SOURCE: Andrews, William L. “‘We Ain't Going Back There’: The Idea of Progress in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.” Black American Literature Forum 11, no. 4 (winter 1977): 146-49.

In the following essay, Andrews explicates the dialectic representation of progress and regress that informs The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, demonstrating a pattern of psychological and spiritual evolution of the African American characters's consciousnesses that counters the forces of sociopolitical stasis and regression.

Escape from the closed world of the Southern plantation-ghetto has been a persistent theme in Afro-American writing from the early slave narratives to the experimental fiction of Ishmael Reed. The rural South has long been pictured as the last bastion of the slavery mentality, and while a few black writers have explored means by which to reform that mentality, more have followed the lead of Richard Wright, William Attaway, William Melvin Kelley, and Ronald Fair¹ in suggesting...