This years marks some major anniversaries for some of my favorite writers. Earlier in the year I wrote about the 75th anniversary of Lillian Smith’s memoir Killers of the Dream, and she also has two other major anniversaries this year: the 80th of her debut novel Strange Fruit and the 70th of her next memoir The Journey. Along with these milestones, 2024 also marks the 60th anniversary of Ernest Gaines’ debut novel Catherine Carmier. I will always have, for a multitude of reasons, a special place in my heart and life for Gaines and work, partly because I was able to meet and work with him during my graduate program and partly because of what his work has taught me, not just about my home state and region but also about writing and craft.

For me, Catherine Carmier is not Gaines’ strongest novel. That accolade goes to, as you know if you read me regularly, to his 1967 novel Of Love and Dust, a work that I argue is the most important American novel of the 20th century. Catherine Carmier is a debut novel. It is a first work. It is one inspired, heavily, by Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons and works by others who influenced Gaines such as Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, and more. Catherine Carmier is a novel that illuminates the social construction of race and details, as all of Gaines’ work does, the structural systems of class that perpetuate white supremacy. At its core, though, Catherine Carmier is a work that highlights why the author had to write the novel, the process of creation and the desire to tell one’s own story.

Gaines wrote for the people in his community, the community of Black, rural individuals in and around Riverlake Plantation, the individuals who did not have their stories told. One of the first items I found when I worked at the Ernest J. Gaines Center was a little undated spiral flip notebook with Gaines’ sometimes indiscernible handwriting throughout. Based on what he wrote in the notebook, it is from the 1960s leading up to the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman in 1971. In the notebook, Gaines lays out, for himself, why he wrote:

1. Write because I must. Because there’s something out there that’s need to be said. If i don’t say it-nobody ‘else might not say it either. By this, I mean, who will write about my part of the country? who will talk about write about the way my people talk, the way they sing, the way they feel about God, the way they work; their superstitions. There are so many things that be said about this particular area.

(B.) Money is not the objective, though I want to make money with my writing. But I want to get self-satisfaction.

Gaines migrated to California in 1948, and he tried, for years, to write stories and novels during his time there. However, it wasn’t till he started coming back to Louisiana, visiting his home soil for part of the year, that he started to find his voice. He spoke extensively about what drew him back and inspired him to return to Louisiana instead of going to Mexico with friends to write or elsewhere. He cited James Meredith’s integration of Ole Miss in 1962 as the catalyst that sparked his return home for part of each year.

Each of Gaines’ novels, in some form of fashion, contains elements of his ow life and experiences. Every work of fiction does this. However, while all of Gaines’ works do this, I see his own lived experiences most visibly in Catherine Carmier partly because I read Jackson, the protagonist of the novel, as a corollary for Gaines’ himself. This connection is, of course, not one-to-one, but Jackson’s return to Bayonne and his discussions about wanting to leave and wanting to stay mirror so much of Gaines’ own experiences that I cannot read the novel and overlay Gaines on top of Jackson and vice versa.

Sitting on the porch with Mary Louise, Jackson starts to think about his life in California and why he came back to Louisiana. He thinks about individuals view the North, the Midwest, and the West as a complete escape from the Jim Crow South, but he also undercuts those idealized views by reflecting on the realities. He contemplates the “shabby neighborhood they had to live in because they were Negroes” and he thinks about his stepfather working as a laborer, struggling to make ends meet. He told himself he would never “live under these conditions,” so he went to college and became a teacher.

Jackson continues by reflecting on when he began to “notice the faults” in the façade of the idealized migration West to California. He couldn’t see them as “he sat in a classroom, surrounded by white students, while in the South the problem of integrating schools was causing so much trouble” or when he participated on “the school track team” (something Gaines himself did as well) or when he went swimming at the community pool. The faults appeared in subtle ways, like when servers at restaurants did not explicitly refuse him entrance to the restaurants but did take their precious time in serving him. He saw them when he went to stores to buy socks and when he and his family looked for another place to rent.

Even with these faults, though, Jackson saw the benefits of a multicultural society in California. He saw that, even with all of the “faults,” it was a better because “whether you were a Negro from the South, an Indian from New Mexico, or a Chinese from Hong Kong . . . conditions here were better that the ones you had left, or you would not have left in the beginning.” This multicultural connection expanded to his time in college where he realized that everyone struggled, in their own way. This realization did not diminish the microaggression or the racism, but it helped Jackson see the impacts of classism and other systems on individuals.

Even with this realization, though, the “little incidents” piled up, poking and prodding him, leading him to ultimately decide to leave for somewhere else. When he makes the decision to leave, he doesn’t want to come South, back to Bayonne, but he does that “because he knew people there, and because he had to go somewhere to think for a while.” This aspect, for me, does not totally relate to Gaines, but it does mirror his reasons, in some ways, for returning.

Gaines came back to think, to listen, and to write. He returned because it was, for him, familiar ground. His roots ran deep into the Louisiana soil beside False River. His taproot remained while his body travelled the globe. He returned to discover more about himself, the people he loved, and to reconnect, after years away, with the place where he grew. The soil nourished him, and it nourishes Jackson. Yet, each of them felt tension, a love/hate and push/pull tension that both calms and angers. Jackson is Gaines and Gaines is Jackson.

Catherine Carmier is about much, much more than what I have written here. It is a novel about love, class, race, and home. It is a novel of place, rural South Louisiana. It is a novel of time, the mid-twentieth century. It is a novel of home and what home means. It is all of these things, and more. Yet, for me, whenever I read it, it always becomes about Gaines himself, the man I knew and the life he lived. It’s autobiographical in a way that a lot of novels are autobiographical, with just enough fiction to be held at a distance.

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Catherine Carmier, pick up a copy, read it, and let me know what you think. What are your thoughts? As always, let me know in the comments below. Make sure to follow me on Twitter @silaslapham.