A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

First published: 1993

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of work: 1948-1949

Locale: The former slave quarter on a plantation in rural Louisiana

Principal Characters:

• Grant Wiggins, a young black teacher in the quarter school
• Jefferson, a young man convicted of murder and awaiting electrocution
• Tante Lou, Grant’s aunt and benefactor
• Emma Glenn, Jefferson’s godmother and friend to Tante Lou
• Reverend Mose Ambrose, the pastor of the quarter church
• Matthew Antoine, a Creole, Grant’s former teacher
• Vivian, Grant’s love, a Creole teacher in Bayonne
• Henri Pinchot, the plantation owner and brother-in-law to Sam Guidry
• Sam Guidry, the St. Raphael Parish sheriff
• Paul, a humane deputy

The Novel

In A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest Gaines once again takes his reader to a familiar fictional setting based on his boyhood home in Point Coupée Parish near New Roads, Louisiana, which becomes the fictional St. Raphael Parish, with Bayonne as its parish seat. A small town of about six thousand inhabitants, Bayonne is one of the two main settings in the novel. The other is the old slave quarter on an antebellum plantation owned by Henri Pinchot located a few miles away, near the St. Charles River. The year is 1948, a time when segregation and racial injustice were oppressive realities for Southern blacks, a time, too, when most of them did not know that the winds of change, if ever so slightly, were beginning to stir. The basic plot is simple. A young, semiliterate black man, Jefferson, is tried for the murder of a white store owner, old Mr. Gropé; although Jefferson is innocent, the all-white, all-male jury sentences him to death in the electric chair. In pleading for his client’s life, Jefferson’s white lawyer argues that it would make no more sense to electrocute Jefferson than it would to execute a hog or some other dumb animal.

That assessment of Jefferson’s human worth deeply troubles his godmother, Emma Glenn, who enlists the aid of her friend, Tante Lou, to pressure Tante Lou’s nephew, Grant Wiggins, into trying to help Jefferson face death like a man, with dignity and courage. Grant, the sole teacher at the church school in the quarter, is reluctant to help, but he yields in the face of his aunt’s strong moral cajoling and the insistence of his friend Vivian, with whom he is in love.

Before he can even visit Jefferson at the jail in Bayonne, Grant must approach the plantation owner, Henri Pinchot, who, because he is Sheriff Sam Guidry’s brother-in-law, can intercede to obtain Guidry’s permission. The prospect of asking Pinchot for help rankles Grant, because he knows he will have to pay a steep price—some of his fragile pride.

But even more troubling are his own persistent doubts about the efficacy of any effort to transform Jefferson into a man. Grant’s sense of purpose as teacher, like his pride, is very brittle. His former teacher, Matthew Antoine, preaching nihilistic futility, had already severely damaged it, and it is soon apparent that Grant would likely bolt and run were it not for Vivian, who cannot leave with him until she has obtained a divorce from her estranged husband.

Grant’s biggest problem, however, is Jefferson himself. During the initial visits to the parish courthouse in Bayonne, when Miss Emma accompanies Grant, Jefferson is almost catatonic, unwilling to communicate with either of them. When, in a subsequent visit by Grant, he does break out of his shell, his behavior shows that he has accepted his lawyer’s conception of him as subhuman. He snorts and grunts, rooting on the floor of his cell and gobbling his food like a hog—behavior that greatly distresses Grant, for it seems to confirm everything that Antoine had said.

Still, Grant does not give up. Although he has no idea of how to go about restoring some pride in Jefferson, his resolve to do so gradually grows. He opts for simple kindness, believing that Jefferson’s sense of self-worth must come from a belief that others care. Grant’s nemesis, the Reverend Ambrose, chagrined by Grant’s apparent agnosticism, pulls against him, convinced that Jefferson can find comfort only in the revealed word of God.

With patience, Grant finally begins to break through to Jefferson. He gives the condemned man a small portable radio, which Jefferson takes as a kind, caring gift, more, in fact, than he had ever before received. Then Grant encourages him to write down his thoughts and feelings, which Jefferson, in halting words, does, finally confirming his humanity. Clearly, before his date with Gruesome Gertie, the portable electric chair, he redeems his manhood; in the process, Jefferson helps Grant to find himself and earn the respect and proffered friendship of Paul, a white but sympathetic deputy. Thus, despite the awful miscarriage of justice that is the central fact of the novel, A Lesson Before Dying ends on a hopeful note.

The Characters

Grant Wiggins, the protagonist, is also the novel’s primary narrator, so it is chiefly his thoughts that the reader audits. He is a seeker cut adrift from his communal moorings by his education, which, ironically, seems to limit rather than expand his options. Given his time and place, he can be little other than a teacher, but his doubts about the value of trying to help the quarter children make him harsh and perfunctory, almost a martinet. Initially, he seems destined to fulfill the fate that Matthew Antoine has told him is in store for him, to become “the nigger” he was “born to be.” For Grant, Jefferson’s plight is all too typical of what a young, ignorant black male might expect in a white man’s world, and Grant sees little point in trying to help him. He gradually warms up to his charge, however, not so much from the moral cross Tante Lou has tried to make him shoulder as his desire to prove Sheriff Guidry and others wrong. Blinded by pride, palpable resentment, and doubt, Grant does not fully understand that, in helping Jefferson, he has set out on his own spiritual odyssey, one that finally proves Matthew Antoine wrong. The reader understands, however, and knows that Paul’s visit to the quarter, made from respect and admiration for Grant, signals an enduring, hopeful change.

Although Grant is hostile to Tante Lou’s moral arm-twisting, she is the first important catalyst in his transformation. She will not let Grant wheedle out of what she perceives as both his Christian and communal responsibility. His education has led him to question her beliefs, but Grant’s residual sense of guilt is tapped by his aunt, for whom he has both affection and grudging reverence. She, of course, is bound to the community by traditional ties based in an abiding faith that Grant, in his modern enlightenment, has almost entirely rejected. He cannot, however, refuse her on a personal level. Vivian is the other important catalyst. Her love offers Grant solace and hope in his darker moments, when the pointlessness of trying to help seems confirmed by Jefferson’s actions. She also keeps Grant anchored to his job, because she is not free to leave with him until she obtains her divorce. Her own strong sense of responsibility, rooted in more private feelings of pride and dignity, nicely balances Tante Lou’s.

While Grant’s main conflict lies within, it is to an important degree objectified in the person of Jefferson, the novel’s victim. To raise him up, Grant must overcome Jefferson’s self-loathing, inculcated by whites who have repeatedly told him that he is no better than an animal. It is that same self-effacement and contempt from which Grant has tried to run, evading rather than coping with it. In helping Jefferson, he is at last forced to face up to and triumph over it. Jefferson, going to his death with manly dignity, provides an outer measure of Grant’s own spiritual growth.

Critical Context

In some important ways, the artistic antecedents of A Lesson Before Dying lie in Gaines’s first novel, Catherine Carmier (1964). There are, for example, close parallels between character pairs, notably Tante Lou and Grant Wiggins and the earlier book’s Aunt Charlotte and Jackson Bradley. The two spinster aunts, spiritually identical, are moral preceptors for their searching, disillusioned nephews, both of whom attempt to find themselves in romantic entanglements with Creole women.

The principal locales of the two novels are much the same, except that Catherine Carmier is set in the early 1960’s, when a young, educated black man such as Jackson had some alternatives to teaching. Despite the pain it causes for his aunt, Jackson rejects the option in his quest for a new, personally rewarding identity. Grant, facing the less hopeful world of 1948, at least goes through the motions of teaching, though he longs, however vaguely, for something better. Racial injustice permeates both novels. Both books relate that injustice to a generational change and conflict between the older, tradition-bound members of the community and the increasingly alienated youth, who can find nothing to bind them to their heritage. Further, both works treat that passing of a way of life with a mixture of relief, sadness, and some compensatory humor.

In A Lesson Before Dying, Gaines also returned to a simpler method of presenting his story. In the novel’s immediate predecessor, A Gathering of Old Men (1983), he used the collective point of view of more than a dozen voices, but in A Lesson Before Dying, he confines point of view primarily to the single voice of Grant Wiggins. The novel thus shares the narrative directness of Catherine Carmier. It is similar, too, in its plain but lyric style—rich in colloquial speech, understatement, and bare diction— and in its characteristically even-tempered handling of the passionate issue of racial intolerance.

Bibliography

Auger, Philip. “A Lesson About Manhood: Appropriating The Word in Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying.” The Southern Literary Journal 27 (Spring, 1995): 74-78. Auger explores the issues of dignity and self-worth in Gaines’s novel, focusing on the problems black men face when attempting to define their manhood. His discussion also includes an examination of Gaines’s other works that deal with the same theme.

Babb, Valerie M. Ernest Gaines. Boston: Twayne, 1991. A major critical introduction to Gaines, with a chronology and bibliography. The best general introduction to Gaines published before A Lesson Before Dying. Strongly recommended as starting point for further study.

Gaudet, Marcia, and Carl Wooton. “Looking Ahead.” In Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines: Conversations on the Writer’s Craft. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990. In an interview, Gaines discusses A Lesson Before Dying as a work in progress. Comparisons of his comments and the finished work provide valuable insights into the processes of creation and revision.

Larson, Charles R. “End as a Man.” Chicago Tribune Books, May 9, 1993, 5. More than any other novel of African American life, A Lesson Before Dying is about being a man in the face of adversity and about the morality of connectedness, of each individual’s responsibility to his community.

Rubin, Merle. “Convincing Moral Tale of Southern Injustice.” The Christian Science Monitor, April 13, 1993, 13. A review for the general reader. Gives a synopsis of the novel and an upbeat appraisal typifying the book’s reception in most reviews. For Rubin, A Lesson Before Dying is an important “moral drama.”

Senna, Carl. “Dying Like a Man.” The New York Times, August 8, 1993, p. G21. An enthusiastic review that helps illuminate the racial lines and tensions among the book’s black, white, and Creole characters. Senna does claim that the novel has an occasional “stylistic lapse” but gives no specific examples.

Sheppard, R. Z. “An A-Plus in Humanity.” Time 141 (March 29, 1993): 65-66. Reviews A Lesson Before Dying, giving a short plot synopsis. Praises the author’s level-headed ability to convey the “malevolence of racism and injustice without the usual accompanying self-righteousness.”

Wardi, Anissa J. Review of A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest Gaines. MELUS 21 (Summer, 1996): 192-194. A highly favorable review that explores the “role of language in symbolic enslavement.” Wardi also offers a brief plot synopsis and character analysis. She praises the novel as “an extraordinary literary accomplishment.”

Yardley, Jonathan. “Nothing but a Man.” The Washington Post Book World 23 (March 28, 1993): 3. A brief but excellent explication of the novel. Focuses on Grant as protagonist and notes that the lesson referred to in the work’s title is one learned by him as well as by Jefferson. Also remarks on Gaines’s admirable restraint in treating racial themes.