, haint get right side me, going ‘Ciss-ciss.’ Then I see that haint making me run ’cross the pasture—toward the fence. Come to the fence, didn’t even think, just went in. Haint knowed what he was doing. Got me all tangled up and tried to beat me to death. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy. You ain’t been beaten by a haint, you ain’t been beaten. When I woke up, I was home. Don’t know nothing. Don’t know nothing. Nothing but that haint.”
Pap must have told that story about fifty times, and every time he told it he told it the same way, so it had to be the truth.
But that was a week later. The night we brought Pap home, Pap twisted and turned and mumbled all night. Mom sat up with him, bathing the cuts on his back and feeding him soup. I wanted to stay up with her, but she made me go to bed. When I woke up the next morning, there was Pap again—mumbling and groaning. People heard Pap was sick and they came by to see him. But Pap didn’t recognize a soul, just sweating and mumbling. People told Mom she ought to get him a doctor, but Mom said Pap was her man, not theirs, and she knowed how to look after him. People wouldn’t argue with Mom; nobody ever argued with Mom. But they kept on dropping by to look at Pap. Everybody dropped by. That is, everybody but Miss Molly Bee. She passed by the house couple times and peeped in, but that was all. One time I met her in the road and she asked me how was Pap feeling. I said he was doing pretty good. She smiled and told me to tell Pap she said hello. I told Pap. Pap didn’t say a word. He just gazed at the ceiling. Then he started talking about the haint again. That haint just stayed in Pap’s mind. Nothing else. Just the haint. And everything led up to the haint. If you said berry, Pap would put berry with bush, bush with pasture, and pasture with haint. If you said post, Pap would put post with fence, fence with pasture, and pasture with haint. If you said dirt, water, sky—anything; it all added up to haint.
But after about a week or so, Pap was able to get up. His legs were still wobbly, and he couldn’t do much, but he could at least go out on the gallery and sit in the sun. And the first day Pap went out there, Pap surprised me. Because that was the first time I’d ever seen Pap sit in a chair on the gallery. He set right by the door across from Mom. And Mom was some proud of it. You could see it and you could feel it.
Not too long after we had been sitting out there, Lucius came by. Me and Lucius played marbles a few minutes, then we sat on the steps. I waited till Mom and Pap were quiet, then I looked at Lucius. Lucius said, “Passed by Miss Molly Bee’s house yesterday, and Miss Molly Bee was laughing to kill Caesar.”
I could tell Mom and Pap was looking at Lucius, and I said, “What was she laughing about?”
Lucius said, “Don’t know. But she sure was laughing. Back there in her kitchen, laughing to beat the band.”
A week after Pap was up, he was able to go fishing again. I dug a big cup of worms, and we left the house. Just as I was turning down the quarters, Pap stopped me.
“Where you going?” he said.
“Ain’t we going fishing?”
“We going,” he said.
“Well, ain’t —?”
“That’s the only fishing hole you know?” he said.
“You mean we going to the river?”
Pap didn’t say anything, and started walking. I ran and caught up with him.
“Ehh, y’all sure think you smart, huh?” he said.
“Who, Pap?” I said.
“Madame Toussaint. Who else?” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I liked old Pap. I liked Mom, too.
“What a haint,” Pap said. “What a haint.”
In His Own Words:
Ernest J. Gaines
in Conversation
A LITERARY SALON: OYSTER/SHRIMP PO’BOYS, CHARDONNAY, AND CONVERSATION WITH ERNEST J. GAINES
Ernest J. Gaines, Marcia Gaudet, and Darrell Bourque
December 17, 2002
DB: That whole idea of influence or use or whatever you want to call it is really broad. I mean to a large extent any of us who are writers or musicians or visual artists are all influenced by the larger culture that we encounter. But what we could do in this particular set of interviews is to ask some more specific questions about how artistic expression impacts a particular imagination. As we’ve talked to you over the years informally and in other essays or interviews that you’ve given, you know, there are instances where you talk about the way in which you listened to Joyce, read Joyce, read Turgenev, loved the work of Vincent van Gogh, and so forth. And so in a lot of ways, I think that one of the reasons why your name immediately came up for me is because I know that as you’ve talked through the years, you’ve touched on some of those ideas. But I was wondering, Ernie, who would you say is a nonliterary artist who has maybe had an impact on you as a writer or as an artist yourself? Are there any people who come to mind?
GAINES: A nonliterary artist?
DB: Right, either a musician or—
GAINES: Well, I’ve listened to music all my life, all my adult life I should say, and especially the classical music, symphonies as well as chamber music. I like to listen to jazz music, a lot of jazz music, of course. And a lot of blues, a lot of spirituals. Pop music. And I think without knowing how directly it’s influenced me, I think it has influenced me. I think I’ve taken from so many different artists that it’s hard for me to pinpoint it to one particular musician. Although I’ve listened to pieces of music, like the
New World Symphony
of Dvořák. And because of the motifs or themes of spirituals and themes in the symphony, it’s awakened something in me when I’ve listened to it.
MG: I want to go back to what you said sixteen years ago. You said at that time that music helped you develop as a writer, and while writing
Miss Jane Pittman,
you played Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition.
You also said that some of the best descriptions of things, especially dealing with blacks, have been described better in music, especially the great blues singers like Bessie Smith, Josh White, and Leadbelly. And also in jazz music—a repetition of things, understatement, playing around the note.
GAINES: Right, right. Yes, I agree. Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues,” and I feel that I get the sensation, the description, and the feeling of it—of the Flood of ’27, as I get when I read Faulkner’s “Old Man.” That sharp picture that she gives in two and a half lines of singing, I get a picture of what it must have been like—for the people—the water, and life at that particular time. Leadbelly singing about the prisons—at Angola or the prisons in Texas. I get a good feeling of what prison life was like. Regarding that influence in some of my work—Lightnin’ Hopkins singing “Mr. Tim Moore’s Farm”—I think that influenced me in writing some of the books. When I wrote
Of
Love and Dust,
a man was put on the farm to work his time out. That had an influence on me. And I listened to the spirituals, and I used that kind of, those kinds of emotions when writing scenes of older women—for example, in
A Gathering of Old Men
or in
A Lesson
Before Dying
—how they talked to God, and the associations about God. I think that’s from listening to that.
MG: Do you think the contemporary singers—and I have in mind especially B. B. King, because I think you said you liked B. B. King. I’m not talking about rap music—
GAINES: I don’t know a thing about rap—
MG: Artists like B. B. King—do you get that same kind of feeling or influence?
GAINES: I do. I think I do. I think the
early
B. B. King. The B. B. King of the fifties. You see, I’ve been listening to B. B. King since the fifties. Definitely. I have those records. And it’s not as sophisticated as it is today. There’s a young musician—who’s compared to B. B. King—called Robert Cray. And he’s just a fantastic blues singer. And he sings contemporary things. The way he sings about these contemporary problems—I went through those problems as a young man in the forties. And he’s young. I guess in his forties—young compared to B. B. King. So I’m still very much influenced by the blues singers. Especially the rural singers, much more than the urban blues singers.
MG: I wonder about the influence of rap. The rap singers are so much a part of the mainstream culture right now—and not only an influence on young African-American culture. But it seems like an
urban
thing, and so removed from the experiences of the older generations.
GAINES: Right. I don’t understand a thing about it. I don’t understand it at all. I can’t even talk about it.
DB: I think one of the interesting things about rap music is the way in which it cuts across a racial divide, so that young white kids are as interested in black rap music as young black kids. And it goes both ways. Some of Eminem’s strongest and most fervent fans are young black kids. And it’s just a phenomenon to me that I don’t understand, either, but there’s a kind of ability to communicate and something going on there that I think is not for our generation.
MG: But in a way the blues and jazz singers did the same thing.
DB: Yeah. That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that.
MG: It just may be the form that generation needed. And that was my other question, do you think that the great blues and jazz singers did serve that purpose—of sort of appealing very widely? They were singing often about specific black experiences, but they reached a larger audience.
GAINES: Yes, I think that definitely happened. And I don’t know where Elvis Presley would be today if it were not for black musicians. And the group that really made white America aware of the influence of blues—especially rural blues—was the Rolling Stones from England. They were the first white group to really come out and say, “Yes, definitely, we’ve been influenced by these people.” By Muddy Waters, and Chuck Berry, and all of these black singers. These blues singers definitely influenced many of the white singers. This young man who died in a plane crash several years ago—from Texas—Stevie Ray Vaughan—a tremendous blues musician, and you can see the influence of black music on him. So it’s definitely there. Go back to jazz, as you said, Benny Goodman with the Count Basie Band, how they integrated, how they worked together and made good music. Benny Goodman had people like Charlie Christian on guitar, and Lionel Hampton on the xylophone. Teddy Wilson on the piano. So it’s always been out there. I can understand that. That stuff that’s called “hip-hop”—I can’t understand. I don’t know what they’re doing. I was at a place recently, at one of these readings, and one guy got up and asked me, “Mr. Gaines, what do you think of hip-hop music, as a writer?” What’s hip-hop? I had no idea what they were talking about.
MG: And what’s almost frightening to me is that I can remember— not so much with my dad because he was a musician, and he loved blues and jazz—but with Chuck Berry and others and when rock and roll became mainstream—and now my generation is questioning whether rap, or hip-hop, really is an art form.
GAINES: I think of contemporary jazz—and when they came out with bebop—you know, nobody wanted to accept it. You know, the old traditionalists didn’t want to accept bebop. But then the artists and industry and all those guys stuck to it—
DB: And now we can hear it. You couldn’t even hear it early on. Your ears wouldn’t accept it—
GAINES: Right—but it’s out there. John Coltrane, when he changed music around, people didn’t understand what he was doing. But John Coltrane was a genius. That was another influence on my work—listening to it—because it’s really rooted in the blues. If you really listen to John Coltrane, it’s really blues all the time—blues and spirituals all the time.
DB: You were mentioning Elvis Presley a while ago, and a little fact about Elvis Presley is his love of gospel music. He would come off the stage after a performance at midnight, and at five or six in the morning, his singers, his backup singers were still backstage. He would make them sing gospel music, and he would just go on until daybreak. And it wasn’t something that happened at a stage in his career. It was all the way through. And I think that he drew to a large extent from the same thing—from the blues and the spirituals.
GAINES: Yes, sure.
MG: And he didn’t see that as a sort of a divide. And I wonder about that—the idea that there is sort of a break between the spirituals and blues or jazz—and even that expression, that one is much more “God’s music” and the other is sort of like “the Devil’s music.”
GAINES: I think the artist must deal with both God and the Devil. I think you can’t put one aside or the other. You know, like if you’re going to write for certain groups, and I don’t believe in writing for any specific group. So let others call blues the “sin music” and gospel is God’s music, just as the minister does in
A Lesson Before Dying.
You know, when they visit Jefferson in jail, and he’s playing that radio and he’s listening to blues, the old man—the minister—says “that sin box.” Well, sometimes that sin box can help you get to heaven as well as anything else. That’s what I was trying to show. But the artist himself cannot separate the religious or the blues or the spiritual. The artist cannot.
MG: Yes, I think that was always an outside judgment, because the artists saw that some of their inspiration for the blues and jazz came from the deeply spiritual.
GAINES: Yes, he must—he has to use both of them.
DB: The minister—and that’s so beautifully drawn in your various works—has a narrower mission.
GAINES: Right. He’s there to save the soul, but what about the everyday life? And that’s what the artist must deal with. He must deal not only with the soul but with both. That’s Grant and the minister’s argument. It’s Reverend Moses’ argument—just as the nihilist and the minister in “The Sky Is Gray.”
MG: What you’re saying reminds me of the ideas about the nature of religion and the sacred and profane—Émile Durkheim’s concept of sacred and profane and Mircea Eliade’s
The Sacred and the Profane
. It’s all part of life, and you can’t completely separate it.
DB: And if you start thinking that there is a separation, then you’ve in some way desecrated the sacred, and elevated the profane in a way. This may be a silly question, Ernie, but I’ve often wondered if I were a filmmaker—I remember that scene in the café in “The Sky Is Gray” where the man asks the woman to get up to dance and so forth, and when they make the film, of course, the filmmaker has to put a song in there for them to dance to. And this is just speculation, and as I said, this may be silly, but if you were consulted by the filmmaker, what are some of the possible songs that you would have had them have on the jukebox? Because I think that’s an important way that you—
GAINES: Oh, I don’t know now if I could just come up with any song. I’m sure if I would think about it for a while, about jazz and stuff, I would come up with the right song, but I can’t think of any specific song. I know it should be a sort of slow beat, but I couldn’t think of a particular title. You know what happened about this particular scene? The tune that this guy played on that record was written by a friend of the director. That’s the music played in the film. It was not a tune that was a traditional one that I knew about, or anyone else knew about. But it was written for this specific film.
MG: One of the things I wanted to ask you about—and again this is in relation to the idea of how art forms express things about life that we perhaps don’t see in other media. And again I’m quoting you, and this was in John Lowe’s book
Conversations with Ernest Gaines.
In one of the interviews there, you said, “. . . we all are naïve about the true history of blacks in this country. We have DuBois, Douglass, and Booker T. Washington, but we don’t have the story of the average black who has lived to be that age.” How does
art
(as opposed to straight history) broaden that perspective? How does art, literature, music sort of fill in that story? Do you see art or literature or music as giving us that history that the written historical record doesn’t include?
GAINES: I think so, because you get so much more of the experience of the everyday man, of the common man, in music—especially music, and music is so much out there that you can hear music all the time. You can hear music on the radio, on recordings, so it’s always there for you. And it tells you much more about yourself than history books because so many people were not able to read the history books. And music just filled in for them. Literature, I think, was the same thing for those who had the chance, who were able to read. I think now all across the country, in eight or nine different cities, people are discussing
A Lesson Before Dying.
And wherever I go I find people, most often white people, saying, “I did not know this” or “I did not know that, and this changes my life.” Someone told me about a year ago, at graduation night, “I just read your book
A Lesson
Before Dying,
and it changed my life.” Someone told me the same thing in Richmond, Virginia. “It changed my life.” Just writing about the everyday people, and literature does that, or literature can do that. A person like Jefferson or a person like Tante Lou or a person like Miss Emma—those people are never written about in a history book. And quite often are never written about in a newspaper, and so literature can bring that to life.
MG: In some ways, that sort of unwritten history, or unwritten in the history book, that sort of thing would have been in oral tradition. In some ways, we always had the stories in the culture about people like Tante Lou or people like Jefferson, but that often didn’t leave that community. That was very local. So it was not known to those people who did not have access to the story in oral tradition. In some ways, the writer gives those stories access to a wider audience (or a wider audience access to those stories), so the writer is more important to the outsider than to the person in the community who at least might have gotten a version of those, who knew more about these. Do you think that’s still true for the younger generation? Do they get those things through oral tradition?