The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) is a fictional oral narrative written by Ernest J. Gaines. Delivered in the voice of Jane Pittman, an African-American whose long life spans the century between the Civil War and the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the novel represents perspectives on the past that challenge “textbook” history. As Gaines noted, Miss Jane “did not fight war [or] make laws,” but her story matters, because “she survived with strength […] the most demanding hundred years of American history.”

An “Introduction” opens the novel, establishing the premise of Miss Jane’s narrative: a schoolteacher has repeatedly asked Miss Jane to sit for an interview with him. It is 1962 in rural Louisiana, and Jane is 110 years old. Mary Hodges, Jane’s protective companion, asks the young teacher, “What you want know about Miss Jane for?” He replies that he teaches history, and Jane’s life story will help him explain the past to his students. When Mary wonders, “what’s wrong” with his history books, the teacher responds, “Miss Jane is not in them.” Jane finally agrees to talk to the teacher and she narrates the story that follows.

In Book I, “The War Years,” Jane is a young slave referred to as “Ticey” by the owner of the Louisiana plantation where she lives. Because her parents are dead, and she doesn’t know her birth date, she guesses she’s eleven when a Union officer stops at the plantation near the end of the Civil War. He calls her “Miss Jane,” and afterward, she refuses to answer to “Ticey,” her slave name, despite beatings from her mistress.



When the war ends, Jane joins a group of former slaves who set out on foot for the North. They encounter a band of “patrollers,” who, in Jane’s words, “was the poor white trash that used to find the runaway slaves for the masters. Them […] was the ones who made up the Ku Klux Klan later on.” After the patrollers murder everyone except Jane and a boy about five years old named Ned, Jane continues her journey to Ohio with Ned in tow. She is not sure which way is north, and although they receive assistance from various people, they never cross Louisiana’s border.

Jane and Ned cease their travels, and, in Book II (“Reconstruction”), Jane finds work as a field hand on a Louisiana plantation run by Mr. Bone. Due to his support for Northern (Republican) political efforts, Mr. Bone was chosen by Union representatives to oversee the plantation. By the late 1870s, however, the federal government’s commitment to “Reconstruction” in the South is flagging, and the plantation is restored to its original owner, Mr. Dye. Jane continues to labor in the field, but working conditions deteriorate to little better than “slavery again.” She is poorly paid but manages to send Ned to school.

As the North withdraws politically and financially from the South, ending the period of Reconstruction, racist organizations consolidate their power. Many former slaves decide to flee the South and its increasingly hostile racial tensions, but Jane resolves to “stay right here and do what I could for me and Ned.” By age seventeen, however, Ned can longer tolerate the oppression blacks are experiencing, and he becomes a community organizer. His efforts to help his fellow African Americans migrate north provoke the anger of local whites. When his life is threatened, he moves to Kansas.



A relationship develops between Jane and another plantation worker Joe Pittman. They “agreed to live together” in a common-law marriage, and, after overcoming several obstacles manufactured by Mr. Dye, they move to a ranch near the Texas border. For seven years, Joe excels at his job training wild horses, but Jane begins to have dreams in which he dies breaking a black stallion. When such a stallion arrives at the ranch, she is overcome with apprehension and lets it loose. Joe is killed trying to recapture the horse.

Meanwhile, Ned marries, becomes a teacher, assumes the surname “Douglass” (to honor abolitionist Frederick Douglass), and fights in the Spanish-American war. In 1899, he comes “from that war in Cuba” with his family to live near Bayonne, Louisiana, where Jane has settled. Now known as Professor Douglass, Ned has ambitions to educate black children and to disseminate the views of Frederick Douglass. In a sermon he delivers by the river, he exhorts blacks to fight for their rights. His rhetoric alarms the whites in power, and they hire a Cajun mercenary, Albert Cluveau, to shoot Ned. After Ned dies, Jane tells Cluveau (once her fishing partner) he himself will suffer a painful death.

In Book III, “The Plantation,” Jane finds work on Robert Samson’s plantation. Samson and his wife have a son named Tee Bob, but Samson also has an older, illegitimate, “black” son named Timmy. The two boys have a brotherly bond, which Samson permits with the expectation that Timmy behaves respectfully and subserviently to his white brother. Their relationship is derailed, however, when the racist white overseer, Tom Joe, falsely accuses Timmy of wrongdoing. Timmy’s attempt to defend himself is regarded as insolence, and he is banished from the plantation.



Later, during the 1930s, Tee Bob falls in love with Mary Agnes Lefarbre, the plantation schoolteacher. Although she is Creole, Mary’s skin is light enough to pass for white. Tee Bob eventually proposes marriage to her, but she refuses, arguing that society would judge their mixed-race union unacceptable. Devastated, Tee Bob commits suicide. When Robert blames Mary for his son’s death, his friend Jules Raynard redirects responsibility for the tragedy to racist belief systems.

Book IV, “The Quarters,” finds Jane and several other women on Samson’s plantation collectively caring for an orphaned boy named Jimmy Aaron. They begin to believe he is the “One,” the savior who will deliver them from oppression. Indeed, Jimmy grows up to be a civil rights activist. After attending school in New Orleans, he returns to Bayonne in the early 1960s to orchestrate the arrest of a mulatto girl for drinking from a “white” fountain. He then organizes a protest against the arrest, and Jane, now more than 100-years-old, intends to participate. As Jane sets out for the protest, Robert Samson appears to say Jimmy has been killed. Undeterred, Jane leads her people past Samson and onto their march against injustice.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is based partly on stories Gaines’s aunt told. His “Bible” while writing the novel, however, was Lay My Burden Down, a collection of 1930s interviews with ex-slaves. The book was televised in a made-for-TV movie in 1974.