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Gaines, Ernest J. (b. January 15, 1933, Oscar, Louisiana) Novelist and short-story author Ernest J. Gaines is one of the most distinguished and steadily prolific African American authors of recent years. He is best known for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), but such later novels as In My Father’s House (1978), A Gathering of Old Men (1983), and A Lesson Before Dying (1993) have earned at least as much praise as his breakthrough novel and a raft of awards and fellowships.

Gaines’s novels and stories are set primarily in the American South, specifically Louisiana’s rural African American communities. Each novel is either set in or connected to the town of Bayonne, St. Raphael Parish, Louisiana, where African American, Creole, Cajun, and Caucasian cultures interact, mix, and confront each other. Gaines’s focus upon Bayonne, St. Raphael Parish, and the South in general has earned him an increasingly common place within Southern literature courses in American universities. One of Gaines’s major goals as a writer is to reinsert African Americans into their rightful place in Southern history, as was true of many African American authors who began publishing in the 1960s. His sympathetic portrayal of African Americans in and from the South certainly sets him apart from such white peers and predecessors as William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, but he is also as true to the vagaries and eccentricities of Southern life as any other writer from the region. Gaines’s perspicacious and nuanced view of his subjects has earned him a Wallace Stegner Award (1957–1958), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1973–1974), a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” grant in 1993, and a special issue of the journal Callaloo (1, no. 3, May 1978) devoted to his works. Callaloo also bestowed a special citation upon Gaines at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention in 2001 as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary celebration.

Gaines’s early novels, Catherine Carmier (1964) and Of Love and Dust (1967), and his short story collection Bloodline (1968) introduce not only the setting that concerns the remainder of his works but also the themes of silence and repression brought about by the South’s and the nation’s obsession with racial categories. His novels since 1970 are arguably his best and most mature, with several bona fide classics among them. The undisputed masterpiece among these is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), which is often categorized as a neo–slave narrative (see separate entry) for its 110-year-old, first-person narrator and protagonist, who was born in antebellum 1852 and lives into the tumultuous Civil Rights era. The novel is told as if Miss Jane is speaking to an editor recording her life, thereby emphasizing the importance of orality in African American culture and literature. The length of Miss Jane’s life and the clarity with which she recalls her experiences allow her to record and remark upon many of the major developments in African American and American history from the Civil War until the novel’s present. The novel is invested in showing the ways in which the different groups living in St. Raphael Parish established their identities along racial lines, with most of the attention going to African Americans, who, like Miss Jane Pittman herself, must name themselves, stave off violent assaults upon both their persons and their communities, and reinvent themselves as the nation slowly crawls toward progress. This is best expressed through the violent deaths of Miss Jane’s adopted son Ned, already orphaned by racial violence, and Jimmy Aaron, a Civil Rights activist. The absurdity of racial distinctions and their repressive effects are ultimately indicted, but the novel emphasizes that the fight against even the worst forms of degradation and discrimination must never cease. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was also made into a popular film for television in 1974, starring Cicely Tyson as Miss Jane.

In My Father’s House (1978) is perhaps the least popular and artistically successful of Gaines’s novels, qualities attributable to its startling departure from the cautious optimism of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. The protagonist, Philip Martin, is a prominent Civil Rights activist who finds that both he and his community now question the efficacy of nonviolent, integrated protest and actions. Philip’s haunting queries act as metaphors for a parallel quest for peace with his past, in which he fathered an illegitimate son who reappears as a member of the Nation of Islam. Martin’s struggles with both his son and his past do not flow as well as the action of the earlier novel but still offer sufficient opportunity to take a retrospective look at the successes and failures of the Civil Rights era.

A Gathering of Old Men (1983) is structured as a detective novel of sorts, with the detectives being the nine men of the title, each of whom has an opportunity to narrate a section of the novel and therefore unravel the plot’s mystery. The latter concerns the murder of Beau Botan, a Cajun work boss on the plantation of the Marshall family. As the local sheriff tries to find the killer, he discovers that many people, especially African Americans who had been subjected to numerous horrors under both de jure and de facto segregation and racial discrimination, have more than enough motive to murder Botan and are willing to pay for his death, regardless of their innocence. As the Boutan family plans its traditional violent vengeance upon the town’s black population, they soon discover that the old ways no longer work in the post–Civil Rights era, in which violence is more destructive to those who commit it.

A Lesson Before Dying (1993), set in Bayonne in 1948, is narrated by Grant Wiggins, a black schoolteacher who is called upon to act as the amanuensis for Jefferson, a young black man falsely accused of robbing a local liquor store. At his trial, Jefferson’s incompetent defense attorney uses a racist defense in front of the all-white jury, arguing that Jefferson’s African heritage makes him capable of spontaneous, random violence but not intelligent enough to plot a robbery. As a result, Jefferson is sentenced to death, but his mother is determined that her barely literate son find a way to define and express himself fully through mastery of language so that he may also die with dignity, despite the vagaries of a racist system. As Jefferson completes his journal indicting the failures of democracy—his name is an ironic commentary upon Thomas Jefferson’s ambivalent attempts to define democracy for the nation—he transforms his community and the narrator himself. A Lesson Before Dying won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1993.

The scholarship on Gaines is extensive; the majority of the articles on his novels are found in Callaloo, African American Review, CLA Journal, MELUS, and American Literature, in that order. Since Gaines is from Louisiana and Callaloo was long based at Louisiana State University, that journal has routinely published excerpts from Gaines’s novels in progress and is the single greatest source of regular scholarship; its entire May 1978 issue (number 3) is devoted to Gaines’s work and should be among the first consulted. Books on Gaines’s fiction include: Valerie Melissa Babb, Ernest Gaines (1991); David C. Estes, ed., Critical Reflections on the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines (1994); Herman Beavers, Wrestling Angels Into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (1995); Karen Carmean, Ernest J. Gaines: A Critical Companion (1998); and Mary Ellen Doyle, Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines (2002).

Key critical articles include: Jack Hicks, “To Make These Bones Live: History and Community in Ernest J. Gaines’s Fiction,” BALF 11, no. 1 (Spring 1977); John W. Roberts, “The Individual and the Community in Two Short Stories by Ernest J. Gaines,” BALF 18, no. 3 (Autumn 1984); Mary Ellen Doyle, “Ernest Gaines’ Materials: Place, People, Author,” MELUS 15, no. 3 (Autumn 1988), and “Ernest J. Gaines: An Annotated Bibliography, 1956–1988,” BALF 24, no. 1 (Spring 1990); Wolfgang Lepschy,“A MELUS Interview: Ernest J. Gaines,” MELUS 24, no. 1 (Spring 1999).

“Girlfriends’ Book.” See Sister Novel.

Goines, Donald (b. December 15, 1937, Detroit, Michigan; d. October 21, 1974, Detroit, Michigan) During his short career, Donald Goines was one of the most popular African American fiction authors, due largely to his novels’ accessible style and street-savvy subject matter. Between the publication of his first novel, Dopefiend, in 1971, and 1975, when his last two novels were published after Goines’s violent death, he attracted and maintained his sizeable audience by writing about subjects he knew all too well from his own experience: the lives and perspectives of heroin addicts and drug dealers; gambling, pimping and prostitution; armed robbery; and various forms of street hustling. He spent approximately six years of his life in prison for offenses committed in several of these occupations. By the time Dopefiend was published, Goines had been arrested fifteen times or more and was addicted to heroin from 1955 until his death.^* All of these experiences gave Goines’s writing a gritty realism that few writers could match, but they also led to his early death at age thirty-six, when he and his wife were shot in their Detroit home. The identity of their two assailants has yet to be determined.

All of Goines’s novels document the life of street hustlers engaged in just about every type of illegal business imaginable. Goines was largely inspired by Iceberg Slim, the former pimp and street hustler whose books were—and still are—highly popular in many African American communities. Like Slim, Goines frequently condemns the very behavior he is depicting and offers a number of both straightforward and implicit social commentaries along the way in a double-voiced style (that is to say, a mix of urban African American and standard English) that pulls few punches. His appeal rests upon offering an indictment of racism and the hypocrisy of the American middle and upper classes, arguing that the underclasses must scrabble under the worst circumstances to survive in a world that is known only in the most oblique way by most of the nation. Dopefiend: The Story of a Black Junkie, for example, follows the downfall of Teddy and Terry, two middle-class African Americans seduced into heroin addiction, including virtually every vice and behavior in which hardcore addicts participate. The same may be said of Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp (1971), in which Whoreson Jones, the progeny of a black prostitute and unknown white father, rises to the level of a major pimp by becoming utterly ruthless, thereby sacrificing most of the attributes that are normally accorded to middle-class respectability in America. Black Gangster (1972) uses the life of another street hustler to show how everything from different types of street crime to the Black Nationalist politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s are vices that can be hustled to the right people if one is clever and cynical enough; Street Players (1973) repeats many of the same themes. White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief: Crime Partners (1973) is largely an exposé of the racial inequities of the American justice system, while Black Girl Lost (1973), Eldorado Red (1974), and Never Die Alone (1974) cover much of the same territory found in Goines’s earlier novels. Swamp Man (1974) is somewhat unusual, in that it imagines the implications of a lusty interracial relationship between a black woman and a white man. With the exception of the posthumous Inner City Hoodlum (1975), the remainder of Goines’s novels were published under the pseudonym of Al C. Clark to avoid flooding the market with too many books under the author’s given name. Four of these novels constitute a series featuring the exploits of militant protagonist Kenyatta, who first appeared in White Man’s Justice, Black Man’s Grief; the others are Death List, Kenyatta’s Escape (both 1974), and Kenyatta’s Last Hit (1975). Over the course of the series, Kenyatta develops into a major revolutionary figure in Detroit. Daddy Cool (1974) and Inner City Hoodlum again cover much of the same ground of Goines’s earlier work, although deeper human bonds and emotions do appear in the former novel, in which a hit man feels enormous regret after his daughter is seduced into the world of prostitution.

Golden, Marita (b. April 28, 1950, Washington, D.C.) Memoirist, essayist, and novelist Marita Golden has established herself as an influential and prolific figure on the contemporary African American literary scene. In 1990, Golden founded the nonprofit Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation, which annually awards prizes to writers of African descent in the categories of fiction, debut fiction, nonfiction, and contemporary fiction. Many newer or younger African American writers of the 1990s have either won an award from the Hurston/Wright foundation, or have been named as finalists. A recent anthology, Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing (2002), co-edited with novelist E. Lynn Harris, collects stories and novel excerpts from many of the Hurston/Wright award winners. The proceeds from its sales also benefit the foundation.

Golden’s first autobiography, Migrations of the Heart (1983), uses her experiences coming of age in the 1960s and in the changing African American communities of the 1970s to reflect upon issues that affected the nation as well as Golden herself. Golden’s subsequent memoirs and essay collections have followed Migrations’s combination of fluid, clever prose and personal experience and its focus upon addressing contemporary social issues. The titles of two of her most popular works, Saving Our Sons: Raising Black Children in a Turbulent World (1995) and A Miracle Every Day: Triumph and Transformation in the Lives of Single Mothers (1999), demonstrate this most effectively; both arose directly from Golden’s experiences raising her family.

Golden’s contributions to contemporary fiction consist of four novels to date. The first, A Woman’s Place (1986), is based upon a few of Golden’s own experiences in the 1960s and 1970s. It revolves around three black women, Faith, Crystal, and Serena, who meet at a predominantly white college in the late 1960s and form strong bonds through their mutual interest in political activism and in finding their identities as women. Each discovers that she must learn to take possession of that identity rather than to surrender it to men who have been acculturated to view women as mere objects to be possessed and controlled.

Long Distance Life (1989) is set in Washington, D.C., and concerns the journey of Naomi Johnson, who moved as a young woman from a hard life of sharecropping in North Carolina to the nation’s capitol to raise her family. Naomi watches as the fortunes of her family wax and wane over four generations, decaying as they move further from the traditions and spirituality that Naomi represents. Golden uses the connections and conflicts between Naomi, her daughter Esther, and their respective husbands to symbolize changes in African American communities over time and through major historical epochs. In addition, Golden tells a quieter tale of the extent to which the novel’s women and men need one another; each of the major male characters dies too young, thereby allowing Golden to show how the novel’s women struggle in their absence. Golden seems equally concerned with showing this struggle and affirming her women’s inner strength, although that character comes with a tragic price.

And Do Remember Me (1992) tells how Civil Rights activist Jessie Foster escaped from her father’s sexual molestation to become part of the zeitgeist of the greatest social movement of the 1960s. As Jessie witnesses the triumphs and tragedies of the movement, she also begins an acting career and befriends Macon, a young black college professor at an historically white university, who encounters the virulent racism common at that time. Macon and Jessie’s respective stories link the Civil Rights movement to present-day “race” relations, arguing implicitly that the struggle that the Civil Rights movement represented never truly ended but has waned due to a dearth of knowledge about that struggle on both sides of the racial divide.

In The Edge of Heaven (1998), Golden experiments with form and perspective to create a postmodern novel about the Singletary family, in which the mother, Lena, is estranged from her daughter Teresa during Lena’s stint in prison for an accounting scandal. When Lena is released, she soon realizes that her family’s bonds have always been strained due to the absence of deep love and the presence of alienating modern conveniences—television, automobiles, and other material items—and deep family secrets in their lives. All of these elements threaten to destroy the family unless they can find paths to redemption and forgiveness.

Gomez, Jewelle (b. September 1948, Boston, Massachusetts) Poet, critic, activist, and novelist Jewelle Gomez began writing and publishing her poetry in the late 1970s after being inspired by the poetic works and performances of Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, and Ntozake Shange. Although most of her output consists of poetry and criticism, Gomez’s novel and short-story collection have earned considerable attention and acclaim. All of her writing is marked by an interest in and attention to the possibilities of helping women to transcend sexism, especially the ignorance and abuse that it brings. Gomez’s first novel, The Gilda Stories (1991), is superficially a vampire story set in antebellum New Orleans, but it is also a remarkable revision of the vampire motif within the horror genre. In fact, it is barely a horror story in the traditional sense, as the true horror comes from the circumstances of slavery whence The Girl runs into the care of the eponymous Gilda, the main vampire in question. Gilda acts as a savior, maternal figure, and lover to The Girl long before she bites her. As with traditional vampire narratives, that act is eroticized, but the eroticism is deeply infused with love, as Gilda gives The Girl her name and a greater sense of identity. The novel earned high praise for Gomez from several quarters but especially from the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered community, which applauded the possibilities of sexual and gender identity the novel offered, earning Gomez a Lambda Award (1991). Gomez’s work also appeals to some aficionados of science/speculative fiction. Gomez’s first short-story collection, Don’t Explain: Short Fiction (1998) comprises a number of sketches and longer stories that fit into the science fiction and fantasy genres, including one that continues Gilda’s saga. The previous year, Gomez also coedited the collection Best Lesbian Erotica 1997 with Tristan Taormino.

To date, a number of scholarly articles have been published both by and about Gomez: Judith E. Johnson, “Women and Vampires: Nightmare or Utopia?” The Kenyon Review 15, no. 1 (Winter 1993); Elyce Rae Helford, “The Future of Political Community: Race, Ethnicity, and Class Privilege in Novels by Piercy, Gomez, and Misha,” Utopian Studies 12, no. 2 (Spring 2001); Gomez, “Speculative Fiction and Black Lesbians,” Signs 18, no. 4 (Summer 1993); and “Talking About It: Homophobia in the Black Community, a Dialogue Between Jewelle Gomez and Barbara Smith,” Feminist Review 34 (Spring 1990).

Gordon, Howard (b. March 11, 1952, Syracuse, New York) Short-story writer Howard Gordon is the author of one collection, The African in Me (1993). The volume comprises nine stories set in the African American community of Syracuse, New York. Many delineate the ways in which racism, difficult family dynamics, and anger affect the lives of the characters. Gordon has had stories printed in the following collections: “After Dreaming of President Johnson,” in Gloria Naylor, ed., Children of the Night: The Best Short Stories by Black Writers, 1967 to the Present (1995) and in The Souls of Black Folk and Related Readings (1998); “The Playground of Hostility,” in Imagining America: Stories From the Promised Land, ed. Wesley Brown and Amy Ling (1992); “My Lucy,” in Rites of Passage: Stories About Growing Up by Black Writers from Around the World, ed. Tonya Bolden (1994); “I Can’t Find My Blackface,” in Streetlights: Illuminating Tales of the Urban Black Experience, ed. DorisJean Austin and Martin Simmons (1996); “Someone is Screaming” in Preventing Violence in Schools: A Challenge to American Democracy, ed. Joan Burstyn (2001).

Greenlee, Sam (b. July 30, 1930, Chicago, Illinois) Novelist, poet, and nonfiction author Sam Greenlee became famous via his bestselling novel, The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969). The novel tells of an African American, Dan Freeman, who fawns his way into being hired by the CIA as a token black in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; he then uses his knowledge to become a revolutionary. Written as a militant indictment of racism and cynicism within the United States government, Greenlee’s novel was a major influence upon African American fiction and culture of the 1970s and later turned into a popular Blaxploitation film in 1973. It underscores the difficulty, if not impossibility, of African Americans achieving true equality in post–Civil Rights America. His only other novel was Baghdad Blues: The Revolution That Brought Saddam Hussein to Power (1976; reprinted 1991), the semiautobiographical adventures of a U.S. intelligence bureau operative stationed in Iraq at the time of the coup mentioned in the subtitle. It is remarkable for its prescient view of the Hussein regime’s nature and role in the region.

Grooms, Anthony (b. January 15, 1955, Louisa County, Virginia) Poet, short-story writer, and novelist Anthony Grooms made a significant mark upon the literary scene with his first book of poems, Ice Poems (1988). His two book-length contributions to contemporary African American fiction, Trouble No More (1995; short stories) and Bombingham (2001) have also been successes. In addition, Trouble No More won the 1996 Lillian Smith Award for Fiction, while Bombingham has won universal praise for its combination of lyricism, complex characters, and a delicate balance of history, politics, and a focus on simple humanity.

Trouble No More’s stories are remarkable for all of these reasons but also for their attention to the extreme diversity within African American communities. Their narrators and protagonists are frequently youths living during or after the Civil Rights movement, attempting to make sense of a world in which their ordinary wants and needs come into conflict with racism or difficult family circumstances. Grooms’s stories highlight the fact that African American communities are never monolithic, always comprising people allied to divergent factions but with their own personal and political problems that often parallel one another. Grooms’s first novel, Bombingham, illustrates this point perfectly. Bombingham takes its title from a nickname that members of the black community of Birmingham, Alabama, gave the city after more than twenty unsolved bombings of African American homes and institutions had occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. The novel’s protagonist, Walter Lee Burke, is a soldier in the Vietnam War attempting to discover when he lost his humanity and compassion. He traces this loss back to 1963, the year when the Civil Rights movement had began to turn the corner of popular support, in part due to the horrific bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, in which four African American girls were killed and many others were injured. Even as the city’s African American community, Civil Rights leaders, and the world at large galvanizes around the event, eleven-year-old Walter Lee must also cope with his mother’s devastating, slow death from cancer. The tragedies parallel each other, creating an elaborate metaphor for the wrenching shift in the nation’s view of African Americans, while keeping the humanity of black people in the light.

Grooms’s work has also garnered a Sokolov Scholarship from the Breadloaf Writing Conference, the Lamar lectureship from Wesleyan College, and an Arts Administration Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Guy, Rosa (b. September 1, 1925, Trinidad) Novelist Rosa Guy wrote a series of stories intended primarily for young adults and juveniles from the 1960s through the 1980s. She was a cofounder of the Harlem Writers Guild (along with John Oliver Killens) in 1951 and a member of the Committee for the Negro in the Arts in the 1940s. Most of her novels are set in Harlem and focus upon the difficulties of coming of age in that environment. The best-known of these are her earliest works, a trilogy comprising Friends (1973), Ruby (1976), and Edith Jackson (1978). Each novel studies conflicts within African American and African Diasporic communities via the Cathy and Jackson families of Harlem. Friends explores class differences and conflicts between African Americans and black Caribbeans, while Ruby focuses upon Ruby Cathy’s heartbreak in the wake of her mother’s death. It was selected as the Best Book for Young Adults by the American Library Association in 1976. Edith Jackson follows the eponymous protagonist’s struggles after her father leaves the family, allowing the novel to comment upon the modern state of the American family.

Guy is also widely known for writing the exploits of young black detective Imamu Jones in another trilogy consisting of The Disappearance (1979), New Guys Around the Block (1983), and And I Heard a Bird Sing (1987). Each of the Imamu Jones novels is both an exemplary work of suspense and an exposé of the problems of drugs, alcoholism, and abuse found in many urban African American communities. Other works include: Mirror of Her Own (1981), about an upper-class white family and its conflicts over love, infidelity, and addiction, and Mother Crocodile (1983; a children’s book adapted from an African American folktale). A Measure of Time (1983) is an adult novel apparently—and loosely—based upon the life of millionaire beauty product manufacturer Madame C. J. Walker. Set in Montgomery, Alablama, and Harlem, the protagonist, Dorine Davis, goes from poverty in the South to riches in Harlem yet maintains her humanity. Paris, Peewee, and Big Dog (1984), My Love, My Love, or The Peasant Girl (1985), and Billy the Great are more examples of Guy’s juvenile fiction. The first and third are tales of friendship, while My Love, My Love adapts Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” for the Antilles in a tale of racial prejudice. It was in turn adapted into the Broadway Musical Once on This Island in 1990 and nominated for eight Tony Awards. The Ups and Downs of Carl Davis III (1989) is juvenile fiction centering upon the titular protagonist’s attempts to share his African American heritage and history with his indifferent schoolmates. The Music of Summer (1991) is an adult novel about intraracial prejudice along color and class lines, while The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995), also an adult novel, is based in part on Guy’s own time in Haiti in the early 1970s. Its protagonist, painter Jonnie Dash, travels to the impoverished island nation to escape her New York environment and background and to restore her artistic vision by painting the local citizenry, but she finds herself shocked and outraged by the poverty that surrounds her.

For her efforts, Guy has become one of the leading voices in contemporary African American juvenile fiction and is routinely listed among the genre’s most important authors of the twentieth century. Guy is included in The Oxford Book of Children’s Stories (1995) and Calling the Wind: Twentieth-Century African-American Short Stories (1994). Scholarly attention has followed, primarily in the 1990s, as the field of juvenile fiction garnered more attention. Key articles include: Vera R. Edwards, “Telling Tales: The Pedagogy and the Promise of African American Literature for Youth,” AAR 28, no. 1 (Spring 1994); Elizabeth Schafer, “‘I’m Gonna Glory in Learnin’: Academic Aspirations of African American Characters in Children’s Literature,” AAR 32, no. 1 (Spring 1998).

* Greg Goode, “Donald Goines,” DLB, vol. 96:96, 98.