Ernest J Gaines

Stirring, heroic, and wonderfully laced with the musical languages of the Bayou, Ernest J. Gaines - the foremost voice in contemporary African American literature - adds another breathtaking saga to his canon with A Gathering of Old Men. When Sheriff Mapes is summoned to a sugarcane plantation to find a dead Cajun farmer, he knows who committed the crime. Mapes finds himself powerless, however, when nearly 20 elderly black men confess to the murder....

In his first novel in ten years, Ernest Gaines, the highly acclaimed author of the best-selling The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, brings us a wrenching story of death and identity in a small Cajun Louisiana community in the late 1940s. A young black named Jefferson is a reluctant party in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the three other men involved are all killed, including the white store owner. Jefferson, the only survivor, is accused...

In a story set in the rural, sharecropping South of the 1940s, a child sees his parents separate and then reconcile.

Miss Jane Pittman is celebrating her 110th birthday. As the civil rights movement heats up, Miss Jane, a former slave, recounts her memories of the black experience from picking potatoes on a southern plantation to fetching water for soldiers in the Civil War to her views on the current and turbulent equal rights movement.

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