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Food
Anthropologist Mary Douglas concludes her foundational study of food, "Deciphering a Meal," by way of analogy: "The rules of the menu are not in themselves more or less trivial than the rules of verse to which a poet submits" (80). Here she draws a comparison between the conventions of literary form to the norms of culinary practice. But it is also true that literary works represent culinary practices to draw on their social meaning. In literature, authors use food to express love, anxiety, desire, and loss. Food plays a huge role in people’s lives, whether it is dealing with trauma, identity, power, social injustice, affection, or loneliness. We usually consider the kitchen space in any household a safe place, especially where a family finds comfort, a sense of being, and togetherness. However, in Ernest J. Gaines’s novel A Lesson Before Dying, kitchen space is presented also as a place of conflict and struggle. As a result, food becomes a complex metaphor for both showing affection and exerting power. Although affection and power might seem like opposites, Gaines's characters, especially Jefferson and Grant, accept or refuse food to communicate their complex feelings. The minor characters, especially Miss Emma and Tante Lou, tend to use food in more straight forward ways to provide comfort, love, and a sense of community. The kitchen space allowed them to control some aspects of their lives in otherwise out-of-control circumstances. Food gave them a sense of justification that they are benefiting their loved ones and they have the power to feed his soul.
Courtney Ramsay, in her article, "Louisiana Foodways in Ernest Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying," expresses the importance of food in Gaines’ novel. She states, “The culture that Ernest Gaines presents in his novel A Lesson Before Dying is heavily influenced by a dependence on the land to fulfill essential needs. Food in its acquisition and its preparation not only provides nourishment and a means by which love is expressed but also serves as a medium to exert power, to express other emotions of acceptance or rejection, and to communicate these feelings to others” (1). Throughout the novel food becomes a way to send messages, especially when words will not suffice. Messages of love, encouragement, and even rejection pass through food.
Food as Love, Power, and Trauma
The kitchen is an important place in any culture. Family interactions happen there, and decisions get made while sitting around the table. For any culture that places special emphasis on food, the kitchen becomes integral, as it is in South Louisiana. This is a place where matriarchs and patriarchs cook large pots of gumbo, jambalaya, and etouffée to serve to family, friends, and neighbors with iced tea. It is a safe communal space to share grief and happiness. At the beginning of A Lesson, Grant comes home from teaching and sees his “aunt and Miss Emma sitting at the table in the kitchen” (10). He knows right away that something is brewing. For African American families, the kitchen plays an important role as a safe place where everyone is welcome, and no one leaves without eating and visiting. In “Cooking by Feeling: Honoring Black Culture Through Food," Alicia A. Wallace highlights the importance of community building through food in African American communities. She writes,”Black cooking is community building. Black meals are communal. Black creativity is a daily practice that turns nostalgia into the making of new memories.” Because of the history and trauma of slavery and memories of being enslaved, constant threats and abuse, it is intensely important for Black communities to create “new memories,” as Wallace mentions. Cooking represents a way to nourish each other with love, to stay together as a community, and to empower a freedom of choice over what to eat.As affirming as cooking can be, A Lesson shows how kitchen space is also associated with the trauma of an unreconstructed past. Plantation owner Henry Pichot’s kitchen reminds Miss Emma and Aunt Lou how their ancestors once worked as slaves in the exact same place. Years after slavery was abolished, inequality continues to saturate their social spaces where they interact with white characters. When Grant, Miss Emma, and Aunt Lou visit Pichot’s “largely white and gray antebellum house” to ask for help getting permission to visit Jefferson in prison, they enter through the back door of the kitchen where they were greeted by a Black maid, Inez Lane (17). The kitchen reminds Grant of all those childhood years he spent there watching his Miss Emma cook food for others while his aunt cleaned:
Grant remembers his aunt’s words before leaving for college: “ Me and Em-ma can make out all right without you coming through that back door ever again” (19). Now revisiting the same place where they spent every day for generations as servants, he could not accept any offer of food. His reason for refusing: “I would not eat at Henry Pichot's kitchen table. I had come through that back door against my will, and it seemed that he and the sheriff were doing everything they could to humiliate me even more by making me wait on them. Well, I had to put up with that because of those in the quarter, but I damned sure would not add hurt to injury by eating at his kitchen table” (45-6). Sharing someone’s table means mutual respect, friendship, and love. But eating at the kitchen table, in this case, meant eating with the help rather than the host. Henry Pichot has no respect for Grant. Despite having a respectful job as a teacher, Grant still is not allowed to enter the house from the main entrance. He is made to wait for hours before Pichot meets him in the kitchen, trying to humiliate Grant by showing that his presence is not important or worth Pichot’s time. Had Grant accepted Pichot’s food, he would have given up some measure of self-respect, tacitly admitting his inferiority to Pichot.I had come into this kitchen many times as a small child, to bring on wood for the stove, to bring in a chicken I had caught and killed, eggs I had found in the grass, and figs, pears, and pecans I had gathered from the trees in the yard, Miss Emma was the cook up here then. She wore a white dress and white shoes and a kerchief around her head. She had been here long before I was born, probably when my mother and father were children. She had cooked for the old Pichots, the parents of Henri Pichot. She had cooked for Henri and his brother and sisters, as well as for his nieces and nephews. (18)
In the scenes that take place in Pichot's kitchen, Grant is invariably angry and eating the food would hurt him even more since he knows he is not welcome in that house, especially if he acts like the educated man he is. Here Grant asserts his agency by refusing Pichot's food and standing tall, showing his pride and self-respect. Grant also uses food as an act of defiance towards his aunt when he is frustrated with her persistence in insisting he help Jefferson. He turns down her cooking right after meeting with Pichot for the first time, knowing “nothing could have hurt her more when he said he was not going to eat her food” (24). However, he also showed the respect he has for his aunt by entering the house from the back door against his will. Although he obeys her, he asserts his agency and establishes a modicum of independence by telling her he will eat in town. The characters consistently negotiate complex emotions and relationships throughout the novel because, although they sometimes conflict, there is a lot of love and mutual respect present in the community. Aunt Lou also has to make the difficult decision of forcing Grant's hand for the sake of Miss Emma, Jefferson, and the greater good of her community.
Miss Emma, Jefferson’s godmother, expresses one of the biggest acts of love through food. When Jefferson was wrongfully convicted of killing a white man and sentenced to die by electrocution, Miss Emma responds by preparing him a home-cooked meal. She is disturbed by the comments made by Jefferson’s defense attorney who, by likening him to a hog, strips him from his humanity. From that moment on in the story, Miss Emma’s focus is to make sure Jefferson knows he is a man so he can die with human dignity. Miss Emma did not have the power to challenge authorities for their unjust actions, so she did what was in her power to give Jefferson his humanity back. She cooked. With the help of her friend Lou, she secured Grant's access to Jefferson and cooked meals to show her compassion and care. Miss Emma's carefully prepared meals for Jefferson showed him he is loved, he is important, he is remembered, and most importantly, he is a human. Jefferson's development as a character can be tracked by his relationship to food, from Grant's first visit alone, with Miss Emma's food in-hand, to the later scenes right before Jefferson’s execution when they all eat together. During the early visit, Jefferson asks Grant if he brought “some corn” because “that’s what hog eats” (82). Even after Grant insists he is not a hog, Jefferson continues the animal-like behavior, retorting, “Just a old hog they fattening up to kill” (83). Then he pretends to eat like a hog. When Grant leaves, he says he will tell Miss Emma how much Jefferson enjoyed the food because “That would make her happy” (85). By associating Miss Emma's happiness with Jefferson eating her food, Grant implies a path forward for Jefferson. Jefferson can give back to her and others. Therefore, his presence is important in their lives, reassuring Jefferson’s self-worth.
While Jefferson continues to use food to express his anger and frustration at the unjust world, Miss Emma continues to use it as a tool to awaken his humanity. During one visit, Jefferson insults Grant’s girlfriend Vivian. In the heat of the moment, Jefferson knocks a bag of food from his bunk saying, “Manners is for living.... food is for living, too” (130). Jefferson appears resigned to his execution. By throwing food, he insists that he is already among the dead. Why eat? Why abide by social etiquette? Why should he care about living for a world that discarded him so easily? However, Miss Emma has not discarded Jefferson the way the criminal justice system did. After Jefferson acts out, Miss Emma requests to meet in the dayroom instead of a cell. In the dayroom, she can set a table for four, she, Jefferson, Lou, and Reverend Ambrose can all eat together like a family. An interesting find from the archives of a publisher's copy of A Lesson shows how Ernest Gaines changed “bullpen” to “dayroom.” According to an online Law Library, “Rows of cells were composed of self-contained cell blocks facing large cages, or "bullpens." Inmates spent their days and nights like caged animals and had little contact with their keepers.” If Miss Emma is on a mission to enlighten Jefferson about his humanity, a bullpen would not be the right place to meet him. He needs to be outside of that confined place where he is caged like an animal. The edit in the unpublished draft makes sense to convey the care Miss Emma gave to Jefferson even in inhumane conditions. The dayroom was set just like home. In the novel, Grant states his aunt told him what happened during their visit: “Miss Emma went about setting the table the same way she would have done at home, humming her 'Termination song to herself. 'This go'n be his place, and this go'n be my place,' she said. My aunt said that Miss Emma, still humming to herself, passed her hand over the table to make sure there was no dust, no specks there—just as she would do at home. 'That's your place there, Lou, and that's yours right there, Reverend Ambrose,' she said. 'Don't it look nice? Ain't this much better?'" (137). Eating at the table is not just about proper manners and etiquette of eating food, but also about showing about communing with one another. By picking out a place for everyone, Miss Emma gives structure and meaning to the meal, and hopes to remind Jefferson that despite his circumstances he is still a person. Her behavior runs counter to Jefferson's because she is not ready to give up his manhood.
Miss Emma’s efforts finally pay off. With some encouragement from Grant, Jefferson shows signs of understanding his humanity. The first expression of human desire he showed was by asking for vanilla ice cream. Imagining his last meal, he says, "I want me a whole gallona ice cream... Eat it with a pot spoon" (170). Although a basic desire expressed crudely, as Ambrose later regrets, the comment shows he can articulate a desire for pleasure and even look forward to something in the future, "though it would be on that last day" (171). When Jefferson reminisces about never having enough ice cream when he was younger, he begins to open up about his past. At the end of a later visit, he asks Grant to thank the school children who sent him pecans and, in their final visit together, he offers Grant a sweet potato from the meal Miss Emma packed. Desire to eat something, to send a message of appreciation, and to offer something to someone—these small acts exemplify human behavior. That is what Miss Emma wants for him before he dies, so he can leave the world with dignity as a man.
