Ernest Gaines’s The Tragedy of Brady Sims: A Final Nod to Toni Morrison

Abstract:This article focuses on Ernest Gaines’s final work, The Tragedy of Brady Sims (2017), which borrows its central motif, filicide, from Toni Morrison’s most celebrated novel, Beloved (1987). Like Beloved, set in the Reconstruction era, Gaines’s post–civil rights novella demonstrates that changes in the law do not directly translate into changes in the hearts and minds of people. After showing how Gaines’s literary techniques help to convey the most pessimistic vision for the future of black men that he ever presented in fiction, the essay ends by placing Gaines’s concern for black men within a wider literary milieu—a context suggesting that, despite Gaines’s tendency to set his stories in the past, he had his eye on the present. The essay also suggests that Gaines’s intertextual linking of his male-focused novel with Morrison’s female-focused one constitutes a gesture toward suturing an African American literary history increasingly segregated by gender.