Who is the Villain in Ernest J. Gaines’ “A Gathering of Old Men”?

Recently, I had a conversation with Jennifer Morrison, for my Multicultural American Literature class, on Ernest Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men. At one point, we began talking about Fix and the ways that Gaines represents him, specifically through the eyes of an outsider to the community, Sully. This topic led me to eventually ask, “Who is the villain in the novel?” On the surface, it seems like Fix, but that is not necessarily the case. I posited that the villain of the novel is white supremacy, and Jennifer argued that it’s capitalism. This part of the conversation really made me start thinking about this, especially in light of discussions I had in class with students in another class. One of the students talked about a class where they looked at the 1619 Project and discussed it, and some students didn’t agree that America rose up from the labor and on the backs of enslaved individuals.

When I think about A Gathering of Old Men, or really any of Gaines’ novels, I have a hard time pinpointing a character that is the villain or the main antagonist. That is not to say that villains and antagonists do not exist within Gaines’ works. Rather, it points to the ways that Gaines, for one, works to humanize all of his characters and the ways…