A Gathering of Old Men by Ernest J. Gaines

First published: 1983

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1970’s

Locale: Southern Louisiana

Principal Characters:

• Mathu, the one black man on Marshall’s Plantation who has never been afraid to stand up to the whites
• Candy Marshall, the daughter of the original owners of the plantation
• Sheriff Mapes, a powerful, often brutal man who is yet to some extent free of the rigid racism of the past
• Fix Boutan, the patriarch of the Cajun Boutan family
• Gil Boutan, Fix’s son and Beau’s brother

The Novel

The story of A Gathering of Old Men is told by fifteen narrators. Violence is part of the story they tell. The book, however, is also a story of the sometimes painful and uncertain processes of change and growth.

Beau Boutan, a brutal Cajun farmer, has been shot and killed. His body lies in the yard of Mathu, and, because old Mathu is known as the only black man in the area who has ever stood up to the whites, most people will surely conclude that he is the killer. He faces both the retribution of the law and the revenge of the Boutan family. Fix Boutan, the patriarch of the family, has lived by a harsh, simple, and brutally racist code. The death of his son at the hands of a black man will certainly lead him to demand more than an eye for an eye.

Candy Marshall, who was half reared by Mathu, is determined to protect him. She is prepared to say that she, a white woman from a plantation-owning family, killed Beau—and she has a plan.

At Candy’s urging, the old men of the plantation will gather at Mathu’s. Each will carry a shotgun and shells like those that killed Beau. Each will have recently fired the shotgun. And each, like Candy, will claim to be Beau’s killer.

As the men move toward Mathu’s, singly, in pairs, eventually as a group, they begin to feel a sense of joyful resolution. All of their lives, they have given in. They have lived in fear of the whites. Now they have been granted an unlooked-for last chance to take a stand as men. A sense of destiny surges in them as Clatoo, an old man who has discovered qualities of leadership in himself, makes sure that they pass by the graveyard where their dead are buried.

Sheriff Mapes is baffled by the situation. He knows that Mathu must be the killer, and he wants by decisive action to divert the vicious retaliation that can be expected from Fix Boutan. What can he do, though, when every old man on the place—and a white woman, as well—is claiming responsibility?

Fix Boutan has called his own gathering. What is the will of the family? Most, as Fix probably expects, seem ready to ride out in the old way, and Luke Will, an outsider to the family, urges them to follow that course. However, two of Fix’s sons, brothers of Beau, speak against violence. Jean, a local butcher, fears the effect of violence on business. Gil, the other son, has hurried back from Louisiana State University on hearing of his brother’s death. Gil is a nationally recognized football star. Together with a black teammate, the other half of a pair sportswriters call “Salt and Pepper,” he is expected on this very weekend to lead his team to victory in the big game against Mississippi. He represents something new in the South, and both his concern for his personal future and his acceptance of the social changes that have helped to open up that future lead him to call for an end to the cycle of violence. Fix accepts what his sons say; the Boutans will take no revenge. Fix, though, can no longer regard Jean and Gil as his sons.

The real identity of Beau’s killer is revealed when Charlie, a childlike giant of a man, turns up at Mathu’s. Now in his fifties, Charlie has been afraid of white people all his life. When his first act of defiance resulted in Beau’s death, he panicked and ran, but he has run enough, now, for a man. He will accept responsibility for his act, and thereby, for his life. He is ready to face what must be faced—and that means Luke Will and his gang, who refuse to abide by the decision of the Boutans. They have come for what amounts to a lynching, but they find themselves in a fight, in which the old men participate while the wounded Sheriff Mapes can only look on helplessly. At the end of the fight, Charlie and Luke Will are dead.

The survivors, black and white, are brought to trial, and a judge places them on probation. This means, among other things, that they may not touch a gun for five years—or, the judge wryly proclaims, until death, whichever comes first. Candy offers Mathu a lift back to the quarters. He thanks her, but he chooses to ride back in Clatoo’s truck, with the other black men.

The Characters

At the center of this novel is a remarkable group of characters: the “Old Men” of the title, who have lived all of their long lives in rural southern Louisiana, surviving by adapting to the demands of the dominant white society. The inner action of the novel follows the growth of these old men from frightened creatures into men who are prepared to stand together against the law and against the Boutan family and their allies. Readers come to know these men as individuals. Each has a story; each story is different. However, the repeated pattern of disappointment and frustration in the face of injustice and oppression clearly emerges.

This pattern lends further stature to Mathu, the great exception. He is thus defined in part in terms of the contrast he represents to the other old men and in part by their willingness to put themselves at risk on his behalf. Sheriff Mapes’s evaluation of Mathu as a better man than most he has known, black or white—praise a man such as Mapes would not give lightly to a black man—reinforces readers’ sense of Mathu’s moral power.

Another side of Mathu is revealed through his relationship with Candy. Upon the death of Candy’s parents, Mathu assumed along with Candy’s Aunt Merle the responsibility of rearing her. The white woman would teach her how to be a lady; the black man would help her to understand the people on the plantation.

This is the background that motivates Candy’s determination to protect Mathu from the consequences of killing Beau, an action she, like everyone else, assumes Mathu committed. Her determination attests to her strong will and her clear loyalties. Without Candy, it seems, the gathering of old men might never have taken place.

Candy’s understanding is perhaps not so quick as her reaction. She is determined to protect her people, as, she affirms, her daddy did before her. However, this attitude, obviously well-intentioned, is ultimately inadequate. These people are not, after all, her possessions, and they must reject her protection as they accept responsibility for themselves. Candy’s character is tested, as she must recognize and deal with her growing and offended sense of exclusion from the deliberations of the men.

Of the Cajuns, Fix Boutan, as patriarch of the Boutan family, is the central figure. It is Fix’s reaction with which the old men are concerned. What Fix is going to do is also foremost on the mind of Sheriff Mapes as he tries to break the old men’s resistance. No one expects Fix to accept the death of his son at the hands of a black man without exacting a harsh revenge. However, Fix, an old man himself, no longer moves with the unreflective violent haste of his earlier years. The family is involved; the family must decide. When two of Fix’s sons speak against revenge, against the old ways, Fix accepts what they say, even as he rejects them for saying it.

Critical Context

As a new novel by the author of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which had been published in 1971, A Gathering of Old Men was assured of a respectful response upon its publication in 1983. The novel was widely and, on the whole, favorably reviewed, and its reputation has held steady ever since. Some critics have regarded it as Ernest J. Gaines’s finest novel.

Gaines was reared in southern Louisiana by older women. His stepfather, who was in the merchant marine, was often away from home. His relationship with the men who worked in the fields was, he has commented, “quite tenuous.” It was when he started coming back to the South as an adult, and as a writer, that he became closer to older men, men of the generation of the characters in A Gathering of Old Men. These men had been thrust into competition with white men from a position of almost absolute social, political, and economic weakness. One of Gaines’s accomplishments in his novel is to get their story told with sympathy and understanding.

The stories the old men told him are a source, not necessarily for the particular details, but for the general qualities of the stories embedded in A Gathering of Old Men. True to his source, Gaines employs a multiplicity of narrators, giving the characters the opportunity to speak for themselves. This choice reflects Gaines’s commitment to black oral folk culture as a literary source. Gaines has learned much from white writers, but the sound of black speech has remained an abiding inspiration, an important factor in his significance within the African American literary tradition.

Gaines has especially given voice in this novel to the sound of his native southern Louisiana. Gaines’s career, from the early novel Catherine Carmier (1964) to the present, has been consistently shaped by his insight that his calling is to the depiction of the lives of black men and women in the rural South. He even rejected Richard Wright’s great novel Native Son (1940) as a model, finding it too “urban” to meet his needs as an artist.

Gaines has always found his subjects in the African American experience, yet that experience, as presented by Gaines, involves an infinity of interactive patterns with whites. His novel Of Love and Dust (1967) and his short story “A Long Day in November,” included in the collection Bloodline (1968), illustrate the fineness of observation and generosity of sympathetic imagination Gaines brings to this material and, in this respect, anticipate his accomplishment in A Gathering of Old Men.

Gaines is aware that he is sometimes accused of being “too nice” to his white characters. He is also sometimes accused of being too nice to his black characters. His goal, however, is not to be nice, but to be true. His ability to extend his sympathy over a wide range of characters, black and white, is what makes it possible for him to treat the explosive materials of A Gathering of Old Men with the psychological richness that is one of the great strengths of the novel and that is one basis of Gaines’s claim to be considered an important novelist.

Bibliography

Babb, Valerie Melissa. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. An entry in the Twayne’s United States Author’s Series, this work begins with a helpful chronology and a brief biography, looks at Gaines’s works in chronological order, and concludes with a selected bibliography. Includes a chapter entitled “Action and Self-Realization in A Gathering of Old Men” that contrasts the murder in the novel with that committed by Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). Some useful interpretation.

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. Byerman notes that in depicting the emergence of a black male identity, A Gathering of Old Men ends in renewal, even though the future may be no easier than the past.

Callahan, John F. “One Day in Louisiana.” The New Republic 190 (December 26, 1983): 38-39. Observes that, like the rest of Gaines’s fiction, A Gathering of Old Men explores how and why the old ways with the land and the old customs between blacks and whites have changed, and are still changing. Gaines knows and loves his world so well that he cannot reduce even the most loathsome redneck to a stereotype.

Christian Science Monitor. December 2, 1983, p. B13.

Estes, David C., ed. Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994. Written by various scholars, these critical essays address a number of different themes found in specific works by Gaines. Includes four in-depth articles on A Gathering of Old Men.

Harper, Mary T. “From Sons to Fathers: Ernest Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men.” College Language Association Journal 31 (March, 1988): 299-306. Harper focuses on the development of the movement of the “old men” of the community from ineffectual individuals into a group of respected father figures and role models for the younger generation. An interesting and informative work.

Jeffers, Lance. Review of A Gathering of Old Men, by Ernest J. Gaines. Black Scholar 15 (March/April, 1984): 45-46. States that the two cores of the novel are the overwhelming need of many blacks to overcome fear of whites and the urgent need for racial unity.

Library Journal. CVIII, August, 1983, p. 1501.

Nation. CCXXXVIII, January 14, 1984, p. 22.

The New York Times Book Review. LXXXVIII, October 30, 1983, p. 15.

The New Yorker. LIX, October 24, 1983, p. 163.

Papa, Lee. “ His Feet on Your Neck’: The New Religion in the Works of Ernest J. Gaines.” African American Review 27 (Summer, 1993): 187-193. Papa examines Gaines’s focus on the effectiveness of religion as a tool for self-definition and shows how Gaines reinterprets Christianity from the African American perspective. He uses Jimmy, Ned, and Jane from The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pitman and Charlie Biggs in A Gathering of Old Men as examples to support his thesis.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXIV, July 15, 1983, p. 41.

Rowell, Charles H. “The Quarters: Ernest Gaines and the Sense of Place.” The Southern Review 21 (Summer, 1985): 733-750. Rowell sees the Quarters in Gaines’s fiction as the central focus of Gaines’s symbolic geography, the stage on which he works out his plots. Thus it becomes a microcosm in which all human aspirations, actions, and psychology can be worked out.

Saturday Review. IX, December, 1983, p. 61.