A Lesson Before Dying

Jim Fonseca

Rating: really liked it
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

I think this book deserves to be considered a classic of American literature about black-white relations in the American South. Two other books I think of in this category are To Kill a Mockingbird and The Help. None are “great literature” in a literary sense – great writing - but they are popular books and they tell stories that need to be told. For those skeptical about The Help as a classic, consider that it has more than 2 million ratings on GR and 85,000 reviews and it is assigned reading in high school and college courses. So I think it’s inevitable that it will come to be thought of as a classic. Of the three, Gaines’ book is the most “genuine,” if I may use that word, because it was written by an African American man who grew up as a son of sharecroppers, picking cotton when he was six years old.



The story is set among the French Creole population in Louisiana, probably about the time the author was growing up, the Jim Crow era. Some French influence remains from Cajun culture in things like calling their aunt ‘Tante’ or their godfather ‘Parain.’

The story starts with Jefferson, a young black man brought up by his godmother. He’s slow and almost uneducated. One fateful day he takes a ride with two other young black men who end up in a shootout with a white store clerk. The two black men and the store clerk all die. Jefferson had nothing to do with it. At his trial, Jefferson’s lawyer points out his ignorance, the ‘lack of slope in his forehead,’ and tells the all-white jury “Why, I would as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.” (And Jefferson’s relations understand what the lawyer is trying to do – it’s their only hope.)

Of course, to the white jury, the facts in the case are ‘straightforward’: a white man was killed; a black man was there; he’s sentenced to die in the electric chair. We know all this a few pages into the book. The trial is not the focus of the book – it’s not a John Grisham.

The focus of the story now turns to Grant, a young black man who is the teacher in a run-down school for black children. He’s one of the few educated black men in town; folks call him ‘professor.’ We learn about the school. It’s a public school even though it’s housed in an old church. Grant is the only teacher for six grades. They use worn-out books with missing pages discarded by white students. Kids bring in wood to heat the building in winter. They kneel in front of the pews to use the seats as desks…

Grant’s parents live in California so he lives with his aunt, the best friend of Jefferson’s godmother. Jefferson’s godmother has one wish before her godson’s execution: that Grant do whatever he can to can to get Jefferson to die like a man and not like a hog. Grant is reluctant and has no idea how to approach this task during the few months of life Jefferson has left. Grant is educated but agnostic, so the godmother also asks her elderly minister to intervene with Jefferson. It becomes almost a competition: when Jefferson goes to his execution, ‘will he kneel or will he stand’?

Grant and the minister have their work cut out for them: Jefferson is in a stupor, refusing to talk, even to greet visitors nor eat the food his godmother lovingly prepares for him. He says he’s a hog and will die like one. The storyline is helped along with a love interest – Grant and a female teacher in a neighboring town.



A lot of the story is a catalog of how whites of that era treated blacks. Grant and his aunt need to see a rich white man that his aunt used to work for. They enter through the back door and wait for an hour in the kitchen, talking to the cook and maid, while they wait. They have to ask the rich man for help to get the sheriff to allow Grant and the minister to visit the cell. When they get into the white man’s office, even the elderly aunt is not offered a chair. The same happens when they talk to the sheriff. Grant buys a radio for Jefferson from a white clerk; he has to argue with her to get a radio that comes in a box rather than the display model. She makes him wait a half hour while she chats with other white people.

Grant talks with a group of white men: “I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.” Language is the key. He takes the high road in talking of his aunt and says “…she doesn’t feel that …” The white man says: “She doesn’t, huh?”…He emphasized ‘doesn’t.’ I was supposed to have said ‘don’t.’ I was being too smart.”

Are all white people like that? No, one is not. One: a young deputy at the jail who is friendly toward Grant and Jefferson and who tries to help them out with the various obstacles the sheriff puts in their way and with the indignities of searches when they arrive at the jail.

Nor are blacks immune from racism. Grant tells us of mulatto men, half black, half white, who look down on the ‘niggers’ who do field work, like sugar cane cutting. They will only work in bricklaying or carpentry. Grant visits an elderly black teacher who was a mentor to him and notes that his wife judges the quality of her husband’s visitors by the darkness of their skin – Grant is suspect. The teacher is a cynic and thinks Grant is wasting his life by staying in this hellhole instead of leaving. He says to Grant: “I am superior to any man blacker than me.” And, if Grant stays, “[they’ll] make you the nigger you were born to be.”

Jefferson keeps a diary in his primitive writing. Those eight pages of misspelling written without capitalization or punctuation near the end of the book have to be included in any anthology of the saddest things ever written. It’s a real tear-jerker.

As I wrote earlier. I consider this book a classic. I’m giving it a ‘5’ and adding it to my favorites. I wish I had read it sooner.



The author (1933-2019) lived the impoverished life he wrote about, literally growing up in old slave quarters on a plantation. In his novels he used his background to create the fictional world of Bayonne in St. Raphael Parish, Louisiana. While A Lesson Before Dying is his most-read work, the general public may know him better for the TV movie made from one of his other works, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, modeled on his aunt who raised him. A Lesson Before Dying was also made into an HBO movie.

Top photo: French Creole people from frenchcreoles.com
Photo of a shack that was a home, still standing on the plantation where the author grew up. From myneworleans.com
The author from diverseeducation.com

Sue

Rating: really liked it
How did I feel at the end of this book....uplifted and beaten down, both. All the love and all the hate and all the even more stultifying indifference. All the indignity and indignation. So many very heavy feelings spread through this sad story, but there are moments of redemption if you watch carefully for them.

Many already know of the story...the teenaged boy who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up sentenced to death. His family wants him to die as a man...and wants--no demands--the plantation teacher assist in this job. Many people change during the course of this story, including any thoughtful readers.

Shortly after starting this book, I realized that I was reading something very special, powerful, important. And I realized that I was very glad to be reading it, no matter how difficult it might ultimately become. Now that I have finished reading, I can only add that my first impressions were correct. I believe every person in this country should read this book.

Julie G

Rating: really liked it
Reading Road Trip: 2020

Current location: Louisiana

Man walk on two foots; hogs on four hoofs.

The entire front of my shirt is soaked right now, from tears. I am wrecked. Wrecked.

I do not understand several things, at this moment, as I have just finished this book:
(1) How did I not know who Ernest J. Gaines was, before I researched a “Louisiana” read for my road trip last year?
(2) Why isn't this book an American classic, as well known as To Kill A Mockingbird?
(3) Are all of his books this good?



Damn it. I feel in over my head right now. Can I do justice to this story, in my response?

First off, I was completely hesitant to begin this. This novel has a boring cover, an uninspired title, and I had never heard of this author before. The story starts off with some awkward dialogue between the two lovers, Grant and Vivian, and I was rolling my eyes, early on, preparing myself for disaster.

It was the total opposite. The total opposite! Within just a short chapter or two from the bad dialogue, Mr. Gaines seemed to hit his stride, describing his surroundings in such detail, I felt I was there:

After leaving the quarter, I drove down a graveled road for about two miles, then along a paved road beside the St. Charles River for another ten miles. There were houses and big live oak and pecan trees on either side of the road, but not as many on the riverbank side. There, instead of houses and trees, there were fishing wharves, boat docks, nightclubs, and restaurants for whites. There were one or two nightclubs for colored, but there were not very good.

This story doesn't take place in New Orleans, but in a small, fictional town known as Bayonne, Louisiana. It's the late 1940s, but, given the surroundings and the social mores, it could easily be the 1840s. The residents of this community still call their home “the plantation,” and the protagonist, Grant Wiggins, “[knows] what it means to be a slave.”

Grant is an educated man, known on the plantation as “The Professor,” but he missed an opportunity to move with his parents to California and instead fell in love with a local woman in the small town, after accepting a teaching position.

When a “cousin” named Jefferson is sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, Grant's aunt and the young man's godmother become obsessed with Grant's role in “rehabilitating” Jefferson to “walk as a man” to his execution and accept Jesus Christ as his personal savior before dying.

This is a big task to ask of Grant, who is not only an agnostic, but a jaded man who has long given up on his civic duties.

What follows is one of the most touching and upsetting stories I've ever read, and Jefferson's godmother, Miss Emma, broke whatever was left of my heart. ("Oh, Lord Jesus, stand by, stand by.")

I realized, reading this story, that we can hold up 8 billion signs that read, “Black Lives Matter,” but if we don't treat people with respect and common decency when we interact with each other, it'll all amount to a pile of bullshit in the end.

There is nothing didactic here; Mr. Gaines is not a preacher, and his protagonist, Grant Wiggins, isn't much of a classroom teacher.

What is conveyed here is subtle. . . a subtle, cruel perversity in the disrespect, invalidation and sterilization of an entire people.

What is the solution? Well, Mr. Gaines doesn't know for sure, but his story makes it clear what happens when we treat people as humans and what happens when we treat them as hogs.

Diane S ☔

Rating: really liked it
With raw, unflinching honesty and a brilliant depiction of time and place, this is the story of a young, black man sentenced to death for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A white man was shot to death, the other two perpetrators dead, someone must be held accountable.

A young school teacher, returned to the quarters to teach the black school children, and now enlisted by his aunt and the condemned man's nana to help the man go to his death as a man, not as an inhuman man, not much better than a hog, a thing, not a person. Poignant depiction of strong women, women who had to be since so many of the men had left and not returned.

In school I read this author but the book assigned was The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which was also very good. It is difficult for the reader not to e touched by this book, this young man's plight and the sorrow of the people closest to him. The last chapter of this book is unforgettable. At least it is for me.

Bill Kerwin

Rating: really liked it

This account of a school teacher's attempt to bring dignity to the last days of a condemned man in 1940's Louisiana is moving but still somehow disappointing. Shortened, it would have made a fine novella.

William2

Rating: really liked it
A look back at Jim Crow-era Louisiana. Rosa Parks has yet take her rightful seat during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and it is still another twenty years until the Selma to Montgomery voting rights march. But Jackie Robinson has recently become first baseman of the Brooklyn Dodgers. In a Louisiana parish, Jefferson, a young black man, has been convicted by 12 white men on trumped up charges of robbery and murder. Jefferson’s attorney in his closing argument refers to Jefferson as a pig; in the sense that he’s just too dumb to plan much less carry out such a heinous crime. This defense tactic not only does not work, it becomes a bee in the godmother’s bonnet. Miss Emma wants the local school teacher, Grant Wiggins, to instruct the doomed young man—perhaps enlighten him—so that he might go to the electric chair with some dignity. She had worked for a prominent white family in the parish for ages, The Pichots, so she pleads with the head of the house that Grant the teacher be allowed to visit Jefferson in jail. The teacher himself wants nothing to do with the idea. The teacher thinks Jefferson as good as dead. Professor Wiggins is an angry young man; he’s autocratic with his students, furious with “the system” in the South—who wouldn’t be?—and eager to leave it behind, no doubt for what he perceives as more exciting northern climes. His old schoolteacher, Mr. Ambrose, has given him a good model for his bitterness, and Wiggins, who now holds Ambrose’s old post, seems to be dutifully replicating it. Truly, the submission all people of color must show toward whites during Jim Crow strikes me as soul obliterating. I’m on Wiggins side in his desire to leave. But Vivian, his lover, wants him to stay. She feels going off to a strange city is selfish, that it’s an abandonment of their people, that the only way to break the cycle of poverty and racism is to stay and help. She’s right in this sense, Martin Luther King Jr. was born in 1929 in Atlanta. By 1952, roughly the time of this novel, he has graduated from Crozer Theological Seminary and was soon to launch his ministry. Gaines’s prose is touched with Faulkner like so much southern writing. I doubt the nature of the lesson itself can be anticipated. The narrative underpinnings here depend on faith, specifically Christianity. This doesn’t bother me because I have an intellectual interest in world religions. I found the story very moving.

Diane Barnes

Rating: really liked it
The third Ernest Gaines novel I've read gets another 5 stars from me. Just as in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" and "In My Father's House", I was not quite the same person as I turned the last page that I was when I began. There was a tiny seismic shift inside me that I recognized as another piece of understanding in this complicated dance of racial relations between black and white.

A simple story on the surface: Young Jefferson, a black man, is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is sentenced to the electric chair. His Godmother, Miss Emma, asks the local schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, to visit him in jail and make him understand that he is not a hog with no understanding as the prosecutor decribed him, but a young man that she is proud of. The outcome is known from page one, but the journey is long, complicated, and heart-rending. This is Louisiana in 1948, and the white man is in charge.

As in the other two books I mentioned, the women in this novel are the strong ones, and get things done. Miss Emma and Aunt Lou get what they need through a combination of guilt, bribery and respect. They never hesitate to use them, even on the white people. They know what works. So, apparently, does Ernest J. Gaines. His language is simple and direct, but he can convey a world of emotion and feelings in just a few words. He made me feel humiliation and anger and hurt so many times with just a description of a glance or movement. He made me see that the black man's understanding of the white man has to be many times that of white for black, just as an act of survival.

I ended this novel in tears, not for Jefferson's death, but for his life. "He was the bravest man in the room".

Chrissie

Rating: really liked it
I dare you to read this and not be moved.

Jefferson, a poor, uneducated twenty-one-year-old Black was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time--in a small-town liquor store outside of Bayonne, Louisiana. It is the 1940s. Three men are killed. He is the only survivor. He is “tried”, convicted and sentenced to the electric chair.

His “nannan” has one request. She asks that Grant Wiggins, a teacher at the church school, be allowed to speak to him. Let him die not as a “hog” but as a man. Those are her words, not mine. Will Grant succeed, or won’t he? That Jefferson is to die, is not up for question.

This is a book that is about dignity and strength.

It is about racial prejudice and discrimination in the South.

It is about real kindness, by that I mean giving not what you want to give but what another needs.

It is about education and what it has to achieve, its purpose.

It is about faith and religion. I believe it will satisfy both those with and without religious beliefs.

And more--about what keeps a person alive, about last requests and about the inhumanity of the death sentence.

That is an awful lot for such a short book. In my view the author does succeed with all these topics masterfully. The characters’ words and actions are well chosen, making the tale succinct and powerful.

Th audiobook narration is executed by Lionel Mark Smith and Roger Guenveur Smith. I had some trouble understanding specific words in the beginning. Was the word I was hearing, “hog”, what I was supposed to be hearing?! Then it cleared for me; yes, it was! The black, Southern dialect is strong, and it should be. The tempo is perfect. The narration is remarkably well done, so this I have given five stars.

In my view, this is Ernest J. Gaines best book.
*A Lesson before Dying 4 stars
*Catherine Carmier 3 stars
*The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman 1 star

Rowena

Rating: really liked it
“But let us say he was (guilty). Let us for a moment say he was (guilty). What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.” - Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying.

Jefferson, an African-American man living in Louisiana in the late 1940s, is accused of a murder he didn’t commit. His lawyer uses the “hog” defence to get him off; however, this is unsuccessful and Jefferson is sentenced to death. Jefferson’s godmother feels the importance of Jefferson dying as a “man” not as a “hog”, so she enlists the narrator, Grant, to teach Jefferson how to be a man so he can die with dignity.

Grant was an interesting character in that he was the only educated black man in that community; the community expected a lot from him and the immense pressure he was under was evident. Add to that his questioning of the Christian faith and a complicated romantic relationship. A very moody character, I’m not sure how I felt about him.

I found the following quote immensely powerful as a person who abhors the death penalty regardless of how “bad” the person is: “How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

This was definitely a moving book. It stirred up feelings of indignation in me for sure.

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
Some books, if you don’t like them you feel you’re going to be excommunicated from all decent society and be made to go about wearing sackcloth (still available from Amazon) and ashes and ringing a bell shouting “unclean, unclean”. E.g. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and everything by Marilyn Robinson. These books are so well meaning and uplifting it would be like publicly declaring that you find kittens unattractive or Van Gogh was a bit crap. A Lesson before Dying is one of these novels. It had some great rage against the machine stuff in it but all that business about getting the wrongly accused black kid to walk like a man to the electric chair to make his old aunt happy was a lot of very slow dancing on the head of a pin and the atheist teacher and the faithful old preacher should have gone the full ten rounds, and the chapter of the wrongly accused black kid’s prison diary was totally Flowers For Algernon and should have been snipped. Etc etc etc.

Where’s my bell?

“Unclean, unclean!”

Natalie

Rating: really liked it
A lesson Before Dying is a very MOVING book. By reading most of the other reviews I'm sure everyone understands what this novel is about. I'm not positive if I would have appreciated this book in High School had I read it 10 years ago. I would like to thank Mr. Gaines for his lessons!! I've typed out a few powerful passages that moved me...There were more but these are just some I made sure I highlighted!

A hero is someone who something for other people. He does something that other men don't and can't do. He is different from other men. He is above other men. No matter who those other men are, the hero, no matter who he is, is above them.

"Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?" I asked him. "A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better then anyone else on earth -and that's a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer gave justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in. As long as none of stand, they're safe.

Please listen to me, because I would not lie to you now. I speak from my heart. You have the chance of being bigger then anyone who has ever lived on that plantation or come from this little town. You can do it if you try. You have seen how Mr. Farrell makes a slingshot handle. He starts with just a little piece of rough wood- any little piece of scrap wood- then he starts cutting. Cutting and cutting and cutting, then shaving. Shaves it down clean and smooth till it's not what it was before, but something new and pretty. You know what I'm talking about, because you have seen him do it. You had one that he made from a piece of scrap wood. Yes, yes - I saw you with it. And it came from a piece of old wood that he found in the yard somewhere. And that's all we are Jefferson, all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood. until we - each of us, individually- decide to become something else. I am still that piece of drifting wood, and those out there are no better. But you can be better.

❦ jazmin

Rating: really liked it

“I want you to show them the difference between what they think you are and what you can be.”

⇢The Plot
So I read this book for school, and quite honestly, I would never in a million years have read this if it hadn’t been required reading, but surprisingly I enjoyed a lot about this book. Books where a main character is set up to die right from the start aren’t my thing, but I think the author did a fantastic job of showing Jefferson’s (the character who was unjustly placed on death row) journey and how it impacted his community. It also discussed racism and prejudice in such a thought-provoking way and from so many different perspectives, which I definitely think more people need to see.

Another reason I was hesitant about this one is because I try to stay away from books written by men. Too often there are unnecessary descriptions of women that rub me the wrong way, and this book did fall prey to that unfortunately, but overall I really appreciated how this book portrayed the women in the community and around Grant. Obviously, their dynamic was different than it would be today because this book discusses racism and the characters are living in a society where black people are constantly faced with it, and that was even worse for the women because of misogyny, but I really appreciated that in many ways this book demonstrated how the women like Miss Emma were the backbone of the entire movement to help Jefferson die as a man. Without them, this book could never have taken place, and the author never tried to hide that.

The other side of this is Vivian, who played into this trope I really hate, the “woman exists solely to further the man’s arc” trope. We see it all too often, and I think that I’m disappointed that it happened here because Vivian had the potential to do so much more as another educated person. However, I still liked her character and she definitely added depth to Grant’s character.

⇢The Characters
This book had the characters set up in a way I initially thought was weird, because at a glance you’d think that the main character should be the person on death row who is the most dynamic character (look at me using terms from English class), but it’s actually Grant, who is essentially tasked with helping Jefferson die “as a man” because Grant is the most educated in the community. It took me a really long time to warm up to Grant if I’m being honest because at first, I found his negativity draining and in many instances completely unmerited, but the great part about this book is that as you get more information, you start to understand why characters are the way they are. In the book, Grant has a great scene where he explains how this difficult task makes him feel, and he struggles with going against what his education taught him time and time again, and those scenes were really the reason why my perspective of him completely changed. He definitely wasn’t a perfect person, and there are issues I had with his character that I won’t discuss because I think they’re more related to the author’s morals, but Grant was sort of caught between two worlds and it became easier to empathize with that as you keep reading.

“How do people come up with a date and a time to take life from another man? Who made them God?”

Another character I want to talk about is the Reverend, Reverend Ambrose. I think he was intended to be a character that you don’t particularly like or dislike, but I have to say that I really hated him. I also understand his perspective (which is a statement that can coexist with my previous one), but overall I think his and my opinions are just too different for me to appreciate his character. This is part of the reason why I like Grant, but I value education before faith, and comfort before faith, and as much as the Reverend helped the community through prayer, he limited them in so many other ways. I know he wasn’t actively encouraging them to not become educated and whatnot, but I feel like the way he wanted the community to act wasn’t ever going to get them anywhere. I think older people might be more partial to what he was doing simply because back then you weren’t taught to question what you believe in, and they would understand that, but as someone born in the years where technology really started to shape society, I can’t help but question what I’m taught.

Finally, I want to quickly talk about Jefferson. We didn’t see as much of him as I had predicted, but what we did see was incredible. I really enjoyed seeing his journey and I was so proud of his arc. And reading chapter 29 with his notebook letter to Grant was so moving. 


“good by mr wigin tell them im strong tell them im a man good by mr wigin im gon ax paul if he can bring you this sincely jefferson”

⇢Overall
There were plenty of things I enjoyed about this book and some things I didn’t, but this was a great book and I’m glad that my teacher included this book in the course!

. ⋅ ˚̣- : ✧ : – ⭒ ❦ ⭒ – : ✧ : -˚̣⋅ .

MY SPOTIFY ❦

MY LINKTREE ❦

Trish

Rating: really liked it
I still think about this book, even after reading it months ago. It’s a very simple story about two African-American men in 1940s Louisiana; one is a teacher and the other is a uneducated man waiting to be executed for a murder he witnessed, but didn’t commit. Both of them have given up hope for their lives, and for humanity in general. They live by the rules of the white majority, and both face a bleak future that’s beyond their ability to change. They are forced to spend time together, and eventually, they end up teaching each other how noble they are, and how precious life is. I won't lie; it's a very sad book, so you should read it with a box of Kleenex nearby. But it's not tragic. There's a great message that you'll carry away from it.
I still believe that To Kill a Mockingbird is the best American novel, but A Lesson Before Dying now ranks in my top three. So read it, and not just because it’s a profound examination of racial, gender, and religious issues. Read it as an appreciation of what the human soul can achieve, even in the smallest spaces. If you get to the line, “Tell Nannan I walked” and you don’t get choked up, you should check your pulse.

Michael

Rating: really liked it
A tale of Jefferson, a poor black man in Louisiana in the late 40's, sentenced to death for a crime he didn't commit, and the teacher, Grant Wiggins, who is asked to help him somehow to become more of a man before he dies. Grant has little faith in his value as a teacher to elementary kids facing an unjust and impoverished life or belief in any afterlife. But he comes to identify with Jefferson and his need to achieve a sense of his own self-dignity, and this task becomes part of his own quest. The prose is rich and elegant in its spareness and the story never settles into melodrama.

Cherisa B

Rating: really liked it
Heartache and pain and racist injustice all the way through. But hope and love and redemption, too. A little human kindness sprinkled with hope in the end. Tears in my eyes and deep down in my heart also. What a beautiful and incredible book.