How many pages is the autobiography of miss jane pittman

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It was more than a year after the war Master told us we was emancipated. We could stay but he couldn't pay us nothin'. But we could work on shares. It was slavery all over again. About half of us left. Big Laura you'd call the leader. She carried her baby daughter. I watched after her boy Ned.

We didn't know where we was goin' or how we was goin' to live. We only knew we were free at last. Then one day the Patrollers found us. They was like the Ku Klux. They killed ever one of us except me n' Ned.

I had been able to keep him quiet. I found big Laura. Them men had even killed Laura's girl child. The Patrollers I made up my mind I was gonna get to Ohio no matter what.

Ned, he took two stones, flint stones from his Ma'am. He carried them with him wherever he went. I guess it was his way of remembering his Ma'am. But I think ever time he struck them rocks together what he was makin' was the spark of freedom Laura had wanted for him n' ever body else.

Each day we walked. But we was still in Luzanna. I hung on to finding freedom in Ohio until one night we came up on the house of an old white man. He had been a sailor at one point in his life. He had maps ever where in his house. He told me I'd have to cross Mississippi or up through Arkansas n' I might take my whole life gettin' to Ohio.

He told me he could be Secesh or he could be a friend of my people. You know I think he was a friend of my people. He could jus' as easy told me sure you take on off for Ohio. So I decided to stay in Luzanna n' find my freedom there some day.

I took work on a plantation. Ned was in a school. I never looked on Ned as mine until his teacher had him read his lesson to me n' I was so proud of him I loved him as if he were my own. The only good that come to my people after the war was when the Beero showed up.

We were freed men and women. But it didn't last. The North made up with the South, and those northern businessmen came down South to make money with the white businessmen.

I took Joe Pittman, the horse breaker on the plantation as my husband. I couldn't have chilren of my own. The doctor said I had been beat so bad when I was still a slave I had been hurt inside.

There was no horse Joe couldn't break. A big rancher hired him to come out to Texas n' made Joe, a black man, his head horse man. But there's always a horse a man can't break. I lost Joe. N' from then on I was just Miss Jane Pittman. I went back to Luzanna.

My Ned came home from Kansas. He was full of ideas. He had been down to Cuba in that Spanish American War. He talked about not holdin' with the Booker T. Washington sayin' that the black people needed to stay off from the white folks, work hard and stand on there on. He took after the ideas of Frederick Douglas n' said that this world was for all folks black n' white. He was a teacher. I still remember hearin' him talkin' to the chilren on the plantation.

He would sit on my porch n' talk. He'd drink tea with me, n' we'd go fishin together' sometimes. Albert would talk about killin' like it was nuthin'. Albert told me if Ned didn't stop his teachin' n' leave, he'd been told to kill him.

N' he said he'd do what he was told to do. Ned wouldn't leave. Even knowin' he was going to die. One night Albert Cluveau met my Ned on the road n' shot him through the chest with a shot gun. Black people have had to fight for whatever they ever got. Ned would never quit. But I sure miss him. There was more wars. There's always wars. I thought after all our young men fought the Germans n' Japanese things might be changin'. There was even a black man played baseball for the Dodgers.

I never missed Jackie Robinson when he was playin' for the Dodgers. But things hadn't really changed. He was the son of sharecroppers on the plantation. We all thought he might be The One, who would grow up n' make a difference for our people. We wanted him to make a preacher or a teacher. Jimmy went off to school. They sent him back home to us. He told us we hadn't even begun to fight in Luzanna. Jimmy asked us all to meet him at the Courthouse the next mornin', gonna get us some civil rights.

I plan on goin'. He reminds me a lot of my Ned. But Albert Cluveau's been long dead. I'm not sure if I'm or I'm a , but freedom's been a long time comin'. Gaines filled The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman with so much historical content, and the voice of Jane Pittman carried such a sense of truth, that upon its original publication, many people thought the novel was non-fiction.

Gaines said, "Some people have asked me whether or not The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is fiction or nonfiction. It is fiction. When Dial Press first sent it out, they did not put "a novel" on the galleys or on the dustjacket, so a lot of people had the feeling that it could have been real.

I did a lot of research in books to give some facts to what Miss Jane could talk about, but these are my creations. I read quite a few interviews performed with former slaves by the WPA during the thirties and I got their rhythm and how they said certain things. Gaines used the then un-mined resources of the slave narratives to provide structure, themes, characters and incidents for his novel.

That appeared in , and up to that date Brown, like Equiano, Douglass, Bibb, Henson, Pennington, and the many others who wrote an account of their life as a slave and their escape from the South had had to contend with the Southern cry that everything the fugitive slaves was saying was lies, and that they did not write their own stories but got white Northerners to write them for them.

In , with the publication of his novel Clotel , William Wells Brown took African American narrative in a direction that was new and dangerous. Gaines returned African American fiction to its roots, and he did so with a didactic purpose remarkably like that of William Wells Brown. For all that he had been a slave there, Brown seems to have loved the South more than he loved the North. He called his last work My Southern Home , and he was never at home in the North.

To his dismay and disgust when he reached Ohio and freedom in , he found a physical hatred of blacks that he had not experienced in the slave states. He had run from Slavery to Segregation. And that is the story that Miss Jane Pittman has to tell of African Americans running from to Gaines in the s and who, like Gaines, started their lives as field hands working for fifty cents a day before they were ten years old Gaines Are the descendants of Ernest J.

Gaines as much caught in a trap of history as the descendants of the historical Julia McVay and of the fictional Jane Pittman? The Civil War did away with Slavery and that was a great change, but Slavery was replaced by Segregation and that was no change. Between and , the Slave Codes abolished by the 14th, 15th, and 16th Amendments to the United States Constitution were resurrected in the Jim Crow laws of the s and s Johnson, T. Yet there was no escaping the knowledge that we dared not trust the slave caste with any power that could be withheld from them.

You gived them the number, they gived you the clothes. Miss Pittman living, breathing and talking in , breaths the breath of her whole race, and she breathes for her race.

That has fictive strength though it has ideological weakness. Miss Jane Pittman absorbs the identities of Julia McVay and Augusteen Jefferson, and of many other once identifiable and distinct human beings, and in creating his character Gaines not only honors these women, he obscures their memory.

Gaines uses another device to provide a continuity backwards from That appeared in , and up to that date Brown, like Equiano, Douglass, Bibb, Henson, Pennington, and the many others who wrote an account of their life as a slave and their escape from the South had had to contend with the Southern cry that everything the fugitive slaves were saying was lies, and that they did not write their own stories but got white Northerners to write them for them.

At the same time, for all that he had been a slave there, Brown seems to have loved the South more than he loved the North. And that is the story that Miss Jane Pittman has to tell of African American s running from to One of the most suggestive is his inclusion of the tragic mulatta theme which so dominated the early slave novel.

That fact infuriated the s critic-activist Addison Gayle. But even though Gaines rings a remarkable variation on the old story, he nonetheless presents the figure of the richly named Mary Agnes LeFabre as a figure of deep melancholy and exquisite beauty exactly contrasting with the black black-women.

Gaines is fatally drawn to the stereotype, and in he was drawn with less excuse than can be found for William Wells Brown in She does so by taking on a new name, a name of her choosing and not one imposed by her owners.

My name aint Ticey no more. I said Jane Brown. She hit me again: what I said my name was. This, at the time, I thought to be one of the most cruel acts that could be committed upon my rights; and I received several very severe whippings for telling people that my name was William, after orders were given to change it. Though young, I was old enough to place a high appreciation upon my name. I was sold under the name of Sandford. But as soon as the subject came to my mind, I resolved on adopting my old name of William, and let Sandford go by the board, for I always hated it.

Not because there was anything peculiar in the name; but because it had been forced upon me. It is sometimes common, at the south, for slaves to take the name of their masters. Some have a legitimate right to do so. But I always detested the idea of being called by the name of either of my masters.

Brown, Narrative The date is , and the slaves on the Louisiana Plantation have heard their Proclamation of Emancipation, and they know that they are free. The plantation slaves celebrate the Emancipation Proclamation that has been read to them by their master, who is their master no more. He has nothing to say to them; they have to think what it means, what to do, what to be.

The first thought is that they should go North, and without geography or cartography, free though they are, they have to resort to traveling by the sun and stars. North Star point the way at night. William Wells Brown, the fugitive slave, reports exactly the same mode of direction finding:.

We continued to travel by night, and secrete ourselves in the woods by day; and every night, before emerging from our hiding-place, we would anxiously look for our friend and leader—the NORTH STAR. Brown,