SOURCE: Griffin, Joseph. “Calling, Naming, and Coming of Age in Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men.” Names 40, no. 2 (June 1992): 89-97.

In the following essay, Griffin addresses the significance of the names assigned to the characters of A Gathering of Old Men in relation to their social status and evolving maturity.

The gathering depicted in Ernest Gaines's most recently published novel, A Gathering of Old Men (1983), is one of several old black men summoned by a young white woman, Candy Marshall, to prevent the lynching or imprisonment of Mathu, another old black man, who has helped to raise her after the death of her parents in a car accident. The novel is set on an October Friday afternoon and evening during the late 1970s in the fictional St. Raphael's parish in Louisiana, and earlier in the day the Cajun Beau Boutan has been murdered, Candy assumes, by Mathu...