Root and Branch

By Melvin Maddocks

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN by Ernest J. Games. 245 pages. Dial. $6.95.

Ernest J. Gaines has not received anything like the attention he deserves, for he may just be the best black writer in America. He is so good, in fact, that he makes the category seem meaningless, though one of his principal subjects has been slavery--past and present.

Born on a Louisiana plantation 38 years ago, Gaines is first and last a country-boy writer. He sets down a story as if he were planting, spreading the roots deep, wide and firm. His stories grow organically, at their own rhythm. When they ripen at last, they do so inevitably, arriving at a climax with the absolute Tightness of a folk tale. "Just Like a Tree," the final story in his fine 1968 collection, Bloodline, could serve as the description for all Gaines' work. Making a slow concentric dance around the life and death of a matriarch named Aunt Fe, the story also anticipated Gaines' new novel.

Jane Pittman is the ancient of ancients, nearly 110 years old, on a Louisiana plantation. Recollecting her life for a tape recorder, she remembers herself first as a slave child, fetching water for Confederate soldiers in retreat, then for Yankees in pursuit. A Yank corporal named Brown tells her to look him up in Ohio. After the Emancipation Proclamation, she sets out to do just that. Most of the ex-slaves impulsively migrating north with her are killed by white-trash patrollers. The moral is fundamental to Gaines' temperament: the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

Humiliations. Jane never gets out of Louisiana. But she has begun a pilgrimage of the soul, at first so creepingly tentative that she seems to be motionless. She marries a broncobuster who is killed by a black stallion. An orphaned boy she has adopted grows up to be a schoolteacher. For his premature ideas about civil rights ("Don't run and do fight"), a hired gun shoots him down.

Still Jane's life goes on, apparently as before, such moments of violence surrounded by uneventful years. Accepting her humiliations the old-fashioned way --pretending not to notice them--she takes pride in sanctioned achievements like cotton chopping. She gets religion, and she takes to Huey Long. When Jackie Robinson comes along, she turns into a Dodger fan. In the 1960s Jane's new surrogate son rises up to make an issue of segregated drinking fountains. He too is killed, but this time, almost 100 years after she tried her first step out of slavery, Jane continues that march.

Obviously this is not hot-and-breathless, burn-baby-burn writing. Unlike apocalyptic novelists, Gaines does not make the revolution happen by surreal rhetoric. He simply watches, a patient artist, a patient man, and it happens for him. When Jane, disobedient at last, walks past her plantation owner to take part in a demonstration, a code goes crack, as surely, as naturally as a root pushing up through concrete. . Melvin Maddocks

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