His most recent offering, Driving the King, is a fictionalized account of Nat King Cole’s childhood in Alabama as told by his friend and chauffeur. His first, Like Trees, Walking, was honored with the Ernest J. Standing beneath the tree, I have joined its audience-the imagined folk, the reimagined, and the living whose future journeys will follow mine. Bringing Miss Jane to life was in many ways an act of historical preservation like the efforts to save the church, the cemetery, and the oak. The preservation efforts of Ernest and his wife, Dianne, have created in this parish landscape what The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman created on the page: a space of memory and feeling. He even headed an effort to restore a nearby cemetery, saving it from the fate of so many gravesites, plowed under and turned into farmland. Ernest’s old church also remains, restored and moved to his backyard. Thanks to an acclaimed writer and his conjuring of Miss Jane Pittman-one rendition of the black Southern experience-the tree was too well known to be erased without resistance. But because it had a name and a history, the tree was saved. A few years ago, one of its branches fell on the road and a car crashed into it. With so much dormant and fallow, the evergreen hue of the oak gives the tree a feeling of permanence, still growing after all this time.īut what most people don’t know is this: The life of the tree almost ended. It’s January, with the winter-colored marshes and empty cane fields. The wide spread of the branches and the rise of the crown. When we arrive, the tree looks as I imagined it would. It’s a 400-year-old oak, and in Ernest’s novel, it’s Miss Jane’s place of rest and commune.
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