L2L The Sky Is Gray (ft. Carol Andrews)

“The Sky Is Gray”

Ernest J. Gaines

Ernest Gaines started in Pointe Coupee Parish, north and west of Baton Rouge, and many of his stories use such country as a setting. In A Lesson Before Dying, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, and A Gathering of Old Men, Gaines attracted global attention with his writing, and his shorter works are no less compelling. Gaines’s “The Sky Is Gray,” written and published during the height of the Civil Rights movement, is a coming-of-age story of a young African American boy in the rural South of the late 1930s. Over the course of a day and deliberations about how to cure a toothache, James and his family examine love, mothering, and what it means to be a man in Depression-era, Jim Crow Louisiana. Leigh, P. T., and Dr. C examine Gaines’s life, his work, and how a story (and its title) can make a difference.