Neal Lester
Chair
Parents Association Professor
Bebbling Family Dean's Distinguished Professor
Arizona Humanities Council Distinguished Public Scholar
Department of English
Arizona State University
Still ‘Walkin’ the Walk and Talkin’ the Talk’:
Revisiting The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
“Her story was bearable because it was [theirs] as well—to tell, to refine and tell again.”
Toni Morrison, Beloved
I have remembered very distinctly the resonant raspiness of 110-year-old Miss Jane Pittman’s voice and her deeply crevassed visage for over thirty years. It was 1974 when I first witnessed the poignancy of her carefully articulated testimony about her hard life and her spiritual triumph. In her perfectly nuanced and detailed stories about the peculiarities of American slavery, then of emancipation and reconstruction, and finally of the absurdity of Jim Crow segregation, I also witnessed Ernest Gaines’ unparalleled ability to create and tell a story with lessons about life and the human condition that defy temporal and historical boundaries. Returning to the film on the occasion of its 30th anniversary reminds me of the film’s and this story’s relevance to all, then and now.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman exemplifies an author’s masterful ability to wed truth and history with imagination to arrive at a greater Truth about human possibilities. Indeed, this is a story about the complexities of both slavery and freedom. We witness in text and film versions the black-white power positions of those who “owned” slaves as well as the compassion of those who see the young Ticey—expressing the disturbing reality of any slave’s uncertainty about her age—as a bird capable of taking flight. We also witness Ticey’s power to claim authority over her life even as a child enslaved, traits that define Jane’s vibrant personality through all of her years: she’s feisty, she’s funny, she challenges, she questions, she owns herself. Without family and adult leadership, young Jane—having abandoned her slave name “Ticey”-- navigates her life and the orphaned young Ned’s toward freedom and safety. In Jane’s adult years, we watch her many personal sacrifices to protect others, sacrifices that through her re-memorying (Toni Morrison’s notion of recreating a past in the present) and storytelling fuel her commitment to continue to advance the civil rights cause.
Gaines’ story also shows the inner workings of slavery as we hear about a slave’s physical abuse and see the efforts of some to reduce even slave children to an animal’s existence. At the same time that we witness the risks of freedom for freed blacks—the horrors of lynching and mass massacre--we see Gaines’ creation of a lyrical romance between Joe Pittman and Jane. We recognize Jane’s resilience and persistence as she grows up and grows old. As a new generation assumes the reigns of 1960s social protest for equal rights and equal access, Miss Jane’s story of survival is the inspiration that cloaks her frame as she majestically dodders with her cane, her head held high, toward the courthouse to take a single sip from the “WHITE ONLY” water fountain. The film’s climactic moment—Miss Jane’s long patient walk, as shocked and anxious whites and blacks look on—reaffirms the hopefulness that characterizes slave narratives generically.
Indeed, the story and the text highlight the most salient features of conventional literary narratives of slavery: literal and figurative journeying toward freedom and selfhood, emphasis on names and naming, divine interventions that save the slave and enable that slave to tell her story, separations of family, the closeness of slaves to nature and the land, and education and literacy as vehicles to liberation. While these characteristics do not necessarily appear in every slave narrative, they are interestingly configured in fictitious re-tellings like James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man and Toni Morrison’s Beloved that move beyond being an account of a single individual’s life. Rather, these fictions are sagas about America’s contradictory and still ambivalent relations with all of its people. While former slaves go on to “right” history and to write themselves into existence by writing their stories of slavery and liberation for reading audiences, an alphabetically illiterate Miss Jane Pittman emerges from and continues in a tradition of stories that underscore the power of orality, of speaking from a position of historical silence. Being interviewed by the white male journalist because she is the only living former slave grants Miss Jane the ultimate authority over her own life and over its storytelling. That Miss Jane Pittman, who in her own words has “seen enough years to last a lifetime,” is emotionally and psychologically caught up in the immediacy of re-memorying her loss and her suffering individually and communally inspires her to take the walk that marks triumph for her and for all people still struggling for full human status in 1960s racially divided America.
Suggested Readings:
Callahan, John. “Image-Making: Tradition and the Two Versions of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” Chicago Review (Autumn 1977): 45-62.
------. In the African American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
Gaudet, Marcia and Carl Wooton. Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990.
Jackson, Blyden. “Jane Pittman through the Years: A People’s Tale.” American Letters and the Historical Consciousness: Essays in Honor of Lewis P. Simpson. Eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Daniel Mark Fogel. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987. 255-273.
Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
Toni Morrison, Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman airs Thursday, September 15 at 8 p.m. on Channel 8.
"THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MISS JANE PITTMAN EXEMPLIFIES AN AUTHOR'S MASTERFUL ABILITY TO WED TRUTH AND HISTORY WITH IMAGINATION TO ARRIVE AT A GREATER TRUTH ABOUT HUMAN POSSIBILITIES."
