Ernest Gaines's The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) is widely regarded as realist historical fiction: one of initial wave of contemporary slave narratives which challenged traditional historiography recovering—as accurately as possible—the voices of those who had been enslaved. Its first-person narration was so convincing, in fact, that countless readers and even a few journalists regarded book as genuine testimony of a living source, similar Works Progress Administration interviews of former slaves conducted in 1930s. 1 In some ways, this generic confusion might have been predicted; not only does title undermine novel's status as a work of fiction, but text is also framed as an oral history, recorded and transcribed a black historian who asked subject (Jane) tell the story of her life (vii). Indeed, Gaines has said that he drew heavily from WPA interviews while writing Miss Jane Pittman, even calling them his Bible, and that he used these documents to get rhythm of speech and an idea of how ex-slaves would talk about (qtd. in Rowell 94). Critics often point Gaines's investment in slave testimony when considering formal properties of novel, associating it with a wider trend in African American lit- erature of period towards a fuller, more accurate representation of lived history. For example, Madhu Dubey argues that realist narratives like Miss Jane Pittman were kindled by political climate of 1960s and, specifically, push from civil rights activists revise historical record, which they viewed as entirely divested of perspective of slaves (781). 2 According Dubey, revisionist historiographic enterprise of this period accounts for Gaines's recourse literary realism, since he was not attempting discredit truth-telling claims characteristic of realist historical fiction but rather amend or correct what had already been written (782). This is way she distinguishes a work such as Miss Jane Pittman from later, antirealist strains of slave narrative genre—think of Ishmael Reed's Flight Canada (1976), Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), Charles Johnson's Middle Passage (1990)—that overtly situate themselves against history, suggesting that we can best comprehend truth of slavery abandoning historical modes of knowing (784). At time he was writing his novel—in late sixties, when WPA interviews and antebellum slave autobiographies were first deemed legitimate evidence—Gaines was far too engaged himself in recovering a lost history, Dubey claims, want destabilize historian's authority. 3