A Lesson Before Dying

Review

In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to proceed to the electric driven chair for murder. A white shopkeeper had past away throughout a robbery gone bad; though the juvenile man on trial had not been armed and had not dragged the initiate, in that time and place, there could be no question of the decision or the penalty.

"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not proceed to the trial, I did not hear the decision, because I knew all the time what it would be..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's mighty exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson before Dying. If juvenile Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the minute plantation village of his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation place of adoration school. More than 75 years after the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans proceed to the kitchen doorway when visiting whites and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law.(Michael, 65) Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't relish, eaten up by resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his woman companion Vivian and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to pass away, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to pass away like a man.(Ernest, 221)

As Grant struggles to impart a sense of dignity to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well: heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime.

I have several opinions about this publication, and the first is that it should be placed on the mandatory reading list of every high school student in the USA; it is destined to become a literary classic in the same vein as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird.(Michael, 65) The themes presented all through this publication are designed to extract discussion and shatter stereotypes. The transformation of the book's main character, Jefferson- a poor, uneducated, juvenile, black man who has been convicted of a killing he didn't consign and whose life is compared to that of a hog by his own defense attorney in the worst closing argument to a committee ever atempted, is remarkable to watch unfold. (Ernest, 221)Jefferson is reborn on death strip with the assist of his teacher, Grant Wiggins, the university educated, local black school teacher who reluctantly agrees to visit Jefferson in his cell at the request of Jefferson's aunt, Miss Emma, who wants Wiggins to make ...