The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

by Ernest J. Gaines

Paperback, 1982

Status

Available

Local notes

PB Gai

Barcode

904

Publication

Bantam (1982), Edition: Reissue, 259 pages

Description

This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110 years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. In this woman, Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkner's Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has seen and "endured" almost everything, and foretold the rest.

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1971-04

Physical description

259 p.; 4.19 inches

User reviews

LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
Classic first person narrative of the life of a woman from emancipation (which came when she was 9 or 10 years old, and an orphan) to the early days of the modern civil rights movement. The historical context is familiar territory, but there's not really another literary heroine like Jane. From the
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moment a Yankee soldier gave her her "freedom name" of Jane Brown, and told her she was no longer a slave, Miss Jane Pittman was a force to be reckoned with. No matter her circumstances, she endured, and often prevailed, by banishing fear, accepting reality, and never for a moment losing her sense of self.
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LibraryThing member filmbuff1994
A work of fiction chronicling a life from the time of slavery to the civil rights era? Wow, I feel smarter already.

Meet Miss Jane Pittman, a 110-year-old black woman who lives on a plantation making meager wages from her white boss. She’s not a slave anymore, but she might as well be. She and her
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fellow workers break their backs on the farm and receive next to nothing. Undereducated but smart as a whip, Miss Jane is quite a character. An unnamed schoolteacher convinces her to let him document her life in a series of audio recordings, suspecting Jane might have quite a story to tell. Oh, and does she ever!

Jane’s story encompasses almost a hundred years, dozens of characters, and a multitude of historical events. Jane has suffered years of abuse and heartbreak and has aged into quite a fine woman. She’s loved and lost, suffered and lost some more. But ages of struggle have given her a wise outlook on life. She’s been a slave. She’s been a wife, an adoptive mother, a warrior. But mostly she’s been quintessentially Jane, a experienced lady with a life time of memories to share.

I had never read anything by Ernest J. Gaines before The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, but I had heard many good things about him. As soon as I got ahold of a copy, I devoured it relatively quickly (for a slow reader like me, mind). A slim volume with a lot of ground to cover, Jane Pittman maintains the no-nonsense and the plain speech of it’s protagonist. I must confess I liked Jane a lot. I adored her strength and her offbeat spirituality.

I found this book to be an enlightening and educational experience without being too preachy. It certainly contains a refreshing lack of white guilt. You’ve got your basically good, decent white men and your dreadful minorities, and vice versa. Your black characters are not above racism and barbarism and your whites are not incapable of compassion. I got the impression Mr. Ernest J. Gaines has a good head on his shoulders and has bigger fish to fry than moaning about the ghastly whites, while still accurately portraying how the white man has fucked things up for many.

On the down side, I found the take of keeping all the characters straight daunting, to say the least. There were about two Marys, two Alberts, and innumerable Joes scattered throughout this narrative. Characters are introduced erratically never to be heard from again. Also, I didn’t find myself liking the last segment of the book as much as I enjoyed the first few parts. Miss Jane Pittman is best when dealing with Jane’s early years or the white Tee Bob’s doomed infatuation with a mixed-race schoolteacher.

However, when Jimmy, a precocious black boy who Jane mystically insisted could be ‘the one,’ showed up, I was just about ready for the book to end. I guess after introducing a strong, progressive African-American character like Ned earlier on and leaving Jimmy little room to develop, Jimmy just seemed like an extension of Ned. Now I know the decision was somewhat deliberate, but I still found the part of the book focusing primarily on Jimmy to be a bit of a bore.

The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a fascinating novel featuring a delightful heroine. It’s brilliance is in it’s artful simplicity, and I am looking forward to catching up with Gaines’ other books.
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LibraryThing member jbmartin
This book, for short TAOMJP, was very interesting. Knowing that it was, hence the title, an autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, I knew that i would be following her life. The only thing however is that I did not know when they would start talking about her life. As I learn from the very beginning,
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they start talking about her life when she was a young slave girl. From there, it went on up until she was an elderly woman, around the time of Martin Luther King. The things that happened to Jane throughout her lifetime were very interesting and kept me wanting to find out more about her life, but I felt as though the story plot dragged on sometimes. It is blatantly obvious that Jane is a hero because of how strong she was, and how she was about to stay so composed during the hard times. She really was a mother to everyone, even when she was a young girl. One of the reasons why I chose to read this book was because I had read another book by Ernest Gaines, and I really enjoyed his writing style- but I was somewhat disappointed with this one because the writing style was very different. I overall enjoyed it!
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LibraryThing member sean.r
A brilliantly crafted work of fiction which interweaves historical references and recollections into a compelling life story. The book is about the life of a woman (Miss Jane) who was born into slavery, and survived to the dawn of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. The book is a modern
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masterpiece on the topics of race and social justice in America, an overarching story of black experience from the Civil War to Civil Rights, seen primarily through the experience of one woman, but incorporating and representing the experiences of all others. (The book was also adapted into an outstanding film starring Cicely Tyson in the title role.)
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LibraryThing member ladybug74
I enjoyed this book, though parts of it seemed to run on and on a bit. I guess that was because it was written the way that this person would have talked if she was telling the story. I can remember my own 2 grandmothers going on and on while talking about their past, so it's easy to imagine Jane
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as a real person telling her story. Though this book is fiction, it was very believable and seemed historically accurate, based on non-fiction books of this type that I have read.
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LibraryThing member yvonne.sevignykaiser
First, I read this as part of the Southern Literary Trail Group, this was one of three January selections as a Pre 1980 read.

This is a fictional autobiography created by the author loosely based on a number of people who grew up with. What a great concept and gives meaning to the times and changes
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a person born of slavery, emancipated, and lives to see the civil rights movement and the changes that came from that movement.

You love Miss Pittman she is a noble character that you wish you had the opportunity to meet and chat with over tea or just a coca cola.
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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace
Miss Jane Pittman could be your great-grandmother, she is that real of a character. I'm sure listening to this on audio had something to do with that perception. When 100 year old Miss Pittman tells her life story to an unidentified high school history teacher it's as if she is sitting in your
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living room. Beginning when she was ten years old and freed from slavery in the deep south, she recounts her journey to leave the Louisiana plantation she has known all her life. She is looking for the white abolitionist who gave her new "free" name. All she knows is that he is somewhere in Ohio. So, to Ohio she heads. Along the way she befriends an orphan boy and encounters seemingly overwhelming obstacles. But, I don't think it's a spoiler to say, overcome these obstacles, she does. She raises the orphan boy as her own and even though she doesn't make it out of Louisiana, forges a life for herself.
One point of observation is that while Miss Jane Pittman has lived a long life, you don't hear her talk a lot about her own personal life. She would rather discuss the people around her and how they influenced her.
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LibraryThing member cbl_tn
At 110 years old, Jane Pittman’s life has taken her from slavery to the civil rights era. Her “autobiography” reads like an oral history recounted to an anonymous interviewer. After the Civil War leaves them free, Jane and several other former slaves set out for Ohio, but Jane never makes it
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out of Louisiana. She finds work that she knows, laboring in someone else’s fields to keep a roof over her head and food in her belly. Her long life is filled with losses of the people she loves most, yet she never loses the fire of her spirit. I found the writing uneven. (Or perhaps it was the pacing.) The first two thirds of the book were hard to put down, but by the last third I was ready to be finished with it and to move on to another read.
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LibraryThing member lycomayflower
Miss Jane Pittman begins her story when she is about eleven years old, just as she and her fellow slaves learn that they are now free. Then she tells of her life over the following hundred years, as she lives through reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the beginnings of the Civil Rights movement. Gaines
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brings Jane alive and, especially in the beginning of the novel, I was riveted by her story. Some of the later incidents (excepting the final one, where I was again riveted), didn’t engage me quite as much, but on the whole I am very glad to have read this novel and feel like I learned things in the best way that story telling can teach. I’ll be looking out for more by Gaines.
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LibraryThing member JerseyGirl21
I found that the story was very informative and well written.
LibraryThing member BeauxArts79
Until I reached the last page of the novel, I was certain I would award it four solid stars. The ending is unsatisfying in a general sense but more so in the context of an autobiography, a genre which doesn't conventionally rely on artsy ambiguity. Since the fictitious interviewer explains in the
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foreword that Jane lived for several months after the final interview, the lack of resolution is especially inexplicable.
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LibraryThing member gpangel
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Earnest J. Gaines is a 1971 publication.

A very realistic classic

I don’t remember what grade I was in, but one of my teachers offered the class extra credit if they watched the made for television movie based on this book. My family gathered around our
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console TV and sat riveted by Cicely Tyson’s performance. I had big fat tears streaming down my cheeks at the end, and the movie made such an impression on me, I still own a DVD copy of it. I will confess that for a long time I thought this was a true story-

For the record, this is a work of fiction, but it is presented in such a way, it would be very easy to believe it was a true story.

Before Ms. Tyson passed away, I had already put her memoir on hold at the library, but after her death, I found myself mulling over her iconic roles, and while Sounder and Roots are still prevalent in my memory, it was her role as Miss Jane Pittman that made the biggest impression on me.

After re-watching the movie recently, I was once again reminded that it was based on a book, which I had completely forgotten about.

How could I have gone all this time without reading the book? That seemed totally unacceptable, so I set out to find a copy, and once again, my library came through- as did Scribd, which has the audio version.

In Jane’s long life she sees the aftermath of the Civil War, lives through the Jim Crow south, and decides, well past the century mark by this time, to set an example, by taking part in the Civil Rights movement.

Her life is filled with hardships and tragedies, but before her life ended, she became a true inspiration, doing what others were too afraid to do.

The book version does vary some from the television production, which left out a sad interracial relationship Jane witnessed, for example, and really, really, toned down the use of racial slurs.

The book, unfortunately, severely lacked inflection, and was devoid of the emotion that the movie generated- especially the iconic conclusion. I admit I was a bit let down by the flat tone of the narration, including the audio version, which was also strangely pedestrian.

This may be one of those very rare times when the movie version was better than the book. Still, I am glad I took the time to read it, as it did teach some lessons the movie left out, and the lack of glossiness was very effective during a few specific passages.

Overall, while the book is fairly dry, it does hold an air of authenticity, and should be read as a companion to the movie for the full experience.

3 stars
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LibraryThing member MontzaleeW
The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
by Ernest J. Gaines
This is a fictional autobiography. Regardless, it is historically correct in the social aspects.
A reporter comes to see Jane who is turning 110 years old and he asks if she would share some of her life stories. This is 1962. The book then
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flashes back to her life as a slave, her freedom but working like a slave, on up til present. It's a book of sorrow, pain, joy, love, and strength. A lot is happening in their town with civil rights in 1962. She has one last adventure left in her before she dies. I enjoyed it but keep tissue handy.
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Pages

259

Rating

½ (209 ratings; 3.8)
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