[MUSIC] The Southern voice, and the stories the voices of the Southern speakers share, are a key to its literature. We can see in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, who is both a folklorist who recorded and collected storytelling and music, and a novelist and playwright, how these worlds connect. And we can look at Ernest Gaines, who created an extraordinary character in his novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. And, in shaping her voice, he recalled the voices of his family and friends in rural Louisiana. And how when they came together for meals and celebrations, they would start talking and tell stories. So the creation of Miss Jane Pitman and the inspiration for that novel was found in the voices that Gaines recalled and began to put together on paper in the form of a novel. I did a lot reading. I read a lot of slave narratives. I read about, er, read a lot of biographies. And I did a lot of history reading, and then my intentions through at that time was to put all of this knowledge and this accumulated knowledge of Black experiences into the mind of a, a southern Louisianian illiterate ex slave Of course I don't, I don't think I could have done it had I not been born in Louisiana. Had I been born in Arkansas, so I'd probably made an Arkansas, Arkan, or whatever you call in Arkansas, or Texan George whatever. But. I happened to govern Louisiana and she was gave a little Louisiana terms to use and dialect. It was. And, and, and when I was writing that book I after reading all these, all the stuff that I had read, I had to, they say, put it into a mind of a, in illiterate who had basic, common sense but did not have the, the, the the advantage of books. And during the time I was writing it, I was trying to hear the voices not of these, all these ex-slave narratives that I'd read, but also what I knew of, of the voices of my Louisiana people. And, so that's how it, That's how it came about. I, I just, and, I didn't know how I how it happened that I could. Well, I, I think that, After I got go, after I got really moving with the, with the, with the voice with, with her voice. I think I told the story it just followed through, lets just say. I hate to say things like I hear the voices, you know, because then they think you're nuts, you know? You're going around the street hearing voices or something. But it seemed that when I sat down at the desk, the voice just took over again, and I just started from where I left off from the day before, you know.
