Return To Riverlake

As happens on many photo journeys across the South, I had no information on this house when I stopped to take a few photos two years ago, and only discovered the story upon returning home. Since publishing this last year, I have learned that Riverlake has now been placed on the list of Endangered Places by the Louisiana Trust For Historic Preservation. I am happy to help sound the alarm, and encourage you to reach out to the Trust for more information.

Ernest Gaines was born in 1933 in Oscar, Louisiana, long past the Civil War and Reconstruction. His family of sharecroppers nonetheless still lived in a small structure on the grounds of this plantation named Riverlake in former slave quarters that in the Depression South of the 1930’s served only as a humble roof over a head. Early education consisted of instruction in one room - a church that doubled as a schoolroom, offering nothing much past the sixth grade for most students, if they managed to last that long. The school year spanned the five months of the year during which his services working in the fields were not required.

When he was 15 years old, he left the beloved aunt who was raising him to join his parents in Vallejo, California in search of opportunity. It was there he discovered the public library, one of more than 2,500 libraries worldwide whose construction was funded by Andrew Carnegie between 1883 and 1929 - more than 1,600 of them in the United States. This one in particular handed Ernest Gaines the rest of his life.

It was here that Gaines began to discover the world, reading the works of every great writer he could absorb, taking the first steps on a long journey that eventually compelled him back to the beginning. Along the way, he discovered within himself literary roots sunk deep into the Louisiana of his youth.

Gaines began to write. His first novel, Catherine Carmier, had to be written twice. The first version, written when he was 17 years old in 1950, was wrapped in brown paper, tied with string, and mailed to a publishing house in New York. When it was returned to Gaines, rejected, he burned it. He later rewrote the same work, which was finally published in 1964. The leafing out of those deep roots went on to result in other novels and short stories - some of which were produced as movies - and many of which won prestigious literary, humanitarian, civic, and academic awards and honors. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, A Lesson Before Dying, and so many more, told the stories of life in the South through Gaines eyes.

The literary road led him home long before the actual road did, but he finally came home for good, spending a good portion of his later years back in Oscar, where he and his wife built a house on part of Riverlake’s former land. His ancestors, five generations of them, are buried in a plot nearby. Many of those plots are unmarked, including the grave of his beloved aunt.

It’s funny how houses speak. When I ran across this one the other day on my hurried way to somewhere else (which is way too often the case with me to be pure coincidence), I was compelled to stop. Having no idea of the story, I began shooting photos, knowing that if there was one, it would present itself in due time with a bit of research.

When Gaines left here in 1948, is was not without mixed emotions, knowing that opportunity lived elsewhere. Looking back on the journey in a 2010 documentary of his life, however, he recalled the thing that gave him the wings with which he eventually flew, providing the foundations for nearly everything that he later wrote. It was Louisiana and the South. His stories now leave us all much richer. As a young man, he knew he had to go. “But I had this love of the place”, he said. That love never left him.

Now, as I write this, I have a pretty good idea of whose voice it was the other day on that back road in Louisiana, gently suggesting with a smile that I stop the car and take a moment. The house, though it is a lovely example of 1820’s French Creole architecture, was only the gateway to the real reason for the pause. I do believe it was Mr. Gaines himself who extended that invitation. He died in 2019, yet apparently is still alive and well here on this land and maybe always will be. If nothing else, his written word will certainly see to that.

Photo of Riverlake Plantation by Beth Yarbrough. Photo of Vallejo, California library via Solano Library. Ernest Gaines quote via National Endowment for the Arts, NEA Big Read: Meet Ernest Gaines, a film by Lawrence Bridges, 2010. Photo of Ernest Gaines via California Community Colleges.