Ernest J. Gaines was born on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, a hamlet of Pointe Coupee Parish in rural Louisiana. He was the first of twelve siblings, seven by his father Manuel, five by his mother Adrianne's second husband, Ralph. His father left his mother when Gaines was a small boy, forcing his mother to move to New Orleans to find work. Gaines was left in the care of his great aunt, Augustine Jefferson, a woman he preferred to call his aunt and whom he considered one of the most powerful influences on the formation of his character. The experiences of his early years, particularly the experience of paternal abandonment, provided the bedrock on which his fiction would later be built.

In 1948, at the age of fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, to join his mother and stepfather, because there were no high schools for blacks...