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 that he uses his texts to point out the systemic issues, birthed in the slave trade, that continue to infect the lives of everyone they touch, no matter their racial or economic background.

On one level, these issues stem, as Jennifer notes, from capitalism: private entities creating and selling commodities for profit on a free market. Slavery was a capitalistic enterprise where enslavers bought and sold individuals as property, as commodities, working them in order to produce more commodities that people could buy, thus making a profit for the owner. After emancipation, the enterprising former enslavers moved to share cropping or other forms of production that essentially still enslaved, in another way, the laborers. This system became more industrialized and cooperate, and we have the labor of today. In each of these stages, the laborer, whether enslaved or “free,” was visible yet invisible at the same time. They were/are interchangeable. When the laborer…