SOURCE: Roberts, John W. “The Individual and the Community in Two Short Stories by Ernest J. Gaines.” Black American Literature Forum 18, no. 3 (fall 1984): 110-13.

In the following essay, Roberts argues that “A Long Day in November” and “The Sky Is Gray” depict the conflict between traditional, community-defined values and those established by individuals.

The interaction between the community and the individual, along with its role in the shaping of human personality, is a primary concern of Ernest J. Gaines in much of his fiction. It is in probing the underlying community attitudes, values, and beliefs to discover the way in which they determine what an individual will or has become that Gaines gives poignancy to the pieces in his short-story collection Bloodline (1968; rpt. New York: Bantam Books, 1970). Because his fiction focuses on the peculiar plight of black Americans in the South, Gaines must consider an additional level of...