Of Love and Dust by Ernest J. Gaines

African-American novel of Southern racial realism

Ernest J. Gaines is an African-American writer known for his novels The Autobiography of Jane Pittman and the Oprah’s Book Club selection A Lesson Before Dying, both of which were made into Emmy-winning TV movies. Gaines, the recipient of many literary awards and honorary doctorates, was born to a sharecropping family on a Louisiana plantation. His 1967 novel Of Love and Dust, is set on a plantation outside Baton Rouge in the 1940s.

Though slavery in the American South officially ended roughly four score years prior to the time of this story, the Hebert Plantation employs many Black laborers through debt bondage, a system of indentured servitude very similar to slavery. Marshall Hebert, the current owner, also acquires workers from the local prisons. A young Black man named Marcus Payne is sent to jail for murdering another young Black man in a barfight. Marshall buys Marcus’s bond, releasing him from incarceration. In exchange, Marshall gets five years of plantation labor out of Marcus. Marcus is a proud man with a chip on his shoulder who refuses to bow down to White men in power. He insists it’s only a matter of time before he escapes the plantation and runs to freedom. As a result of his cockiness and insubordination, Marcus draws the ire of the Cajun overseer, Sydney Bonbon, who works Marcus harder than the other workers in an attempt to break his spirit. The novel is narrated by James Kelly, a Black man and veteran worker on the Hebert Plantation who “onboards” Marcus into the plantation workforce, acts as his supervisor during the farm work, and looks after him in off hours. Kelly and Marcus develop a relationship that’s part friendly and part adversarial.

There ends up being more love than dust in this novel. That is to say, it starts out as a muckraking exposé about the exploitation of agricultural laborers, but it soon turns into a story more about the racial politics of love and sex. In 1940s Louisiana, White man and Black woman is OK, as long as nobody talks about it. Black man and White woman, however, is not only frowned upon but also possibly a capital offense for the Black man involved.

Gaines has written Of Love and Dust in a very down-to-earth realist style, with little modernist experimentation. Much like the writing of John Steinbeck, it is modern in the sense that it deals with the modern world, modern themes, and modern psychology, but the prose is straightforward and not in any way linguistically opaque like William Faulkner’s depictions of the South. This is not a simple black-and-white tale of violence and oppression between overseers and enslaved. There are complex motivations here and some sly scheming going on as characters, both Black and White, jockey for an advantage in this power struggle. At times the plot twists, as well as the cleverly written but period-realistic dialogue, reminded me of an Elmore Leonard novel.

Of Love and Dust has a problem with its pacing. The middle portion of the novel is rather drawn-out and repetitive, to the point where the reader is ready to say, “OK, I get it. Let’s move on.” The ending, however, feels rushed and crammed into the last ten pages. Suspense builds to the point where the reader has a right to expect an epic confrontation, but what’s delivered doesn’t quite live up to expectations. But that’s realism. A more thrilling conclusion might have put this novel into the realm of a potboiler or adventure story when it really belongs more in the domain of tragedy. The slice of history depicted here deserves more than a formulaic story of villains and victims, and Gaines commendably delivers something much more nuanced, complex, and authentic.