How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
Lord have mercy, Jesus, what now? Where do I turn? Go where first? The Major? For what? He's already drunk out there on that front garry, and it's just twelve o'clock. Miss Bea? That's like talking to the wall. Where? Mr. Lou? Yes. She said call Mr. Lou. Mr. Lou and Miss Merle. I better make it Mr. Lou first. […]
I was crying so hard when I got through talking to him I had to wipe my whole face with my apron. Then I dialed Miss Merle. But nobody answered. (2.1-2)
It's Janey talking to us in the above passage, and it just so happens that she's the only female African American character who gets her own chapter in A Gathering of Old Men. It also happens to be one of the shortest chapters in the novel, and all we get from her are feelings of pure terror and fear. Not really empowering, is it?
Quote #2
I looked back at her. I didn't jerk my head around, I looked at her slowly. I had known Candy for over twenty-five years. She was no more than five or six when her mother and father were killed in a car wreck, and I had helped raise her. Surely, Mathu here in the quarters and I at the main house had done as much to raise her as her uncle and aunt. Maybe even more than they. […]
She was small, no more than five two, and thin as a dime. She wore the wrong clothes, and that hair was cropped too short for a young woman interested in catching a man. But Candy was not. A young man came around, but I had no idea what kind of relationship they had. (3.10-12)
Miss Merle isn't buying Candy's story in the above passage, but what she does seem to buy into are some pretty sexist stereotypes of how a woman should dress.
Quote #3
Now, I ain't even stepped in the house good 'fore that old woman started fussing at me. What 'I'm doing home so early for? She don't like cleaning fishes this time of day. She don't like cleaning fishes till evening when it's cool. I didn't answer that old woman. I set my bucket of fishes on the table in the kitchen; then I come back in the front room and got my old shotgun from against the wall. I looked through the shells I kept in a cigar box on top the armoire till I found me a number five. I blowed the dust off, loaded the old gun, stuck it out the window, and turnt my head just in case the old gun decided to blow up, and I shot. Here come that old woman starting right back on me again.
"What's the matter with you, old man? What you doing shooting out that window, raising all that racket for?"
"Right now, I don't know what I'm doing all this for," I told her. "But, see, if I come back from Marshall and them fishes ain't done and ready for me to eat, I'm go'n do me some more shooting around this house. Do you hear what I'm saying?"
She tightened her mouth and rolled her eyes at me, but she had enough sense not to get too cute. (4.52-5)
Whoa. So, Chimley threatens to shoot his wife and she just rolls her eyes at him. What do you think this little exchange tells us about gender relations and violence in Gaines's novel?