Ernest J. Gaines and the Jane Pittman Oak

It spawned questions, that title. Some caught its urgent playfulness, a novel that winks before you turn its cover. Others scrunched their brows at the onset of genre vertigo. Ernest J. Gaines, the son of sharecroppers in Pointe Coupee Parish who became one of the most acclaimed American novelists of the late 20th century, occasionally addressed the matter of “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”

“A representative of Newsweek asked me to send the editors of the magazine a picture of Miss Jane Pittman to be used with a review of the novel,” Gaines wrote in his essay “Miss Jane and I.” “I had to inform her that I could not, since Miss Jane is a creation of my imagination.”

By the time of that book’s publication in 1971, Gaines had already published two novels and the story collection “Bloodline,” finding a serious if not wide audience. Then came “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,” his epic narrative from the perspective of a woman born into slavery who lives through Reconstruction, the Civil War, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Era. Great novelists do more than invite us into their world. They allow us to feel it. That may explain the confusion over the enduring voice that Gaines embodies in Miss Jane’s “autobiography.” 

As a child, Gaines sat in these pews while attending school in the church that he and his wife, Dianne, eventually moved onto their property.

In Oscar, the town on False River where he was born in 1933, Gaines mastered the art of listening. Even as a child, he collected stories from the sharecropping community of Cherie Quarters. His work, which includes the novels “Of Love and Dust,” “A Gathering of Old Men” and “A Lesson Before Dying,” provides an emotional history of one place. It’s his place, the place of the people he grew up among, and through his books, Gaines offers it to us.

On a bend of Louisiana Highway 416 in Lakeland, four miles from Oscar, rises a majestic live oak tree. Estimated to be more than 400 years old, it bears the name of Gaines’ most famous character.

In Gaines’ novel, Miss Jane says of the live oak now honored with a historical marker that she is “not ashamed to say I have talked to it.”

“If you know Ernest Gaines’ work and you know the parish, you know the Miss Jane Pittman Oak,” says Mindy LaCour, executive director of the Pointe Coupee Historical Society. She and her husband, Greg, an architect and vice president of the Historical Society, note that the tree would have been cut down long ago if not for the efforts of Melanie Bueche. In 2008, a limb 12 feet in circumference fell from the tree, damaging a car and blocking the highway. The Department of Transportation sent a landscape architect to inspect the site’s safety. The verdict: The Miss Jane Pittman Oak needed to be felled. Bueche’s movement to save the tree led to its 2016 registration in Louisiana’s Live Oak Society.

In 2021, the Historical Society began work to erect a historical marker beneath the tree. The marker went up the following year. Six months later, it was stolen. Mindy and Greg LaCour started thinking of ways to replace it.

“We built a fortress around it,” says Mindy of the new sign. Although Gaines died in 2019, his widow, Dianne Gaines, still lives in Oscar. In February 2026, she attended the unveiling ceremony. She and Gaines married in 1993, “a momentous year,” she says, that also marked the publication of “A Lesson Before Dying,” the book for which Gaines received a National Book Critics Circle Award. Its dedication reads “For Dianne.” She didn’t know what he was writing when they started seeing one another, and he didn’t tell her. He told her everything else.

Miss Jane Pittman Oak

“We just talked and talked and talked,” she says, sitting in her dining room in Oscar where much of that talking occurred. “It never seemed like a long time.” Among the days that she remembers with her husband, Louisiana’s great novelist: Together on the land where Gaines grew up, the land that inspired his work, they began a conversation one morning and didn’t stop. The hours faded and with them, the light. “Do you think anybody else does this?” Gaines asked. She admitted that she didn’t know.

They met at the Miami Book Fair in 1988. Dianne, a New Orleans native, had been practicing law in Miami. Eventually, they returned to Louisiana, settling in Oscar. They restored the wooden church from Cherie Quarters and moved it behind their house. Gaines had attended school in that church, sitting in its pews and balancing a notebook on his lap before leaving home, at age 15, to study in California, where his mother and stepfather lived.

The Ernest J. Gaines Stamp

“He always came back to Louisiana,” Dianne Gaines says. “He loved Louisiana. It was a part of his soul.” His work remains alive in the land, in the majestic oak that many in this community worked to preserve and honor. It remains alive between covers, in books that deepen the mysteries of the place we call home.

Location
Pointe Coupee Parish

Did You Know?
In 2013, Gaines accepted the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. The U.S. Postal Service issued its Ernest J. Gaines stamp — the 46th stamp in the “Black Heritage” series — in 2023. The annual Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, initiated by donors of the Baton Rouge Area Foundation, “honors Louisiana’s revered storyteller, Ernest J. Gaines, and serves to inspire and recognize rising African-American fiction writers of excellence at a national level.”