In the fall of 1962, surrounded by more than 2,000 jeering white protesters, James Meredith entered the University of Mississippi as its first African American student. This event, a landmark in United States history, was also a turning point in the life of the then twenty-nine-year-old Ernest Gaines. At the time an aspiring writer in San Francisco, California, Gaines said to himself, "if James Meredith can go through all this-not only for himself, but for his race-, [then I] should go back to the source that I [am] trying to write about" (Gaines in Babb, p. 5). This source, rural Louisiana-where Gaines had been born in 1933 and was raised until age fifteen-is the setting for his novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Narrated by a 110-year-old former slave, the novel tells the long story of her struggle-and the greater African American struggle-for justice after the Civil War and into the 1960s.
Life after slavery. The months following the end of the Civil War were a time of great uncertainty for the freed slaves of the South.
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