SOURCE: Griffin, Joseph. “Ernest J. Gaines's Good News: Sacrifice and Redemption in Of Love and Dust.” Modern Language Studies 18, no. 3 (summer 1988): 75-85.

In the following essay, Griffin delineates the unwritten but universally understood Southern racial code that informs the relationships in Of Love and Dust, observing parallels between messianic traditions and Gaines's characterization of Marcus Payne.

In his 1967 novel, Of Love and Dust, Ernest J. Gaines depicts a world in which the lives of his, mainly, black characters are sharply limited by their race. On the Louisiana plantation where he comes to work in the summer of 1946 after being bonded out of jail where he has been awaiting trial for killing another young black man in a roadhouse fight, Marcus Payne is thrust into a milieu which accentuates, even more than his native Baton Rouge did, the liabilities of being black in the post-World War II South. But...