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• 1 2022-02-22T17:26:51+00:00 Introduction 19 plain 836 2022-05-26T16:30:49+00:00

  The publication of A Lesson Before Dying in 1993 marks the culmination of Ernest J. Gaines’s extraordinary writing career. The novel met with immediate critical acclaim, earning a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize and winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Southern Literary Award, and the Louisiana Literary Award. It became his bestselling novel after Oprah selected it for her book club in October 1997. And its reception grew still more popular in 1999 when HBO released a film adaptation. Gaines had established himself as an important contemporary American novelist in 1971 with the publication of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. By the end of the millennium, he had become recognized as one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century. Even before its landmark success, however, A Lesson represented an important moment in Gaines’s career. He began work on it while teaching for the first time. The University of Southwestern Louisiana (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) offered him a position as Writer-in-Residence in 1981, then invited him to stay on permanently in 1983. Although he had visited Louisiana often throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his permanent position represented a homecoming for Gaines who had not lived in Louisiana since 1948—the same year two young men, Grant and Jefferson, begin their mutual education in A Lesson. On the precipice of his greatest success, A Lesson shows Gaines contemplating how life’s greatest lesson prepares its students not for achievement but for sacrifice.

  A Lesson thematizes homecoming through its main narrator, Grant, who returns home after college and struggles to find fulfillment as a teacher in South Louisiana. He wrestles with how to make a life for himself under the constraints of family obligation and social inequality. At the heart of the drama is Grant’s question about how to live as a man. When Jefferson finds himself on death row for a crime he did not commit, Aunt Lou expects Grant to swallow his pride to help Jefferson understand “that he’s a man” (31). The phrase resonates equally with questions of humanization and gender. The white supremacist society of Bayonne excludes Black men like Grant and Jefferson from the realm of humanity, most explicitly when Jefferson’s defense lawyer calls him a hog. The same social process of dehumanization works in more subtle ways as well, as when the superintendent checks the students’ teeth or when various white characters make Grant wait on them. Even in such a hostile social environment, however, the Black community expects young Black men like Jefferson and Grant to maintain their dignity by living up to norms of wholesome masculinity: support their community, protect their women and children, avoid sinning with alcohol and secular music. Throughout the novel Grant and Jefferson struggle not just to live in accordance with that idea of masculinity but also to decide if they share it as an ideal. “Do I know what a man is?” Grant asks Vivian early in the novel, echoing a note of reflection Gaines jotted down while working on the novel (31). That question of gendered humanization drives the fundamental lessons Grant and Jefferson learn.
  
  The lesson of the novel’s title has multiple meanings. Most obviously, the title references a series of lessons Grant tries to impart to Jefferson as he awaits execution. Those lessons start within the context of a fairly conventional teacher-student relationship, without much impact on Jefferson. Eventually, the teacher-student hierarchy gives way to more heartfelt overtures from Grant. He extends himself to Jefferson as a friend and someone who might help Jefferson be in community with his godmother, Miss Emma. “Jefferson, I want us to be friends,” Grant says. “Not only you and me, but I want you to be friends with your nannan. I want you to be more than a godson to her. A godson obeys, but a friend—well, a friend would do anything to please a friend” (190). Finally, “something was touched in Jefferson” and, in the final sequence of Grant’s lessons, Jefferson accepts his Christ-like role as redeemer for his community (193). As redeemer, Grant explains, Jefferson will “chip away at that myth” of white supremacy by proving himself a man (192). In turn, we see how Jefferson’s courage gives Grant purpose as a teacher and reveals that Grant too can be “someone who does something for other people” (191). In the conclusion, a second possible meaning of novel’s title arises out of Grant’s transformation. The teacher learns to believe in his students and to trust them with his need for a meaningful life.
  
  The novel ends with a sign of Grant’s vulnerability and, ultimately, a new sense of his manhood. Returning to the classroom after hearing news of Jefferson’s execution, Grant sheds a tear in front of his class. The reconstruction of masculinity, grounded in sacrifice and vulnerability, looks salutary compared to conventional gender roles. As feminist critic bell hooks explains, within our patriarchal society, “The masculine pretense is that real men feel no pain” (6). With guidance from strong women—Aunt Lou, Miss Emma, Vivian—Grant and Jefferson learn to shed the pretense, eventually dedicating themselves to the benefit of others. From the perspective of race, however, that will to sacrifice may resonate differently. Symbolizing sacrifice to the community through the unjust execution of a young Black man makes the lesson hard to swallow. If learning to do for others comes at the cost of death and humiliation, should readers accept the lesson the novel seems to teach?
  
  The answer to that question depends in part on the genre of A Lesson. Read as didactic literature, the novel would dramatize the values and morals Gaines wants readers to embrace, even replicate in their own lives. Didactic literature offers readers moral instruction in the same mode of Grant’s lessons for Jefferson. Reading the novel as didactic would mean interpreting Grant’s lessons as intended for Jefferson and readers alike. Such a reading might also position Grant as an ironic model of Christian ethics—ironic because he rejects religion even as he comes to enact some of Christianity’s highest values. His capitulation to a life of service, his softening views on Reverend Ambrose, and his vulnerability in front of school children could suggest forms of conduct for readers to adopt. However, if read as historical realism, the novel looks somewhat different. Instead of taking Grant and Jefferson as behavioral models, readers would understand them as socially accurate representations of young Black men living in rural Louisiana during the 1940s. Historical realism strives to reflect society truthfully, using realistic depictions and historically accurate details. Realist novels often do suggest an ethical worldview, but that worldview is not identical to a character’s perspective. Readers must comprehend “the moral of the story” through interpretation; for example, by weighing the virtues and flaws of a main character or by elaborating the historical context that situates characters in social hierarchies. Read as historical realism, the ethical charge of the novel may dramatize sacrifice to provoke critical awareness of how white supremacy limits opportunities for Black masculine self-realization. Perhaps the only way for Grant and Jefferson to become fully realized men is through sacrifice. From this perspective, sacrifice looks less like a virtue and more like a cage.
  
  The historical realist aspects of A Lesson grow clearer in light of Gaines’s account of writing the novel. In his essay “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” Gaines explains how, after hearing the premise of the story, one of his colleagues introduced him to the case of Willie Frances, a Black teenager sentenced to death in 1945 for the murder of a pharmacy owner in St. Martinville, LA. His case is especially notable because the state botched his first execution and had to schedule a second. Although the fictional and historical cases differ in significant ways, Gaines notes some of the striking similarities. “Both young men are black. Both nearly illiterate. Both were involved in the murder of a white man,” he explains. “No defense witnesses were called in either case. Only white men served on the juries. In the forties there were no women and, of course, no blacks on the jury” (771). Gaines had planned to set the story in the early 1980s, but then learned that a teacher probably would not have access to a death row inmate at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Setting A Lesson in the 1940s increased the plausibility of the story because, at that time, the electric chair known as Gruesome Gertie traveled from parish to parish. The Louisiana legislature moved all executions to Angola in 1956. Gaines researched these details, trying to learn “what kind of wood the chair was made of, how much the chair weighed, how wide and thick the straps were that went around the arms and legs of the condemned” (772). Set in a parish jail, a teacher might gain access with permission from the local sheriff. Gaines just needed to figure out why a sheriff would grant such permission. He describes rejecting several solutions to that plot problem—blackmail, skeletons in the closet, an interracial affair—on the grounds that they were unrealistic. Instead, Gaines opted to have two elderly women, former employees of the white family, ask for the favor in consideration of their many years of service. The simpler plot point more accurately conveys the gender and racial dynamics of domestic labor during the time period.
  
  For Gaines, such details mattered because they expressed the truth of overlooked lives. His fiction represents people who were not otherwise celebrated in literature and who, like Jefferson, could not fully express themselves in writing. The setting of A Lesson evidences the profound connection to land, people, and cultural history Gaines made during his adolescence in Oscar, LA. Like his other fiction, it narrates the life of a sharecropping community struggling to survive. It also evidences a deep sympathy for death row inmates that exceeds the local setting. In an interview for the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read program, Gaines traced his motivations for writing A Lesson back to his time in San Francisco, living across the bay from San Quentin State Prison. “I was horrified by the executions at San Quentin,” he said, explaining that they always happened on a Tuesday at 10am. He marked execution days by walking to the coast until the execution was over, then walking back to his apartment to spend the day alone. “I didn’t want to see anybody, talk to anybody,” he said. “And I think this is what drove me to writing A Lesson Before Dying, because of these nightmares and nightmares about execution” (NEA Big Read, 9:45-10:50). Writing the novel became a way for Gaines to imagine the experience of waiting for death as a prisoner, especially under an unjust legal system.
  
  The remarkable opening lines of A Lesson (“I was not there, yet I was there”) voice the inevitability of a guilty verdict when a Black man faces trial in a racist society. Although not himself convicted, Grant felt like a prisoner of the Jim Crow South. He need not attend to know the outcome of Jefferson’s trial because the pattern of incarceration is all too familiar, especially in Louisiana, which holds the highest incarceration rate in the country. About 50,000 people are currently locked up in prisons, jails, and youth detention centers across the state. Roughly two-thirds of those people are Black, despite the Black population making up only one-third of overall state demographics. Criminal justice systems have changed in many ways since 1948. Yet life in prison continues to dehumanize, demoralize, and isolate inmates. Countering those effects, A Lesson suggests, requires hard work and courage. If the novel begins on a note of resignation over Jefferson’s wrongful conviction, it nonetheless holds out hope for remembering him as part of the community. The school children manifest that community for Jefferson by sending him small gifts and reminding him of his own school experience only a few years prior. When Jefferson asks Grant to thank the students for the pecans they sent, their gift inverts Grant’s opening lines: they were there with Jefferson in spirit, but not in jail as inmates.
  
  The children represent a locus of community in the novel while also standing in for its ideal readers. Much as Grant’s students learn by following Jefferson’s case, young readers stand to learn how incarceration impacts both individual prisoners and their communities. In an interview from the mid-1980s, while still in the early stages of work on A Lesson, Gaines commented that if he had to name an audience he writes for it would be “the black and white youth of the South” (Porch Talk 14). Since then, the novel has become part of the ninth-grade curriculum in Louisiana, ensuring that it finds new readers every year. As the entry on education explains, those students have to confront scenes of education while embedded in their own educational settings. What forms of sacrifice and moral obligation do contemporary educational systems cultivate? Will reading the novel help students recognize how schools sometimes exert power in similar ways as prisons? In a contemporary classroom, A Lesson has the potential to raise questions about how disciplinary practices like expulsion or school-to-prison pipelines impact student experience. Such questions can bring readers back to the problem of sacrifice with a new perspective. Instead of treating sacrifice as the moral obligation an individual must fulfill, students might learn to ask who our society sacrifices in the name of law, order, and justice.