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A Gathering of Old Men by the noted novelist, Ernest J. Gaines, was first published in 1983. I wish I had known it then. Last week I stumbled across a 1992 edition published by Vintage Books at Borders on a table set aside for black authors. His most celebrated novel is The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. A Gathering is a remarkable mystery about a young white woman and 17 old black men in an isolated Louisiana parish, each of whom confess to the murder of a brutal Cajun farmer and who shoot their 12-gauge shotguns and bring them to the scene of the murder to prove their guilt. After a submissive lifetime of just keeping out of trouble, even at the cost of losing their dignity, these old men now want to do something worthwhile with their lives. Gaines' novel is all dialogue, presented through the voices of these individuals. The author, who grew up in Louisiana and now teaches literature there, portrays the language of these men accurately and lovingly. The acts of the men, whose grandparents were slaves, bridges the generations from the old South to the new. It also hints at the difficu