"Gaines's novel brings to mind other great works: The Odyssey, for the
way his heroine's travels manage to summarize the American history of her race, and
Huckleberry Finn for the clarity of her voice, for her rare capacity to sort through the mess
of years and things to find the one true story of it all."Newsweek

"Stunning. I know of no black novel about the South that exudes quite the same refreshing mix of
wit and wrath, imagination and indignation, misery and poetry. And I can recall no more memorable
female character in Southern fiction since Lena of Faulkner's Light in August than Miss Jane
Pittman herself."Life

This is a novel in the guise of the tape-recorded recollections of a black woman who has lived 110
years, who has been both a slave and a witness to the black militancy of the 1960s. In this woman,
Ernest Gaines has created a legendary figure, a woman equipped to stand beside William Faulkners
Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Miss Jane Pittman, like Dilsey, has endured, has seen
almost everything and foretold the rest.