*This date in 1971 celebrates the novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines.
The story depicts the struggles of Blacks through the eyes of the narrator, Jane Pittman. She tells of the major events of her life from the time she was a young slave girl in the Antebellum South at the end of the American Civil War.
The lead character, Jane Pittman, was born sometime before the war. She was a slave from the day she was born. She lived on a plantation in Louisiana until she was 11. Her slave's name was Ticey. When the war broke out, a Union soldier named Mr. Brown came through the property. Mr. Brown was from Ohio. He told Jane that Ticey was a slave name and that she should have another name suitable for a free person. He gave her the name Jane, after his daughter.
When the Union soldiers left, Pittman refused to answer to the name of Ticey, and she was beaten badly by her mistress. Throughout her life, Pittman was independent, determined, hardworking, watchful, and always confronted difficult people and situations head-on. She grew wiser and wiser as she grew older. She saw firsthand the terrible effects of racial discrimination and hatred. Pittman never had children of her own, was never formally married, and outlived all her loved ones. When she was more than 100 years old, Pittman made an important stand for the rights of Blacks by drinking from a "Whites Only" fountain in the courthouse at Bayonne. Pittman lived to be 110 years old.
She lived through the war and Reconstruction. At the turn of the century, Pittman introduced the automobile, the radio, the Depression, and two World Wars. She saw the victories of Black heroes like Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and into the time of the 20th-century American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
She was an eyewitness to many changes in America and the status of African Americans during her lifetime. Bantam Books first published the fiction novel, later dramatized in a TV movie starring Cicely Tyson in 1974.
