Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

Ernest Gaines' 'A Gathering of Old Men' was the choice for the 2012 Community Read of Madison County.

Everyone is guilty or no one is guilty

Ernest J. Gaines uses the device of multiple narrators most famously used by William Faulkner in As I Lay Dying to tell a story largely through the points of view of a segment of the southern population that Faulkner depicted only from the distant vantage point of the old white aristocracy—impoverished African Americans sharecropping white landowners’ plantations, in this case the Louisiana bayou country in the 1970’s. The setting is further south than Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and the time is a half century or more later, but the living conditions are not radically different.

A black man has killed a white landowner, supposedly in self-defense, but the whole truth and nothing but the truth is known by no one, allowing racial tensions to escalate into almost certain violence. Candy, the heir to the landowner on whose property the incident occurred, is determined to do whatever is necessary to protect the old servant Matthu, whom she loves as a surrogate father, that the evidence incriminates. This drastic action entails spreading the word for all the old African American men in the area to congregate at the scene of the crime with shotguns filled with blank shells; all of them confess to the killing. A unified field of old men with guns, all confessing the murder, will most certainly challenge the orderly execution of the sheriff’s duty, as they take a stand against all the wrongs they have suffered for decades.

I must confess that I felt compelled to suspend disbelief that this many men could form a brave, unified front as a call to action without one voice of dissent other than the old preacher, whom one would expect to advocate non-violence. Casting that aside, this is a pressure cooker situation where parties on all sides react and overreact and fall at various points on the spectrum between pacifism and militant action. The most extreme tendencies of the white racist vigilantes are expressed by Luke Will, a redneck ripe for recruitment in Bull Conner’s riot control police force and on the side of the black men by the Black Panther-like Johnny Paul.

A dramatic crisis of this magnitude inevitably elicits epiphanies from almost everyone that is affected by it and forces them to question assumptions held for a lifetime. In general, Gaines is successful in depicting a variety of points of view from a wide range of characters, black and white, and the dialogue feels accurate with just a few exceptions where it sounds like it was lifted from a weekly TV drama. Not everyone escapes caricature but Gaines’ confidence that he is telling a story that is worth telling propels the story and supplies accelerating momentum, largely transcending the weaknesses. I don’t know enough detail about race relations in the bayou country at that time but if Gaines’ novel is realistic, then it successfully describes a period after the civil rights movement of the sixties when regressive behavior that attempted to turn the clock back no longer happened so easily.