This page was created by Maxwell Gontarek.  The last update was by David Squires.

Keys to the Archive: A Lesson Before Dying

Education

By Maxwell Gontarek

Education in Louisiana Past and Present

The history of education in the South consist of a grotesque constellation of landmark moments that continue to shape our present. Indeed, it is not only that the past sets off presently felt repercussions, or that the present rhymes with past; in many ways, the past is the present, especially in Louisiana. The key image of this page is a photograph of the church school Ernest Gaines attended as a child, which probably served as a model for his envisioning the church school in A Lesson Before Dying, and which Gaines moved to his property in Oscar, LA and rehabilitated. This is a profound act of preservation and a fruitful metaphor for discussing the themes of the novel. I don’t believe it merely serves as a fetish of nostalgia, a starkly prescient reminder, or an index of how far we’ve come (or some other platitude). Rather, it is a contemporaneous entity that Gaines integrated into the landscape of his present, in all its complexity.


From the tyranny of Black Codes and Jim Crow laws to the landmark 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, which reinforced and stabilized those oppressive regimes nationwide, the characters of A Lesson would have understood as well as anyone that whatever idealism had been communicated by the abolition of slavery was yet a long way off from manifesting as social reality. In fact, those ideals were hardly a part of the mainstream conversation at all in the pre-Civil Rights Era South, which led the country in race riots, massacres, and lynchings, as well as institutional hurdles and prohibitions (Black Past). Robert Mills Lusher, who served as Superintendent of Education in Louisiana after the Civil War, wrote that one aim of education was to “vindicate the honor and supremacy of the Caucasian race” (Tisserand). A school in New Orleans still bears his name. Nicholas Bauer, who served as Superintendent from 1923 to 1942, wrote in 1902: “to teach the negro is a different problem. His natural ability is that of low character and it is possible to bring him to a certain level beyond which it is impossible to carry him. That point is the fifth grade of our schools” (qtd. in Kennedy). And this was not just rhetoric. One parish superintendent openly reallocated funding meant for Black schools to white schools in 1941. Despite Great Depression-era Governor Huey Long’s oft celebrated populism, which meant adult literacy and free textbook programs for many Louisianans, public school funding remained tight during and after his term as Governor (Blokker 28).

Even after the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which the characters of A Lesson were on the precipice of, desegregation was met with the same brutal violence and systematic resistance as abolition. One outcome of legal desegregation was the closure of Black schools, which meant many Black educators lost their jobs; their representation in southern schools has steadily declined since Brown (Ramsey; Lash and Ratcliffe). As student populations became more diverse with the advent of busing programs, white flight effectively reestablished segregation all throughout America. Over 80% of Louisiana school districts were rated as highly segregated in 2019, and, as of 2018, a third of Louisiana school districts were placed under desegregation orders to redistrict or make other systemic changes in order to be considered legally integrated (Butkus). More recently, one area of Baton Rouge has attempted to secede from the rest of the city in an effort to establish its own wealthy, mostly-white school district (Harris; Brown).

The post-desegregation professional landscape abounded with proficiency and competency tests which were used both to control minority entrance into the teaching profession and the retention of white teachers (Lash and Ratcliffe 329). However, for a teacher like Grant, living under segregation, there would have been no certification test to become a teacher, and a minimum junior college degree was required. In early drafts of the novel, Gaines writes that Grant attended Southern University, an HBCU in Baton Rouge, and, in the final version of the novel, that Vivian had attended Xaxier University, an HBCU in New Orleans. One-room church schools such as the one in the novel and the one Gaines attended were standard in most Black communities across the South, and were often located in places such as the quarters described in A Lesson, which would have originally been slave quarters on a plantation. The lived experience of education in Louisiana before desegregation would have been close to home and close to work––as in the novel, near cane fields, mills, pecan trees, cemeteries, and populated by religious iconography and local wildlife such as the bugs the students play with and butterflies that might “light on a hill of bull grass that offered it nothing” (Gaines 252).
 

Education in A Lesson Before Dying

A close reading of A Lesson shows the intricacies of the historical context outlined in the previous section in intimate detail. It would be a mistake to read Grant as a heroic figure whose purpose as a character is to overturn the normalized forms of disciplinary power deployed by the systemically corrupt and racist institutions of education in the South. He takes part in these everyday infractions of dignity as much as the typically and readily vilified characters and symbols of hierarchical oppression. Although Gaines appears to have softened these characterizations of Grant since his early drafts, they remain apparent in the final version as well. Below, we can see examples of the particular tone of Grant’s cruelty that were subsequently deleted. 
After a student interrupts his infliction of corporal punishment and looks at Grant with contempt, Grant narrates: “So I thought I should give him more attention,” before continuing to strike the student with a ruler. A page later, when Grant is on the verge of berating a student who has written a slanted sentence on the board, Gaines has struck out a description of her primal fear from the draft: “She stared wild-eyed at me while breathing heavily from the mouth.” Even without those sentences, the final version emphasizes the pitch of Grant’s role as disciplinarian, which is characterized by sarcasm and described as arising on a whim, as a simple “mood.” The stuttering inability of the girl trying to vocalize a response illustrates Grant’s capacity to dehumanize his students as much as the Superintendent, Dr. Joseph, who appears a little later in the novel. On the final page, we can even see how Grant makes his student teacher, named in the final version as being Irene Cole (who plays a larger part in the characterization of women in the novel), complicit in the corporal punishment by signaling for her not to warn the oblivious student of the impending blow.

Only in a later scene, reflecting upon the actions of the Dr. Joseph (named Mr. Paul in an early draft), does Grant overtly cope with his culpability for enacting the same forms of disciplinary power that are perpetrated by the more obvious characters and symbols of oppression in the novel—and he does so in an utterance of ironic scorn. The Superintendent comes on an annual visit to assess the students, but instead of only focusing on a student’s command of rote memorization (of bible verses, the pledge of allegiance, grammar, mathematics, geography), he focuses on the cleanliness of their hands, their nutrition, and their teeth:

Open wide, say ‘Ahhh’—and he would have the poor children spreading out their lips as far as they could while he peered into their mouths. At the university I had read about slave masters who had done the same when buying new slaves, and I had read of cattlemen doing it when purchasing horses and cattle. At least Dr. Joseph had graduated to the level where he let the children spread out their own lips, rather than using some kind of crude metal instrument. I appreciated his humanitarianism (56).




Derision is all Grant can muster in this moment because he is speaking of himself as much as he is of the Superintendent. That Grant evokes disciplinary power in this scene, as well as a self-knowing ironic scorn, rather than a transformation into some rousing savior for the students (i.e. railing against the Superintendent with all his might), is illustrative of Gaines’ complex and complexifying approach to the depiction of the power relations at stake in education. Gaines’ approach is to urge the reader to pay close attention to the twists, turns, and absurdity of the raw material of the historical circumstance in its very reality (as only fiction can elicit). Grant and the Superintendent (and, by proxy, Irene, as well) are work together in a system of power that subsumes the South, and the irony of a heart-attack-bound ethical authority like the Superintendent espousing the virtues of health mirrors the inanity of endorsing a humanization whose violence is equal to dehumanization. Thus the novel serves more as an object for retrospective investigation itself than the context for revisionism or simple caricatures of heroism, the latter of which would ultimately uphold literature’s apocryphal “ability to act as an antidote to prejudice” (Melamed 66). That is how the novel educates. It is not an allegory about finding a sense of humanity despite systemically racist and institutional odds—it’s a novel about exactly how intricate those odds are, how far-reaching the lattice of power reaches, and how entangled each individual is within.

Another example of Grant’s first-person narration taking the reins of a scene both literally and symbolically occurs at the end of a scene in which Miss Emma, Reverend Ambrose, Jefferson, and Grant join for a meal in the courthouse, where they have more space but it is required for Jefferson to be shackled. Grant takes Jefferson for a walk away from the other two characters, and begins a kind of monologue, the climax of which begins with Grant asking: “Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?” (192). In both early drafts and the final version, the monologue ends in silence from Jefferson, so Grant vocalizes Jefferson’s perspective in his own voice in the narration. Just as with Grant and the Superintendent, there is a transition in interiority that positions the two characters as overlapped, or as one. When Grant narrates, “I cry, not from reaching any conclusion by reasoning, but because, lowly as I am, I am still part of the whole,” he is not only speaking as Jefferson, but as himself (194).



In the early draft, there is an emphasis on "doubt" which was later removed. I believe doubt is central to the thematic concerns and mechanics of the novel—as we can also see in the recurring presence of Matthew Antoine’s voice in the “myth” monologue (62), as well as an earlier “vicious circle” monologue, spoken to Vivian, brought on by a discussion about Irene (166). Doubt is the real powerhouse behind subversions of power in the novel, even though it might, at first glance, seem cynical, counterintuitive, or resigned.  


Doubt is the tool which reveals the ways in which “potential can be turned against itself by bonds of power” in the novel, as Zakiyyah Iman Jackson defines plasticity in her essay, "Losing Manhood: Animality and Plasticity in the (Neo)Slave Narrative" (119). Gaines rearticulates rather than resolves this portrayal of power in A Lesson, letting the novel question "liberal humanism’s selective recognition of black humanity” and suggest instead "a desire for a different mode of being/knowing/feeling and not simply a desire for fuller recognition within liberal humanism’s terms” (Jackson 96).

Louis Washington, Jr., raised that grimy little hand again.
“Is you go’n bow down too, Mr. Wiggins?”
“The proper way to ask that question is,' Are you going to bow down too, Mr. Wiggins?'"
“You go’n bow down too?”
“I’ll be outside,” I told the class. (250)

 

A Lesson Before Dying as Education

A Lesson saw critical acclaim and commercial success. The novel won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, was a 1997 choice of Oprah’s Book Club, and was adapted into an Emmy-winning movie produced by HBO in 1999. Since then, it has found a place in reading lists and classrooms, especially in Louisiana, where the novel is taught to 9th graders as a part of Louisiana Believes, a statewide plan to increase student performance in public schools. The ELA (English Language Arts) Guidebook for teaching the novel focuses on the question: “What makes us human?” For context, the curriculum offers psychologist Abraham Maslow’s well-known Hierarchy of Needs. The hierarchy theorizes that the motivation to meet one’s needs toward “self-actualization” is intrinsic, and follows a basically rigid structure. I believe this is precisely the problem of certain readings of the novel. To accept the norms of “what makes us human” is to demand people like Vivian, Irene, Grant, and Jefferson conform to a particular view of self-actualization. For instance, one of the base levels of Maslow's hierarchy is safety, suggesting that without safety a person cannot self-actualize. What would safety look like for an inmate on death row? Is it impossible for Jefferson to achieve self-actualization while in imminent danger and isolated from his community? The ELA Guidebook treats the novel as what literary critic Jodi Melamed describes as "the race novel": “a genre that took literature for granted as a powerful tool for antiracist social transformation” (52). While reading about racism might be educational, Melamed argues, it hardly counts as social change in and of itself. We see the substitution of reading for social change in the ELA Guidebook, which describes the novel as "hopeful" and suggests it "shows that views, opinions, and beliefs can be changed through simple acts that defy the expected behaviors in the face of oppression" (4). Another way to read the novel might be to understand it as less concerned with changing opinions and more concerned with changing a legal system that has the highest incarceration rates in the country. At any rate, whoever changes their opinions in the novel, they hardly help Jefferson. He still faces execution in the end.

For historical context, the ELA curriculum spotlights topics such as phrenology, the judicial system, Jim Crow, and the diversity of populations—all of which are acutely criticized in the novel, and certainly form a necessary part of the conversation of race in America. However, relegating oppression to the past might suggest a limited view of the scope of the aims of the novel. The forms of legal and disciplinary power on display in the novel exist in our present, even if in modified forms or located in different institutions. To limit the focus to the institutions represented in the novel is to see a fraction of the larger picture—and to miss how the novel braces itself for those depths and really goes there, as can be seen in the passages outlined above. As literary theorist Samera Esmeir argues in "On Making Dehumanization Possible," the call for readers to recognize each person as human "without asking in what way the subjects of violence may be dehumanized" trades a critical view on the workings of power for a facile optimism that things will be okay (1549).

A Lesson is primarily focused on that question of “in what way” Jefferson and others are dehumanized, and Gaines’ acuity as a writer will take the reader there if they read along. That’s the educational power of the novel. And we can catch a beautiful glimpse of it in a scene where Grant somewhat enigmatically reminisces about his university days, in a way that echoes Gaines talking about his own: 

I read the story and reread the story, but I still could not find the universality that the little Irishman had spoken of. All I saw in the story was some Irishmen meeting in a room and talking politics. What had that to do with America, especially with my people? It was not until years later that I saw what he meant. I had gone to bars, to barbershops; I had stood on street corners, and I had gone to many suppers there in the quarter. But I had never really listened to what was being said. Then I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, how they talked about the dead and about how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere. (90)

This page has paths:

This page references: