than one woman. When the plantation system changed to sharecropping, many of these people left the plantation for the big cities, and there was always news about them getting into fights and getting themselves killed or sent to Angola State Prison for life. H (yes, that is a name) was one of those tough guys; he was tall, very handsome, and tough. He was shot point-blank when he was trying to climb through a window after hearing that his woman was with another man. Two or three months after this happened, I was back in Louisiana, and a group of us went over to the White Eagle bar. One of my friends pointed to a guy three tables away from us and said, “That is the fellow that killed H.” “What the hell is he doing here?” I asked. “Shouldn’t he be in jail?” “He was the good nigger,” my friend said. “You don’t have to go to the pen when a good nigger kills a bad nigger. A white man can pay your bond and you work for him for five to seven years.”
I could not get that image of this guy sitting there in his blue silk shirt, blue slacks, and two-toned shoes from my mind, and back in San Francisco one day while listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins and “Tim Moore’s Farm,” I thought about this guy at the White Eagle who had killed H. Suppose now, just suppose, I said to myself, you take a guy like this and you put him on a plantation to work off his time under a tough, brutal white overseer: what do you think would happen between the two of them? I wrote a first draft of this novel in three months and sent it to New York. My editor sent it back to me with this note: “I liked the first part of your manuscript; I liked the second part of your manuscript. However, the two parts have nothing in common but the characters. In the first half you have a tragedy; in the second, a farce. Go back and do it one way or the other; stick to tragedy.” I wrote him back, “But the State of Louisiana did not see this as a tragedy. I have proof of that.” Bill wrote back, “Too bad for the State of Louisiana.”
And he was right about the novel. The first half was serious, the second was not. But I thought that if the State of Louisiana would not take the death of this young man seriously, why shouldn’t I make a farce out of it? “Your Marcus killed another human being,” Bill said; “you let him con the people on that plantation every way that he can, then you let him escape with the overseer’s wife. No, that is not right; he should pay, or in this case let’s take a different route.” What happened in reality was that I rewrote the novel in three months and sent it back to Bill. He said that I had improved it 100 percent, but he told me to run it through the typewriter one more time, and he would publish both the novel and the
Bloodline
stories.
Bloodline
is the beginning of going back into the past. I realized after writing
Catherine Carmier
that I had only touched on what I wanted to say about the old place and the people who lived there. My own folks are African, European, and Native American; they had lived in the same parish for four generations before me. My siblings and I are the fifth generation, and my brother’s children are the sixth. There are no diaries, journals, letters, or any written words left by the old people, but there are people on that plantation who could tell me about my grandparents’ grandparents and about the other old people of that time. Some of the stories were horrible, others were funny, but they were educational.
Until I was fifteen, I lived with my aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson. Because my aunt could not go to other people’s houses, they would come to our house. They would talk and talk and talk, and I would listen. When there was no school and I was not needed in the fields, I often was kept at the house to make coffee or serve water. I also wrote letters for the old people. I have been asked many times about when I started writing, and for years I said I started at the
I could not get that image of this guy sitting there in his blue silk shirt, blue slacks, and two-toned shoes from my mind, and back in San Francisco one day while listening to Lightnin’ Hopkins and “Tim Moore’s Farm,” I thought about this guy at the White Eagle who had killed H. Suppose now, just suppose, I said to myself, you take a guy like this and you put him on a plantation to work off his time under a tough, brutal white overseer: what do you think would happen between the two of them? I wrote a first draft of this novel in three months and sent it to New York. My editor sent it back to me with this note: “I liked the first part of your manuscript; I liked the second part of your manuscript. However, the two parts have nothing in common but the characters. In the first half you have a tragedy; in the second, a farce. Go back and do it one way or the other; stick to tragedy.” I wrote him back, “But the State of Louisiana did not see this as a tragedy. I have proof of that.” Bill wrote back, “Too bad for the State of Louisiana.”
And he was right about the novel. The first half was serious, the second was not. But I thought that if the State of Louisiana would not take the death of this young man seriously, why shouldn’t I make a farce out of it? “Your Marcus killed another human being,” Bill said; “you let him con the people on that plantation every way that he can, then you let him escape with the overseer’s wife. No, that is not right; he should pay, or in this case let’s take a different route.” What happened in reality was that I rewrote the novel in three months and sent it back to Bill. He said that I had improved it 100 percent, but he told me to run it through the typewriter one more time, and he would publish both the novel and the
Bloodline
stories.
Bloodline
is the beginning of going back into the past. I realized after writing
Catherine Carmier
that I had only touched on what I wanted to say about the old place and the people who lived there. My own folks are African, European, and Native American; they had lived in the same parish for four generations before me. My siblings and I are the fifth generation, and my brother’s children are the sixth. There are no diaries, journals, letters, or any written words left by the old people, but there are people on that plantation who could tell me about my grandparents’ grandparents and about the other old people of that time. Some of the stories were horrible, others were funny, but they were educational.
Until I was fifteen, I lived with my aunt, Miss Augusteen Jefferson. Because my aunt could not go to other people’s houses, they would come to our house. They would talk and talk and talk, and I would listen. When there was no school and I was not needed in the fields, I often was kept at the house to make coffee or serve water. I also wrote letters for the old people. I have been asked many times about when I started writing, and for years I said I started at the
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