The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman

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Ernest J. Gaines book, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, used many historical events to connect to the characters story. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman was published by Bantam Books in 1972 and has 259 pages. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is a classic fictional book. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman is the story if a women’s life told when she was over one hundred years old. The novel goes over 3 main periods of time: war years, reconstruction, and slavery. In The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman it is the time of reconstruction and the novel really connects with the history of the time.
The novel starts the story at when Jane was a young slave. The Emancipation Proclamation was a decree announced my President Abraham Lincoln in September 1862 and formally issued on January 1, 1863, freeing slaves in all Confederate state still in rebellion (Abbott et al. 408). Jane and the other slaves where read the proclamation and where offered to stay on the plantation by their former slave master. The slaves then gather and decided if they should stay on the plantation of leave. In the time period many white where scared of that the now freed slave would do. The former slaves did not initially even dream of social equality; far less did they plot murder and mayhem, as the white people feared (Abbott et al. 439). Although the slave are set free the social frame work slavery continues.

When Jane and a few others decided to leave the plantation patrollers spotted them and killed many of them. Jane says, “Them and the soldiers from the Secesh Army were the ones who made up the Ku Klux Klans later on” (Gaines 21). Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized black people in the South during the Reconstructi...

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... during this time. Problem involving the racial order in society caused many deaths not only in the book but in real life. Jane was free but lived as a slave her entire life. Jane tried to escape to the south but failed and work the same jobs as she did when she was a slave. Black people were not slaves but law anymore but they still lived in mental slavery, bound by the racial order. Black people suffered for many years after slavery and fought for civil rights just as Jane, Ned, and Jimmy “The One” did.

Works Cited

Abbott, Carol, Virginia Anderson, et al. The American Journey A History of the United States. 6. River: Pearson Education, 2011. Print.
Gaines, Ernest. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. Print.
Mackintosh, Barry. "A Time of Reckoning." www.nps.gov. N.p., 30 Jan 2014. .

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