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    A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree"
    A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree"
    A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree"
    Ebook56 pages42 minutes

    A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 13, 2018
    ISBN9781535868075
    A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree"

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      A Study Guide for Ernest Gaines's "Just Like a Tree" - Gale

      19

      Just Like a Tree

      Ernest J. Gaines

      1963

      Introduction

      Just Like a Tree is a story by Ernest J. Gaines, a twentieth-century writer who gained renown for his multifaceted explorations of the milieu in which he was born and raised, the African American community of a Louisiana plantation. With his fiction spanning the end of slavery through the challenges and successes of the civil rights movement, he delves into individual stories and community relations with an eye and ear to the broader historical narratives taking place around his characters. Gaines's best-known work is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), considered a masterpiece of historical fiction, realized narrative voice, and African American experience.

      Although the locale goes unnamed, Just Like a Tree is readily conceived as set in the same fictionalized Louisiana region as elsewhere in Gaines's fiction, in the vicinity of a city called Bayonne. Through a series of narrators, the reader approaches the house of the aging Aunt Fe, who, owing to unfortunate circumstances all too typical of the civil rights era, must leave her longtime home and travel north. The simile of the title—elaborated by one of the story's narrators—hints at the difficulty that the endeavor presents to the pensive elder woman. First published in the Sewanee Review in the fall of 1963, Just Like a Tree was subsequently included in Gaines's short-story collection Bloodline in 1968.

      Author Biography

      Ernest James Gaines was born on January 15, 1933, on the River Lake plantation, in Oscar, Pointe Coupée Parish, Louisiana. His father was a local plantation laborer who left the family—including nine brothers, of which Ernest was the eldest, and three sisters in all—during the children's youth.

      Gaines was raised largely by his aunt Augusteen Jefferson. Since she was effectively housebound by the loss of both legs, friends and family came to visit frequently, and Gaines would later profess to learning much of the art of storytelling from the yarns they spun to pass the abundant time in the absence of radio, television, and other distractions. By the age of nine, Gaines was already working the land, picking potatoes for fifty cents a day. He also already displayed literary inclinations, in writing and directing minor plays for his church.

      At age fifteen, Gaines migrated to Vallejo, California, to reunite with his mother and stepfather, a merchant seaman. Part of his mother's motivation for encouraging the move was the lack of adequate schooling for African Americans in rural Louisiana during the segregation era; in particular, there was no nearby high school that would allow her son to attend. Nonetheless, the adolescent Gaines was not excited about the cross-country relocation, which left him feeling uprooted and displaced. There was a sense of multicultural vibrancy in the housing projects they originally inhabited in Vallejo, with white, African America, Chicano, Filipino, Japanese, and Chinese families intermixing. They soon moved elsewhere, however, with his disciplinarian stepfather forbidding Gaines to spend time with local teenagers deemed untrustworthy.

      Consequently, the homesick Gaines spent much of his time escaping into literature in the local library. In the mid-twentieth century, white authors still dominated the shelves, and Gaines came to realize that a genuine depiction of the down-home culture he missed was essentially unavailable. Already at age sixteen, then, feeding off his nostalgia, Gaines undertook an effort at a first novel, writing A Little Stream over several weeks and seeking its publication. The manuscript was unceremoniously returned to him, and, with youthful inspiration, he decided to burn it; later, with

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