Catherine Carmier by Ernest J. Gaines

First published: 1964

Type of plot: Historical realism

Time of work: The early 1960’s

Locale: The former slave quarter on a plantation in rural Louisiana

Principal Characters:

• Jackson Bradley, a young, educated black man determined to break with his Louisiana heritage
• Brother, Jackson’s friend from his youth
• Raoul Carmier, a proud Creole sharecropper, father to Catherine
• Catherine Carmier, Raoul’s oldest daughter and main support, who falls in love with Jackson
• Charlotte Moses, Jackson’s aunt and patroness
• Della (Johnson) Carmier, Raoul’s estranged wife
• Lillian Carmier, Raoul’s youngest daughter, alienated from her parents
• Mary Louise, Jackson’s former girlfriend
• Madame Bayonne, Jackson’s confidante and former teacher

The Novel

There is a strong autobiographical strain in Catherine Carmier. Like the novel’s protagonist, Jackson Bradley, Gaines moved to California to get a decent education and a stronger foothold on a better life than he could find at home, in the poor rural area around New Roads, Louisiana, which, fictionalized, is the novel’s setting. He also faced a similar personal dilemma, whether to return home to teach or to seek a more promising life elsewhere.

By the time he finished Catherine Carmier, Gaines knew that writing was his life’s work, but Jackson, his fictional counterpart, has no such vision of the future. He knows only that he cannot sacrifice himself to the seemingly futile task of trying to educate children whose futures he perceives as singularly bleak.

The novel is divided into three parts, each made up of several short chapters. Throughout, Gaines uses a third-person-omniscient narrative technique, but he primarily limits forays into the thoughts of characters to those of Jackson and his romantic nemesis, Catherine. The work also develops two distinct but parallel lines of action. The first, dealing with Jackson’s decision to leave Louisiana, centers on Jackson and his Aunt Charlotte; the second focuses on the intense but ultimately ill-fated love affair of Jackson and Catherine.

Part 1 starts with the imminent arrival of Jackson on a bus from New Orleans. He is to be met by his old friend Brother, who is introduced in the opening scene. Catherine Carmier also waits for the same bus, which, coincidentally, carries home Lillian, her younger sister. Thus Jackson has a brief encounter with Catherine, revealing at the outset that there is a magnetism between them; however, they do not begin their affair until midway through the novel.

It quickly becomes obvious that Jackson cannot find his bearings in the world of his childhood. His relationships with Brother, his former girlfriend, Mary Louise, and especially his Aunt Charlotte, although polite, are strained. Jackson knows that he cannot relate to Charlotte’s church circle, but he dreads telling her the truth, that he must leave again. At a party thrown to celebrate his return, he feels more like an unwanted intruder than the guest of honor. Only Madame Bayonne, his former teacher, senses that Jackson cannot stay, and she quickly becomes his mother confessor.

Jackson’s alienation is paralleled by Lillian’s in the dysfunctional Carmier household. Taught to hate what her mother represents, she, too, longs to leave. She stays on, however, held by complex motives, including sibling jealousy mingled with a desire to free her sister from her unhealthy dependence on Raoul.

In part 2, Jackson and Catherine begin their affair, and Jackson tells Charlotte the truth about his plans, a revelation that almost kills her. It is her culminating disappointment in Jackson, foreshadowed by earlier revelations that he had quit going to church and had begun drinking and playing cards. Only after the Reverend Armstrong shows her that her possessiveness is destructively selfish does Charlotte forgive Jackson.

Meanwhile, the furtive, mercurial relationship between Jackson and Catherine is sexually consummated in a few stolen hours of love. Jackson cannot openly woo Catherine because her father tolerates no rivals, not even those of his own kind, Creoles of mixed racial heritage. Torn between her father and Jackson, Catherine goes through a ritual of self-loathing, marked by complex love-hate feelings for Jackson. For a time, she manages to break off the relationship, incurring Jackson’s frustration and anger, even his accusation that her relationship with her father is incestuous.

In the last part of the novel, the love affair takes its final, implacable turn. Lillian secretively sends Jackson a note telling him that Catherine will be at a dance in Bayonne and urging him to go there. Jackson finds Catherine and takes her from the dance back to her house. They plan to run off together, but Raoul, cued by two black informants paid by Raoul’s Cajun enemies, rushes to stop them. He and Jackson fight, and Raoul is beaten. Ironically, however, in defeat Raoul triumphs over Jackson, for Catherine at last realizes that she cannot leave her father. Jackson is once more left alone, to search for a meaningful identity that to the novel’s end eludes him.

The Characters

Jackson is a character cut adrift from his roots, seeking to find himself. His education has put his earlier life in a sophisticated perspective that distances him from his former friends, and he resists a sympathetic engagement in their community from fears of being dragged down into a miasma of despair. He plans to leave, to continue the search for self in a world that has already scarred him with some racial bitterness. Before leaving, however, he must confront two strong adversaries.

The first is Aunt Charlotte. She has spun a moral web from which Jefferson must free himself at the cost of seeming to be a selfish ingrate. She is his patroness, and although he loves her, he knows he must disappoint her. She is a simple, strong-willed woman with a deep, abiding faith, and it is her goodness and moral rectitude that make Jefferson feel like an apostate in his darker moments. She is also the first adversary in Jackson’s personal rite of passage.

The other iron-willed character is Raoul Carmier, Jackson’s rival for Catherine’s love and loyalty. He represents a very different sort of challenge. A proud, unyielding man, Raoul is also an imposing blocking figure. He dominates his world, made narrow by his hatred for whites and blacks alike. He treats his wife, Della, like a household servant, elevating Catherine, his favorite, to surrogate spouse. For her part, Catherine is drawn to Raoul’s strength, while he, from selfish designs, has cut her off from any sort of mature relationship with other men.

In some ways Raoul is admirable. He is a hard worker who, unlike most black sharecroppers, refuses to give up the struggle against the Cajuns who have slowly displaced the blacks on the plantation’s land. To survive against them, he must work long hours, plowing his fields with mules because he is too poor to afford motorized equipment. Yet there is also something ruthless and sinister about Raoul, and by the end of the novel, it is intimated that he had killed Mark, Della’s son, born from a brief extramarital liaison with a black man. Strangely, it is only when he reveals his guilt that Della is once more drawn to him.

Catherine’s relationship with her father hints of latent incest, but it is never expressed in overt behavior. Like her mother, she has had an amatory adventure with another man, a Creole farmer, who fathered her child, Nelson. The farmer, however, was run off by Raoul, and until her affair with Jackson, she has had no other man in her life except her father. Despite her enchanting good looks and strong passion, she is content to be her father’s companion. So imbued is she with loyalty to Raoul that her love for Jackson is accompanied by feelings of guilt, betrayal, and self-hatred. At the end, Jackson is simply unable to overcome these conflicting emotions and loses the enigmatic Catherine to Raoul.

Critical Context

Catherine Carmier was Gaines’s first novel. Although it was not a critical success, it revealed the author’s unquestioned skill as raconteur and established the fictional locus that he used in succeeding works. In all of his published fiction, Gaines has dealt with poor blacks in the same locale in rural Louisiana, a former slave quarter on a plantation near the town of Bayonne, places adapted from the author’s boyhood home. Typically, for Gaines’s black characters, that idyllic world is slowly but relentlessly disintegrating.

In Catherine Carmier, he also introduces central characters who appear in one guise or another in many of his later works. One is the fatherless son, alienated from his heritage and searching for a new identity and sense of self-worth. For example, Grant Wiggins, in A Lesson Before Dying (1993), is in many ways Jackson’s resurrected Doppelgänger. A second major character is the childless black matron who, like Aunt Charlotte, serves both as the young man’s foster parent and benefactress and as a strong defender of the community and the Christian faith. Her counterpart in A Lesson Before Dying is Tante Lou, who, like Charlotte, is both the protagonist’s aunt and his moral conscience. In a somewhat different guise, she also appears as the title character of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), Gaines’s most famous work.

Although Gaines would later experiment with other narrative voices and techniques, in Catherine Carmier he uses a plain, direct, and simple style that he has never abandoned. The folk idiom and cadences of real speech, for which he has a finely tuned ear, he exploits extremely well, making his characters both intriguing and convincing. Apparent, too, is the author’s sympathetic engagement in his characters’ plights, his kind, fundamental empathy, a quality that marks all of his works and attenuates the bitterness of those who suffer from poverty entrenched in racial discrimination. With his very first novel, Gaines seemed to have learned that a gentle, cajoling humanism can be a much more powerful force than a strident, divisive, and message-heavy diatribe. In Catherine Carmier and succeeding novels, whether his characters are black, white, or racially mixed, he asks only that readers understand, not side with, applaud, or condemn them.

Bibliography

Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Asserts that Gaines’s writing transcends African American experience and voices the concerns of humanity. Catherine Carmier is a pastoral, but one in decline.

Bell, Bernard W. “Ernest Gaines.” In The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bell claims that Catherine Carmier is informed by the sense of nihilism of the nineteenth century Russian author Ivan Turgenev and by the sense of southern history of the twentieth century American author William Faulkner.

Bryant, Jerry H. “Ernest J. Gaines: Change, Growth, and History.” The Southern Review 10 (1974): 851-864. Bryant states that Gaines combines moral commitment and aesthetic distance. Catherine Carmier depicts the triumph of inertia.

Byerman, Keith E. “Negotiations: The Quest for a Middle Way in the Fiction of James Alan McPherson and Ernest Gaines.” In Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Examines how Jackson and Catherine must escape the confinements of the old world, but in the name of the values of that world.

Carmean, Karen. Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998. Critical overview of Gaines’s work and its importance to African American and southern literary history.

Doyle, Mary Ellen. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Focuses on Gaines’s achievement in capturing the oral traditions and the linguistic cadences of African American culture. Argues that the varied voices of his characters combine to generate the unique voice of the author himself.

Hicks, Jack. “To Make These Bones Live: History and Community in Ernest Gaines’s Fiction.” Black American Literature Forum 11 (1977): 9-19. Notes that Catherine Carmier is informed by a view of personal and racial history as a prison from which the principal characters can never fully escape.

Stoelting, Winifred L. “Human Dignity and Pride in the Novels of Ernest Gaines.” CLA Journal 14 (March, 1971): 340-358. Stoelting claims that Gaines is concerned with how his characters handle decisions, rather than with the rightness of their choices.