 in partnership with the Gaines Center at the University of Louisiana Lafayette and includes this evening's keynote event, a digital humanities project prepared by the library staff and we'll post the link to that in the chat box. A small physical exhibition mounted in the library and Bristol's Rogers Free Library a reading group discussion and a writing workshop. The annual program celebrates a milestone anniversary of the publication of an important work of literature. This year's selection the autobiography of Ms. Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines is celebrating its 50th year of publication and was selected by a university committee. This committee is chaired by Professor Adam Braver who has a dual role as an RWU professor of creative writing and the library program director. Professor Braver will introduce this evening's esteemed panelists in just a moment. We are hugely grateful to Robert Blaise an alumnus of RWU who with his gift to the university in the year 2000 made these events possible. Mr. Blaise's gift was in honor of his mentor and friend Professor John Howard Burst Jr a scholar of Herman Melville and Walt Whitman and a collector of first editions. The Blaise gift supports an exhibition, a library book fund for collecting works related to the exhibit, travel for Burst students to archives and libraries associated with the book and a keynote event. And now I'd like to invite Professor Braver to introduce our panelists. Thank you. The the theme of this panel grew out of the idea of storytelling and the ways we can talk about critical issues of our time through artistic expression and narrative. And as I learned from Shailon, excuse me, one of our guests tonight for Dr. Gaines, storytelling was the only way he wanted to address issues of race and the story of being black in America. So it occurred to us that along with hearing about Dr. Gaines and his work, it would be insightful to broaden the conversation to learn from others engaged in artistic practices and their stories of race, hearing their approaches and what they might have learned from Ernest J. Gaines. So briefly, we have Dan Z. Senna, author of five critically claimed books of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Caucasia, won the Book of the Month Award for first fiction, the American Library Association's Alex Award. And I would also call attention to removing an insightful memoir of where did you sleep last night, a personal history. She teaches creative writing at USC and is joining us from Los Angeles. Dr. Michael White is an accomplished and multifaceted New Orleans based clarinetist, band leader, composer, musicologist, jazz historian, and educator, is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities and culture bearers of traditional New Orleans jazz music. He's known to all in the Crescent City as a true legend. And he also is a teacher, and he teaches at Xavier University in New Orleans. And lastly, Shailon Woods is assistant professor and archivist head of the Ernest J. Gaines Center at University of Louisiana Lafayette. Shailon and her co-worker Jordan have been amazing partners with us on this project, in particular inspiring my colleagues, Christine Fagan and Heidi Benedict, in their work in creating the digital exhibition. And there's a link to the exhibition in the chat. I would encourage you to take a look at it when you get a chance. Each of our panelists, someone unexpected to me when putting this together, shared that they had direct connections with Mr. Gaines and his work. And as we first met and talked, there were also other connections that were revealed. In one case, a potential connection between Danzie's grandmother and Michael's mother, who both attend Xavier at the same time. I mention this because it all seems so fitting and apropos for talking about Ernest J. Gaines, someone who also wrote so much about faded and coincidental connections between human beings. But let's get going. I'm going to start off with, so I'm going to start off with a question for each person and then let's us evolve into a conversation between our three panelists and see where it goes. But all of you should feel free to write questions into the question and answer section and we'll do our best to include and incorporate them into the conversation. So, Shailon, I want to start with you and ask you just to set the context for Ms. Jane Pittman when Dr. Gaines wrote it, what the backdrop was, the inspirations he might have had. So when talking about Ms. Jane Pittman, one of the biggest influences was his aunt Augustine who was, by all stories, an amazing human being. She was differently abled. He would say she couldn't walk. She just couldn't walk. She did everything else. She took care of children in the quarter. She took care of him and his siblings. She raised them. He was with her until he was 16 years old and she was absolutely a huge influence and guiding force in his life. He learned so much from her and he talked so affectionately about her throughout every interview and conversation. Whenever she turned, whenever she was mentioned, he talked about how much of an impact he had on her life and one of the interesting things about that I did get to talk to him about his aunt was more importantly how in the community she was never treated differently. Even though she could not go into the community, the community came to her. They brought their children to her to wash, to watch them. They would stop by after church. They made sure she got communion and she could hear the sermons and they would have conversations with her. They come into the yard and have conversations with her. She would wash and clean and cook for her entire family with no problem. She guarded. She taught him and his siblings how to guard and how to pick pecans, how to raise chickens and prepare them to cook as if nothing was wrong. It's weird to say that. That's why I pause to say as if nothing was wrong because in actuality, for her nothing was wrong. She functioned with complete autonomy even though she was unable to physically walk. He and his siblings had respect for her even though very early in their lives they could overpower her. They absolutely never did. Her presence was one that commanded respect and love because that's what she gave to the world. She expected them all to move in the world the way she was training them to move in the world regardless if she could see them or not. That is something incredibly telling about Southern Blackness as a whole, about Southern Matriarchy as a whole is that that's something you don't forget. That's something that doesn't leave you. You carry that with you no matter where you go. You always remember the women who came before you who sacrificed for you to be something. He intended to be something in honor of her and he absolutely lived up to that. He is Ernest J. Gaines. He was an internationally acclaimed author. He was a French knight. It is his work. It is this work. The autobiography Miss James Hem and that first introduced French students to what American slavery was, a narrative form of American slavery in that the text goes from antebellum to civil rights and he found a way to encompass these major historical events in Black history through the voice of one person and not just through her voice. She is the narrative where her voice is the voice of an entire community and how these things shape everything around them, how they learn to engage and what they chose to do as they moved forward. It's really amazing. It's a text that should continue to be read much more often than it is. Thank you. Danzi, just moving to you, and I guess I'll ask this as an overview since I suspect this will be more of a conversation, but from your perspective as a writer, why use storytelling to talk about social issues or race, sort of the artist versus the polemicist in this case? Yeah, that was kind of when you first wrote me to ask me to be on this panel. You included that idea in there and it's something I think about all the time, but another reason why I wanted to be here today was just my respect and love of Ernest Gaines as a writer, but also that when I was 13, my father, who's a writer, wrote a review of a lesson before dying for the New York Times, and he is from Louisiana. He's from Jennings, Louisiana. I think it's like an hour and a half from where Ernest Gaines is from. His mother went to Xavier. There's a lot of deep roots in that part of the world for my father and he moved to Boston as a child to the Northeast and he didn't talk that much about his childhood there, but these things would come out sideways, like him wanting me to understand something, and I remember him talking so much about Ernest Gaines and his work and that kind of love of place and of geography and that sense of one's fiction growing out of a specific place in a specific world was something that I got from him. My father was born 11 years after Ernest Gaines, but I think they kind of came from the same place in America and so when I read him, I was really just so moved and then I was a few weeks ago after I agreed to come here today, I was looking at interviews of Ernest Gaines and was just struck by how protective he was of his role as an artist and that was the thing that really struck me was something to kind of learn from and keep reiterating was that his refusal to kind of, when you're a black writer of fiction in America and I can say this from experience, you're asked to be a sociologist, you're asked to be an anthropologist, a political activist, a polemicist, you're supposed to go on Twitter and say what you think about everything that happens and I think that his position to tell his truth through stories was really radical and for me as an artist I can really see how you get sort of split into pieces and asked to explain your work and to say what the point of it was and to say what your message was and his refusal to do that was what made him a great human, a great student of the human experience and a great teacher of the human experience because I think in his work and embedded in those stories that he wrote is a celebration of this place and this culture in allowing it to have the full spectrum of humanity and allowing us to see it from this sort of intimate world view of a novelist and every time you're asked to explain that and explain your position and something that I don't think white artists are asked to do, I don't think especially white straight male artists are asked to say what the point of your fiction was or what your position is on this and that, every time you do that you're sort of splintering yourself and you're sort of diffusing this power and this gift that you have and I think that he was really protective of that and listening to his interviews, one of the things he kept repeating was this idea of, I'm just looking for the quote, but he kept saying something about listening to the voices, he kept listening to the voices of these people and these characters and he wanted to show them as no better or worse than he is or than any of us are and sort of allowing, I think if he was alive right now, it would be interesting to ask him what he thinks about social media and I don't know if he ever, I think you said that he didn't even engage with it at all, Shailam, but I was thinking about how he refused in his work to cancel any character. Every character was still worthy of full complexity of human experience and human flaws and human greatness and sort of, he just refused to reduce any of his characters and I think that's something that he had a clarity about him, about his role and his gift that he was protecting by refusing those other roles and keeping that space of storyteller. Yeah, really interesting and Michael sort of bringing it into, you know, into music and particularly, you know, knowing that all of the books are set in Louisiana and that is the culture he's writing about and the region he's writing about. How does the music factor into this? How does music tell this story from your perspective or historically? Well, you know, we have many different kinds of music in Louisiana and the thing that seems to have the most strength in all areas of Louisiana is the folk music that comes from various regions, whether you're talking about zydeco music or blues or Creole music or spirituals, hymns, jazz and those are very important. I think, like Mr. Gaines, I think musicians have a similar role in telling a story. The advantage is, of course, that you know, if you're playing instrumental music, everyone doesn't necessarily know what you're saying. But you know, Mr. Gaines, one of the things that I think he refers to a lot is feeling and understand what musicians were saying. And I had the honor and pleasure of meeting with him on two occasions. The first time, I think both of those times were times when I had a music job and the first time was in New Orleans at a hotel and I met him and his wife and we talked a little bit and I was able to talk to him and ask him some questions about, you know, about writing and things like that. You know, he compared writing to music and he said, you know, that black music influenced him more than black writers and it took me a while to understand what he meant by that. But you know, what he's interested in is the story, the nuances and the variations. And I think that's very important. I'm from New Orleans and music here is special. Of course, jazz is the most significant development to come out of New Orleans. And that's a very folk community-based music that not only tells the story of a people's lives and their spirits and emotions, but it's a music that also invites people to participate. We have large social club parades here with brass bands, for example, where the community turns out and they participate in by dancing and this creative dancing becomes as much a part of the music making as the actual music itself, the rhythms and the movements and with the social clubs, the bold colors that they wear, all of those things paint a certain kind of picture that tells the story of life. And in that, beyond the dancing and the sound of the music, if you really step back and look, you see the history and the story of people's lives, their aspirations, their hopes, their pains, their joys, the things they went through in history. And one of the things that was very impressive about experiencing that as a young musician was that I felt a certain type of bond with the community. So when I read Mr. Gaines' works, I feel that sense of telling the story of the lives of people the same way a lot of the musicians did in their music. And I understand when he says he was greatly influenced by musicians. He mentioned different kinds of music. The second time I met him was in Baton Rouge, and he was an honoree at a job. And every time we had a break, I would run to go and sit down next to him and talk to him and ask him about writing. And of course, he told me the usual advice is six words of advice that he tells everybody, that he told everybody, read, read, read, write, write, write. But he more wanted to talk about the music. And he was very complimentary about our music. But at the same time, he related it to writing and storytelling and how those are reflections of life. And he mentioned the thing that influenced him the most. Of course, he said he was equally influenced by blues as much as jazz. But he liked certain aspects of jazz that he says good writers use, like certain nuances and certain variations, things like that. That makes a lot of sense. And also just the repetition when I was hearing him talk about writing about hearing voices. When you write dialogue as a fiction writer, you're listening for the music of how people speak more than what they're trying to say. And so, you know, I think I see that in the voices on the page, too. The music of dialogue. Definitely, definitely. Yeah. I think something that's really important to point out. You mentioned that he said he wasn't, he was more heavily influenced by black musicians than black writers is also understanding the time period in which he's writing in the space he wants to write about when you he wanted to write about the South because he had moved to California and he was no longer in the South and he missed his home. So he turned to Southern literature, which was predominantly white at the time to just see a reflection of his own of his space. And he didn't see a reflection of his community. He saw a reflection of the landscape in which they populated. But it was sans the people. When you listen to black music, particularly you hear those people, you hear the voices, you hear the joy, you hear the sadness in those voices. So he's writing, though, he's not he he's writing Southern blackness. So you have to do that. You have to do both. You have to read Faulkner and Twain and you have to understand the pastoral. You have to understand the similarities, which is why his work is so global reading. Russian writers were also writing about the land in these ways to get to grasp what that space is supposed to look like. And he could not and would not continue to write these spaces without the people who make it so special without the quarters, without his community, without his aunt, without his mom, his dad, his siblings. He can only get that in the music. Because at the time, black music was really was more easily accessible. I don't want to say it was really accessible, because that's not 100% true, but it was more easily accessible than black literature. And that's something that's really important is that he found a way to blend these two things, which are the only things that are available to him at the time, to create these landscapes and these soundscapes of Southern blackness, which is why his work does hold till today. People still see and hear their friends and their families and their communities, even in Louisiana, where a lot of these communities no longer exist or are rapidly disappearing. You still hear them and see them in Gaines's work. Certainly. And you know, when I was a young musician, I had contact with dozens of older musicians that were born between the late 1890s and 1910. And a lot of them were characters, a lot of them had had come from this from other rural areas in the south and migrated to New Orleans. And it's very interesting. I mean, in a lot of Gaines's characters, I see and I'm reminded of a lot of the people I saw in the community. I've seen several people that remind me of Miss Jane Pittman. I've seen several people that remind me of a lot of people, by the way, they talk and what they say and what they don't say in a certain manner. It took me a while, but I came to understand a lot of similarities between what Mr. Gaines does and what musicians do. And I could understand, I think he said his favorite jazz musician was tenor saxophonist Lester Young. And Lester Young revolutionized jazz by pioneering a new way of playing jazz on the saxophone. And it influenced, you know, not only saxophonists, but it inspired later generations and in fact, entire jazz movements. And Lester Young was, you know, his approach was more quiet, more nuanced, but yet at the same time it was swinging, but it was smooth. And it had a lot of different colors and flavors than what you were used to. But he was telling a story. He was telling a story of his life. And one of the things Mr. Gaines talked about was he heard a recording of Lester Young playing. I think he said it was My Funny Valentine. And he said that, you know, he played a little bit of it, but then you didn't hear My Funny Valentine, yet it was there. It was there the whole time. And he said that, you know, that kind of thing is what influenced him to, you know, do like jazz musicians. You make an opening theme or statement, and then you give, you know, variations on it. Yeah, exactly. I was thinking, Shailon, you were talking about how he read Faulkner and Twain. And when he was being interviewed, he was talking about how he read a lot of these writers' check off. I mean, he read writers from everywhere when he was in California at that time. And he talked about how he, from a lot of these white writers who didn't see the humanity of the world he came from, he was still able to learn a lot about form, formally he learned. And he also then talked about how when he read Black Writers, it gave him, you know, a sense of like the furniture to build this house that he had learned to build and gave him sort of all of this sort of sense of admission into this canon of Black Writers, right? But I was thinking about him, his clarity when he talks about it, because I often will assign my students some writer who just does something with plot really beautifully or does something with language really beautifully. But they're offensive. Like this writer might not do everything that we want them to do, but they have something to teach us. And my students, you know, this generation of students will reject it off the bat because there's things in it that are problematic. And I say, yeah, but look at what they did with the plot. You can learn something about the plot. And I was listening to Ernest Gaines, I was thinking, he knew, he's studying the form like the way that you learn, you know, just as any kind of artist, as, you know, Michael, you're a musician, like you study the form, you practice, you practice, you practice, and you fill it in with all the meaning you have in you. And he, I just, I loved hearing that from him because I was like, that's how you got so good, because you were willing to learn from anything you could when you needed to learn how to tell this story. It was really, really interesting. And speaking to that, specifically talking about Miss Jane Pymling, he read the WPA interviews with former slaves to hear the voice. He, he studied. He studied. He, and I think when people are thinking about creative writing, I know when I use, I used to ask this question when I first started, like, do you think it's hard as a man to write from the perspective of a woman? And most people were like, nah, just make it up. And it's not just making it up. He studied and he acknowledged like this is difficult. It was difficult work because he's trying to write in a cadence from an era he doesn't know. He knew the people he grew up around and some of them may or may not have been that old and remembered or the case may be. But he himself did not experience, he himself did not know that he knew a different, he had a, he had a different, I will not say completely different because that's not true. He had a different experience on the same landscape. And that's something that's really important. And when you're talking about like understanding and learning, the one thing that he did that so many people still to this day cannot do is he found a way to, he found a way to write narrative in an authentic voice that is not offensive. I cannot tell you how many times, especially in older Southern literature, people are trying to write black dialect. And it sounds like blackface on paper. It's terrible. And because he built upon all of these blocks to get to his craft, to get to his artistry, it doesn't read that way. It is something that reads you, you can, you hear and you feel the affection and the love for this community as you're reading his work, even as he's also leaning heavily into what is authentically them. He's not, he is absolutely concerned with grammar, but as you're reading it, you're not thinking about is the sentence structured correctly. That's not your focus because that's not supposed to be the focus. That's never, that was never his point. His point was giving a voice to people, to his people who have been ignored and marginalized in the life, literally for centuries. And he did that work and he did it beautifully. And that's, that's why, oh, I'm sorry. No, you're fine. Okay. That's, that's why, you know, so many people had trouble finding out that Ms. Jane Pittman wasn't a real person. I mean, she was real. She is real, even though she isn't, she is, you know, because we know people like that. But, but he created a person that was so deep and identifiable without, without overdoing it. I mean, he had just enough right touch of nuance and feelings, you know, when, when she was angry about something he didn't, you know, overdo it. He just, he just made her so real that, you know, everyone can identify with, with that character and, and her emotions and her pain and, you know, her feelings and her sufferings and her hopes and, you know, her desires, even, you know, from the very beginning, I mean, it was, she was so real that, you know, that that's the sign of a true artist. But see, that's, and that it wasn't autobiography. It is a construct and the work of a controlled, you know, craftsman, like that's a construct because it's not him and he's drawing from the world he knows and loves, but he's, he's in full control of that narrative. And, you know, it's not just a kind of unknowing explosion on the page. He's, he's, he's someone you can study for craft for that reason. And, and you can see he did the work and he studied and studied and studied and, and did, and, you know, also like he's, he's someone who left home and he's writing about people who didn't necessarily leave and go off to other places in that way, you know, and that separation of, I'm always curious about those years in California and his being able to write once he had really, or think of himself as a writer once he left in a way. There are a number of interviews where he explicitly states California, he learned to write in California. He's not a writer in California. He is only a writer and an artist in Louisiana. He would spend, he would go, he would go back to Oscar, Louisiana for long periods of time to start writing. And he would, you know, work Smith it, workshop it, I mean, in California, but he did not start novels really in California. He's the, the, the novel in his canon that he started in California, that was, was Catherine Carmié that he wrote at 16, wrote as a young, as a teenager, I say 16, I think I'm correct on that age, but I might not be exactly, but he was a teenager and it was rejected. And he scrapped it and he came back to it later. So he was always very clear about the fact that he, his writing is Louisiana specifically, he doesn't write about California. He didn't like it. He didn't like that work, but he, Louisiana was always in the forefront of his mind. Louisiana was his muse and to the point where he, he had to be in the space to work. So he, he, he, he learned because of looser. That's not the right way to say that. He learned writing and form in California because of the lack of Jim Crow. So he learned because the lack of legalized segregation and oppression that was, that was in the South that was not in California is not sans segregation or oppression in California. It's just the lack of legalized segregation, which gave him access to more, to libraries, to better staff libraries, better education, better access to schools and being able to go further in his education than he could have here. So he needed that to get the tools, but he, his canvas is Louisiana always was and was, and definitely now forever will be Louisiana. The cane fields of Oscar Louisiana, a River Lake plantation and the very, the small community surrounding that's, that's what he's writing. That's what is painted throughout every single page of every single novel of his. And I would say that, you know, every great writer writes from a sense of place. Every great work of literature to me has that kind of rootedness in, in a specific place. Sandra Cisnero said universal is bound in the specific and, and there's an essay by Eudora Welty about how, you know, Southern writers always considered regional, but say like a New York writer isn't considered regional, but every writer is regional and they're all writing from a specific place. And, you know, I think he understood that, that his power was in this specific world and these specific peoples that he was writing about, you know, that that's, that's where the lifeblood of his work was within this geography. And, yeah, I mean, you can feel that on the page. Go ahead, Michael. Sorry. The real spirit of the, of the people comes out. I mean, you, you, you, even the characters that are, let's say less likable, you, you, you come to understand how they were formed. You come to understand what their actions are, what their actions aren't, you know, so, I mean, they're very well developed characters in this Jane Pittman, for example. And I think you, you, if you know about rural Louisiana, you hear, you, you feel and see, you know, the plantations, you hear and see what's going on. The spirit of all of that is there. I mean, when I was reading Miss Jane Pittman again, I could feel the air, I could feel the atmosphere. It was like, it was all there, even if he didn't quite describe it all, but you could feel it all, you could sense it all. It was very real. I think two points, Michael, that you made. The first one was about my funny Valentine that really stuck out to me about his statement, how you heard it at the beginning and then you didn't hear it anymore. And I feel like when we're looking at Gaines's working, he's writing about what he's writing about in general, Southern Blackness and Southern Black Experiences, it has that you have at the front, you see and you hear what is known nationally about Southern Blackness and then it kind of dissipates into very human pieces, but you never forget. And I'm thinking about Ned, and the way Ned develops as a character from an enslaved toddler to an activist for his community, you don't ever forget, you always do that development. You're also engaging with a lot of historical structure and context, even though it's not very clearly like he'll throw out a historical period like reconstruction in all of Miss Jane Pittman. He talks about, he says it's called reconstruction, but it's not like you're not being beat over the head with this is reconstruction, this is reconstruction, this is reconstruction. This is a Freeman Bureau. This is a Freeman Bureau. This is a Freeman Bureau because this is a Freeman Bureau. But you understand, if you know those concepts, that that's absolutely what he's talking about. He's talking about someone in the in the throes of that. And that's really important. Like you, you hear it, but it's so faint because you're so busy focusing on that character. And as that character is developing, same thing with Albert, I'm always pronounced as last name wrong. Clavo. He's a very, and he's not a likable character. He's not supposed to be a likable character, but he's a sympathetic character for a reason because we have an understanding of like certain levels, historically of Southerness that are always in the forefront when we're reading games is working and they fade into this, to this background, faint music as he's building these characters. So even though Clavo's not a favorite character, he garner some sympathy at the end because we all understand as readers like he's fighting the same machine and he doesn't know what he's doing. He's trying to survive like everybody else is and you see that and because of that, you can have empathy and even sympathy, but it doesn't make his actions okay in any space. But it puts this bigger historical context in, I lost my, I lost the word. It makes you inquisitive about the social structure, the historical social structure that you have, you've heard of, but maybe never gave that much thought. And that's something that's really great about games is work. It's beautiful. And you were talking at the beginning about like this disappearing world that he's kind of sort of writing a record of a world that's disappearing and it's almost disappearing as he's writing it. Like these characters are moving through time periods that are disappearing because of the swiftness of social change. So it's like, it's just, no character is ever born outside of history. We're all born into a certain moment of history with all of the legacy behind us. And his characters also kind of, especially in this book, like move through these incredibly important movements in American history and the individual story is never lost in that larger structure. He stays intimate. He stays in the skin of these characters. He never looks down upon them. Right. I found it interesting that, you know, that he didn't spend a lot of time describing historical events and things, but he did spend more time perhaps than anything else talking about Huey Long. And I found that very interesting that, you know, that was where Ms. Jane really kind of let out, you know, where, you know, Huey Long did a lot for the people. They criticized him, but, you know, and I found that I found that pretty interesting because he doesn't do that as much with other historical events and things that are persons that he talks about, you know. If you know anything about Louisiana history, you understand there's absolutely a reason for that. There's absolutely a reason why the Long family and its relationship with Louisiana Blackness is very complicated and like, like it folds upon itself so many different times. That's definitely a deeper conversation for another space. And I encourage everyone to look up Huey Long and the Long family in that whole era of Louisiana politics because it is fascinating. But when you're looking at the way that would it be political family, I don't want to say dynasty because I feel like that's a weird thing to throw out there, that political family because it was more than just Huey Long engaged with so many different levels of Louisiana society to embed themselves in society and especially when it came to Blackness and how they played, they were really good at playing the crowd in front of them. And that's why it became really important for, you know, even for rural Black people talking about Huey Long because they did do things for Black communities. They also did things that hurt Black communities. And it was one of those things just like they didn't, did they do more good than bad depends on who you're talking to because even to this day I've talked to some older Black folks who still swear by the Longs and that they were absolutely a champion of the Black community in Louisiana and those others who are like, they were not. And it's that level of complicateness that he writes in every single character because they're all human and you can't. It's really hard to be like, they're clearly the bad person. They're clearly the good person. You're like, oh, they're all kind of today they're bad but tomorrow they're not so bad. Like he bought her coffee or whatever. The teacher is a great example of that. You start off like annoyed with the teacher because he's been pestering this elderly woman. He's not being respectful. He acknowledged he's pestering her and then you're like, but he did a really good thing getting this history that would be lost. So it's like. Well, it's that ambiguity that he leans into and allowing the full contradiction of his characters to exist that they can be both things at once. That's the language that literature speaks. But I was just curious, I'm still like, where did he get this sense of authority to tell these stories? I always think somebody and maybe it was his aunt who told him his voice because to be an author is in some ways to play God. And he's playing, he's creating a whole world and it takes such a level of, I mean, and he was so persistent when you talked about at 16, he wrote saying it didn't work and he just kept going. I mean, I think it's just always interesting to me as a novelist to know where other novelists kind of get that sense of like, is it a compulsion? Is it a, you know, just something they can't explain. It's a gift. He just had to do this. And that was the language he spoke. Gaines's work is absolutely activism, even though it's not viewed that way. It is 100% activism gains himself through, even though it's fiction is absolutely an archivist. And I don't think, I don't, from my engagement, the engagements I had with him and from reading his work and from conversations and studying and reading articles on him, it wasn't an issue of authority. It was an issue of duty. He ruled across the country. He, first of all, let's acknowledge the fact he has, he lived through numerous historical periods in his time period. And we're talking about American Blackness. Like there are so many transitional points, historical points in American Blackness that people personally are living through. So not only is he living through these historical transitions, he's physically, he physically moved from one region of the country to another, which was a spatial transition, a social transition and a historical transition. And he's dealing with all of those things and he's engaging those things and he's understanding something that's vastly important, which is, yes, Blackness is like not, is not on full display in a positive way, but Southern Blackness even less so. Yeah. When we're engaging with Southern Blackness at that time, it's not, it's, it's, it's caricatures, it's the verification of women, it's Uncle Tommy, it's all these things that he's like, that's not, that's not me, that's not us, literally, that's not us. He grew up in a community with people who did not have access to education and yet thought education was the end all be all for so much. It was the door you had to get through to better yourself. They didn't know how to read and write a lot of them. So, but they did not, they expected their children to know how to read and write. Their job was to make sure this next generation did not fall between the cracks, the cracks that were not cracks. They were, they were like caverns, actually, we're going to be honest about it. These were huge social caverns specifically put in place to hold them down as much as they possibly could, whether it be through transportation issues, through resources not having power in these areas until the 1970s, not having, not so like racially, racially motivated policy and leaning into pseudosciences about cleanliness and head shapes and all this other ridiculous stuff that we now know in 2021. Hopefully we all know in 2021 that these things are lives and don't make sense and never made sense. They were part of a bigger agenda. Through that he, he felt an obligation to make sure the truth was told in a way that could not be refuted. And you can't do that. You can't do that when you, when you're calling names, especially when you're talking about Southern spaces during, and you're talking about Southern spaces during Jim Crow, your writing during the civil rights movement, where people are being a little bit finally, kind of a little bit more cognizant and vigilant about racism because of Alabama, because of all these other things that are happening, even in California was all, it was rampant in California. So people are, you know, like, oh, he is racist, but if you write, you know, Bill, what's his name was in the Klan, and Bill's like, you can't say that and your family still behold it to Bill, whoever Bill is, what are you supposed to do? There's a thing that I grew up hearing old people saying, which is, but I'm just talking about what I'm talking about. And there's power in that. It's a way of saying what you need to say, but understanding that only the people need to understand that catch it, because I'm just talking about what I'm talking about. So you can take it or leave it. And he did that with fiction. But if you, you can, you can, you can date it's fiction. You can date these things. You can go to historical documents and line them up. I'm not saying you'll find these exact people. It's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is he's writing about things that actually happened. Things that are not studied, things that should be studied. So he's writing these invisible people into spaces and making them visible. If you choose to dig and take the time to research this, it's all, you will find all these things. It's awesome. And it's like writing yourself and your world into existence. And I see him in that library writing the book that doesn't exist in that library, right? That's, that's deep. Yeah, I think he, he was trying to give a voice to people that, that didn't have the voice. I think that's one of the things that he liked and identified with in jazz and the blues, you know, musicians, one of the things that they would always tell me, the older musicians in New Orleans was that you have to find your own sound and your own expression. And I started to realize that that was one of the ways of overcoming societally imposed invisibility. And it was very important because that voice goes beyond you and it carries and it, it, it makes people listen and gains you, it can gain you attention, it can gain you respect. And I think I could see that seems to be some of what he was telling me that he related to in, in the music, you know. So if I can, may I give a brief example or musical example? Like for example, he talked a lot about the blues and instrumentals. This was just a brief, briefest of things. But like, for example, I'll just make up something that's like the head of a blues. He said that the musicians would make an initial statement, right? So this is the melodic statement one measure of music. Well, the second statement would be perhaps, but instead of doing that, the thing that Mr. Gaines seemed to point to was how they would make the variation where you're not actually making that second statement, but it's there and you hear it. So the first statement might be, so that second statement is not, but something like so it's there and you hear it, but you've changed it. So the reader, the audience, hears that and hears the feeling, but they also hear your personal take of what this is and that color and nuance. I find that in a lot of his, in a lot of his characters and it's really beautiful. That was really beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, that was awesome. Amazing. Well, you know, he inspired, you know, he talked a lot about the differences between, or the similarities between his writing and music. And in particular, we talked about jazz and I was very impressed by, you know, not just his knowledge of jazz, but also the way he took aspects of that and tried to use some of those concepts in his writing. I mean, sometimes when he's writing, you see a certain kind of rhythm, back and forth rhythms and then other times you see more color coming out and nuances. And sometimes we hear what we call ghost notes and that's where you're not really playing a note, but it's felt and it's there. And I see that a lot in his works too. That's real cool. I can kind of see like the ghost notes, like the especially Jane Pippin is the spirit of the people who are gone. Yeah. And as a, yeah, that's real cool. Shailon, there's a question. I'll start with you and maybe I don't know if the others have thought there's a question. And it seems like a very apropos question as the hour winds down too. In the Q&A here that says, for all his wonderful achievements, Gaines has not garnered the kind of critical scholarly attention that we might expect. What do you think needs to occur in order to ensure a Gaines legacy that is not only popular, but is consistently scholarly robust? There's a robust Gaines scholarly legacy. It just needs to be updated, I guess. Like he was written about a lot in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which is where most of our articles come from. And I think it's just one of those things like it just kind of, I don't know, I guess maybe if he was a little bit, if he had been more willing to do interviews, like some of his other contemporaries were in all these interviews and soundbites, not just talking about his work, but talking about the political things happening of the day, which he absolutely does in his work. And I think it's because our memory is short and I think we are more visual people. We kind of forget that. I think something that's really important that people forget is the, if it wasn't for the autobiography, Ms. Jane Timmons roots wouldn't have been a thing. The TV version of Roots would not have been a thing. The autobiography of Ms. Jane Timmons predates Roots and got Cicely Tyson refers to me. Like these are really big things, but because everything is so subtle, it kind of falls through the cracks. And I think that's incredibly Southern, like Southern, Southerness has a level of subtleness to it. Like that's what it is to be Southern. You're not supposed to be, you shouldn't be, it's rude to be overly aggressive. You say what you have to say, and you have to be smart. You have to be quick to catch it. People can be saying things to you that's real slick, but it's hidden in this like levels of politeness that if you're not from it, you don't understand. It's not, they're not going to flat out tell you, I don't like you get out of my face, but they've told you multiple times, I don't like to get out of my face. So when we get to, when Southern folks get to that point of saying it, it's a problem. And I think that's, that's a misconception about what Southerness actually is. And until that's engaged, and you are seeing it being engaged more with this, I don't want to say modern Southerness, Southern people, but younger Southern people in the way they're engaging and creating art, you're seeing that more, you're seeing people kind of gravitating towards that more. And I think, I think it's just because we have short attention spans, but I absolutely think his work should be re-evaluated. Again, I would love to see the autobiography Miss Jane could be remade for multiple reasons. They remade roots. It's still super long, but they remade roots. And I would love to see the autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman remade, just remade through a more authentic Southern lens, and it was originally filmed in. We have things like Queen Sugar. We have a lot of things that are being taken from a Black Southern perspective. I would love to see this redone in a Black Southern perspective. I would love to see me there. The two, three years ago, there was a whole special issue on Gains and SLI. There is the Gains Scholars. There's the Gains Scholars organization through ALA, the American AMLA. I think it is, I have to double check that I'll get back to you, but there's a scholarly organization around Gains actually, like the Faulkner Society, but for Ernest K. Gaines. And they are writing, they're producing, there's John Lowe, there's Trudy Herres, there's Lillian Brown. There's all these amazing scholars who are actively working. They are actively working. There's Daddy and Davis. They're on the verge of retiring, but they're actively working and engaging with students on a daily level and they are talking about Gains. We have the Gains Lecture Series every year. We just started recording this year, but we're on the 10th year. So there's absolutely scholarly interest in Gains. It's just not heavily publicized. And I don't, I don't know what to do about that. Gains wrote what he wrote and said what he said, and it was what it was. It seems like really, really important for a new generation to read his work to me because of what you talked about, about that disappearing and the sort of amnesia of this moment, like people, I think there's a whole generation that doesn't understand those historical shifts and how we're living in the kind of same historical trajectory that he's writing about. Like this is all related to everything that's happening right now. So I think you should come pitch it to Hollywood. If I knew someone in Hollywood, I would have no problem. I'm super fun fact. The quarters, sherry quarters, people lived in sherry quarters into the 90s in the same house as he was born and worked for former slave cabins. They lived there to the 1990s. When I talked to students on my campus, I point out to them that every single one of them, they're from the South, not just Louisiana, they're from the South. They are tied to these stories through by blood. Like they have family members who lived these stories actually. And it's not that long ago. It really isn't. But we're talking about rural spaces, not just rural Southern spaces, but rural spaces in general. Like you said earlier, Dan, the South is regional and LA and New York and Miami, they're global, right? Yeah. Though people don't engage with the South. We are lumped as one, one like glob of Americana, even though it's super complicated. And people don't engage with the South because they view it as rural or backwards, whatever these other misconceptions are that they have. When it's actually with the exception of New Orleans, no one views New Orleans as rural or backwards. But the South is actually multifaceted and complicated, which is what Dan's work does. Yeah, I think I agree. I agree, you know, because I think that I find a lot of my students a certain disconnect. And in that disconnect, there is a certain lack of self awareness or place. And, you know, it's almost like there's a sometimes there's an anger. And I think that, you know, trying to understand what happened before through stories like just, you know, Miss Jane Pittman, I mean, that's all of our stories, you know, from the South. We all are related to Miss Jane Pittman, you know, and I think you go back in families, you find those stories and it gives you a sense of connectedness and understanding where people went. And then I think it would help them to better understand their place today, you know, in terms of, in terms of blackness, in terms of their place in the struggle, in terms of what people went through for us, you know, and them to be where we all are today, you know, and I think that's very important. So yeah, I'd like to see it remade as well. There's multiples. Also, I feel like of Love and Dust absolutely should have been made into a major TV movie. If you haven't read it, that is absolutely one of my favorite novels. It's amazing when you talk about the nuances and like not knowing who to like. Like everybody's a load of place, you don't know who to vote, you don't know who to root for the whole story. It's amazing. But I don't understand why I was never made it to a major TV movie. It's perfect for the screen. It really is. This is the moment. Let me ask you all one last question that came through the chat. And I guess it wasn't fair to me, Shailon, I should have told you that previous question was asked by Trudy Harris. But this comes from actually one of our students here who would just like to hear, who says she'd love to hear and I wouldn't like, wouldn't like, she'd love to hear from all of you how Gaines has influenced your own work and perhaps your own outlook on the world. I mean, as a fiction writer, I can say that just his, I, as I said before, really you know, write from a sense of place. And I grew up in Boston in the 1970s, the child of a black man from the South and a white woman from Boston. And I was really interested in writing a story that I had not seen that didn't exist yet. A story of an interracial family in the civil rights era where the characters, the biracial characters did not aspire to whiteness. They weren't tragic. And they were in fact like living in the era of black power and the ghost story of the South kind of trickling into their lives through this father. And I think for, for me, I admire and sort of would say the influence is, is a sense of history in our characters that no character I write is ever born in a vacuum. And they're born, they had, you know, their father is the child of and that grandmother is the child of and it's a, it's a historical progression. And, and when I'm writing about race, too, I'm interested in the way people talk about race. And I'm interested in the questions it raises about the human race, like I've been asked, you know, why do you always write about race? And I say, well, I'm writing about people of a particular race. Is that mean I'm writing about race? Like, how do you define writing about race? And I would say that Ernest Gaines, you know, has that, that thing I aspire to, which is to show the full humanity and to write from a place that I have not seen represented. And that's always the impulse for me as a novelist that I see him doing. So big influence and huge admiration. In my particular case, I've been influenced a lot in terms of music. Of course, I'm looking for, you know, developing and creating those types of nuances that he talked about. And he found in everyone from blue singers like, you know, Bessie Smith and, and singers like Billy Holiday and our musicians like Lester Young and Louis Armstrong, he talks about. But even more than that, that generation of musicians that I got to know, that special experience, I saw a lot of things in New Orleans that I discovered rather late. I was like 20 years old when I discovered the world of black social clubs and jazz funerals. And then, you know, I had this long relationship with all these old musicians that played with everybody that traveled that had these incredible lives. And I also met community people. I wrote down and documented a lot of things from them. I lost most of my stuff in Hurricane Katrina, but certainly I have a lot of memories. And at this stage of the game, I mean, at first I was thinking of writing, you know, as I had been academically and, you know, about history of aspects of jazz and all of that, which is fine. But at this stage of the game, I'm realizing with, you know, this memoir that I'm working on now that these people need more of a voice. They need more. So I think what games inspired in me was to look at my own very rich culture in New Orleans and some of the people, places and things I've seen, I've seen in the history and to use that as a creative source of writing. So at this late stage of the game, I'm jumping in the waters of creative writing and I have quite a lot of characters, themes and development. But, you know, it's a question of, like he said, I mean, working really hard, because of course, as you all know, it's not an easy process at all. So he's inspired me in terms of looking at, you know, coming back home, so to speak. I mean, I have a degree in Hispanic literature. That's what my degrees are in. And, you know, I never thought of writing creatively until, you know, the last few years. And so I admire all artistic aspects as well as thematic aspects. And that's inspired me to, you know, get into it. Um, that's a really good question. I feel like being here, having the position I have is like the culmination of what I was supposed to do with my life, if that makes any sense. That sounds like really grandiose and kind of over the top. But I have been blessed enough to only have, you know, I've only processed, I've only worked with Black communities. I've only processed Black history. I've been doing this work in one way or another since I was seven. And this is what my family's always done in one capacity or another. So getting to work with Dr. Gaines, personally getting to listen to him and know him and understand why he did it, just validated why I wanted to do it, why I felt a deep desire to be very kind of selective of what I wanted to do and how I wanted to get there, essentially. It's just a constant motivation. Like I said, throughout Gaines' work, I consider Gaines an archivist, not just because I run the archive for his work, but literally in reading his work. His work is preserving and documenting Black history on so many different levels. In the beginning of autobiography, when I'm doing the beginning, like halfway through when she talks about how she became sterile, like we're talking about that. We're talking about the atrocities enslaved women in America's experience as test subjects and not just that going as early as the, oh my gosh, the 90s, early 2000s when there were people were turning a blind eye to terrible clinics that poor women had to go to and the effects that have had, he's documenting that. He's documenting it through narrative because that's how people engage with stuff. It's through narrative, like public history is important and it matters. His work, in my opinion, absolutely should be classified as a part of public history. Yes, it's fiction, but there is power in fiction and folklore, especially when you're working with communities of color and marginalized people. There's a level of safety that comes from engaging the world through the lens of folklore and fiction because it allows you to lean into your most authentic self and he does that. That's amazing. My job is to help people engage with their most authentic self and find ways to save their communities and he did that and that's what I want to do. It's an aspiration, so it's amazing here. Shailon, I want to thank you. We need to close now, but you've been really helpful to my staff in the library staff in working on our virtual exhibit and Adam's going to post the URL. Yes, he just did. I hope you all will take a look at it. Michael, I am a jazz fanatic, so now I have to go back and reread the book with a different lens. I also was a literature major and so, Danzie, I really can't wait to take some of what I learned from you about the characters and go back and reread it. I've already read it three times, but now I have new insight. I want to thank you all so much. This was such a great panel. Each of you worked together so well and Adam put together a great group. Please take a look at our virtual exhibit and thank you so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you. It's been a pleasure working with your staff. Thank you. Everybody, please check out that exhibit. There's all kinds of amazing things from the Gaines Center archive there, and they did an amazing job. It's beautiful. Please click that link and check that out. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Okay, everyone. Good night. Have a good night. Good night, everybody. Participants, Adam. Bye, Danzie. Bye, Michael. Good night. Bye, good night.