Every culture possesses a body of traditional knowledge and patterns of behaviors which are utilized to navigate the many windfalls, challenges, and vicissitudes of the world and African Americans, with their long, complex, and multi-layered history of presence in the US are no exception. Ernest Gaines, as an ingenous capturer of the experience of Black Americans in this country then and now, utilizes his inherited traditions to great effect in his stories to better illustrate and contextualize these lives.

In 2017, two years before his death, Ernest J. Gaines published The Tragedy of Brady Sims, a novella that opens with the titular character shooting and killing his newly convicted son in the Bayonne courthouse. Unlike his earlier work—especially A Lesson Before Dying, A Gathering of Old Men, and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman—Brady Sims has yet to be brought into many scholarly discussions, a gap which seems reflective only of time and certainly not of the novella’s richness and depth.