Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People That Inspired Ernest J. Gaines
Ruth Laney
LSU Press
Before he became an award-winning writer, renowned Louisiana writer and Pulitzer Prize nominee Ernest J. Gaines was the son of sharecroppers in Cherie Quarters, a small Black community in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana.
Drawing on decades of interviews and archival research, Ruth Laney explores the lives and histories of the families, both kin and not, who lived in a place where “everybody was everybody’s child.” Built as slave cabins for the nearby River Lake Plantation in the 1840s, the houses of Cherie Quarters were cold in winter, hot in summer, filled with mosquitoes, and overflowing with people. Even so, the residents made these houses into homes.