Ron Peters's Reviews > The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

This is a terrific novel. It is the story of a black woman from the Southern U.S.A. who lives to be a century old. Her life covers the entire period from the emancipation of the slaves in the 1860s to the start of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. It was written by Ernest J. Gaines, a black man who was born to a sharecropping family like the one Jane Pittman grew up in. There is not one ounce of self-pity in this story which I think was one reason I enjoyed it so much.

Tena tells me she saw the television movie with Cicelie Tyson decades ago and thought it was fantastic (she also said that the makeup effects were remarkable and ground-breaking). The book comes from the period when people in the U.S.A. were starting to become interested in the lives of black and indigenous people in a way that had not been true before this time.

This book came eight years after Thomas Berger’s (1963) Little Big Man, so it is to some extent derivative since that is a book about a semi-anonymous interviewer who convinces an extremely old indigenous man to tell his story about life in the Old West and later. But Jane Pittman’s story is so good in itself that this thought popped in and out of my head without making any real impression. This is well worth reading.