It would be a miracle if slavery's harsh degradations could forge a person as resilient and gracious as Miss Jane Pittman. She bears physical scars from the brutality of those who enslaved her, but the content of her character and the strength of her faith bless her with a spirit that can soar. Jane is fictional, but it is comforting and inspiring to believe that many of the real people who survived slavery made for themselves some of the peace that Pittman found in her more than a century of life.

Jane is the title character of Ernest J. Gaines' The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, in which she recounts events from her life in Louisiana and describes even more fully parts of the lives of people she has known. The novel presents Jane's first-person account as it was captured on audiotape by an editor who visited her many times during what turned out to be her final summer.

Jane begins her story during the Civil War when she was Ticey, a girl enslaved and forced to work in her owners' fields instead of playing the games and attending the schools that would have been hers if she'd been white. Because no one cared enough about slaves to keep records about them, Ticey does not know how old she is. She guesses she is about nine. She knows that she does not enjoy being a slave. When a Union officer tells her that Ticey is a slave name and that her name should be Jane, the girl clings to her new identity through extended beatings by masters who believe their birthrights allow them to strip Jane of hers. The beatings leave scars and years later Jane learns they have left her unable to have children, but the viciousness does not break her spirit.

That unalloyed will enables Jane to survive the War's immediate aftermath. When a mob, a precursor to the Ku Klux Klan, kills several of the newly freed former slaves with whom Jane is hiking to a better life in the northern United States, it falls to Jane to care for an even younger boy whose mother the racist thugs murdered. The boy grows up to be an eloquent, peaceful leader in the movement to gain for freed Americans the rights they've been denied. This spiritual forebear of Dr. Martin Luther King suffers that real-life visionary's fate, and decades later when racist violence also claims the life of another young man for whom Jane has been like a mother, it marks a turning point in the life of a woman who is aged but not old.

Gaines concludes his novel in the 1950s when Jane is preparing to attend a civil rights rally. The book ends before Jane makes the quiet, defiant gesture that ends the celebrated 1974 made-for-television adaptation, which stars Cicely Tyson in an Emmy-winning performance. The book's ending provides a suggestion that Jane will take a stand of some sort, but leaves it to the reader to imagine what she might do. The uncertainty Gaines crafts is elegant because he's told us enough about Jane that we trust she will do something simple and bold and inspiring.

Gaines tells Jane's stories with confidence and skill. None of his phrases rings false, and each of his words sounds like it could have been spoken by a woman unbowed by either age or the hatreds she has endured. Here he has Jane recalling what Ned, the young man whose mother was killed, said about the need for people of African descent to work together:

" 'I wish I could stand here and tell y'all our African people fought the white man. And there was war and war and war. But that's not true. Our people fought each other, and the white man bought the captives for a barrel of rum and a string of beads. I'm telling y'all this,' he said, 'to show y'all the only way you can be strong is stand together. The white man never would have brought us here if we was together. He never would have separated a nation. But little tribes beat each other, and all the white man had to do was wait.' "

Later Jane says that God sends such heroes as boxer Joe Louis and baseball player Jackie Robinson to lift the spirits of oppressed people. She suggests that both Louis' loss to Max Schmeling and his subsequent first-round knockout of Schmeling were part of a divine plan:

When times get really hard, really tough, He send always send you somebody. In the Depression it was tough on everybody, but twice as hard on the colored, and He sent us Joe. Joe was to lift the colored people's heart. Of course S'mellin' beat him the first time. But that was just to teach us a lesson. To show us Joe was just a man, not a superman. And to show us we could take just a little bit more hardship than we thought we could take at first. Now the second fight was different. We prayed and prayed, and He heard our prayers, and at the same time He wanted to punish them for thinking they was something super. I heard every lick of that fight on the radio, and what Joe didn't put on S'mellin' that night just couldn't go on a man. You could look a week and you could still see the n-ggers* grinning about that fight.

The novel's fictional editor is left regretting that he did not get more of Jane's stories down on tape before she died eight months after their last conversation. The reader shares that regret. Jane is fascinating and knowing more about her would be a treat. Gaines has won acclaim for his subsequent novels -- including the intriguing A Gathering of Old Men and the powerful A Lesson Before Dying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993 -- and he would undoubtedly win acclaim if he chose to write a second volume. Jane deserves more. In the tough life that she led with quiet grace and unfailing compassion, she earned it.

__________


* Jane, of course, did not leave out any letters because she was not limited by Epinions' unsophisticated censoring program.



Recommended: Yes