A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines

"Let me explain it to you, let me see if I can explain it to you," I said.  The brandy was really working now.  "We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery.  We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves.  So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle--which he never does.  Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind.  So he, too, must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own.  I can see by your face you don't agree, so I'll try again.  What she wants is for him, Jefferson, and me to change everything that has been going on for three hundred years.  She wants it to happen so in case she ever gets out of her bed again, she can go to that little church there in the quarter and say proudly, 'You see, I told you--I told you he was a man.'  And if she dies an hour after that, all right; but what she wants to hear first is that he did not crawl to that white man, that he stood at that last moment and walked."

Jefferson, a young black men, has been sentenced to death for killing a white storeowner.  He's innocent, a bystander, but it hardly matters in front of a white jury.  Even his lawyer tries to defend him by saying that he's too stupid and inhuman to be responsible for what happened; to kill Jefferson would be, the lawyer says, like killing a hog.  Grant Wiggins is a schoolteacher in the same Louisiana parish, and Jefferson's godmother, a friend of Grant's aunt, wants Grant to visit Jefferson on death row to teach him one more lesson before the date of his execution--that he is a man, and not a hog.

Grant is resistant to these claims being made on him, that he can, or should, try to teach Jefferson anything.  Grant is a bitter man and a bad teacher who hates his job, hates living in the South, and dreams only of moving away to California when his girlfriend, Vivian, is finally able to secure a divorce.  His aunt, Jefferson's godmother, to Grant they want him to do something that would entail reversing hundreds of years of history.  But he goes, and finds that Jefferson is just as recalcitrant as he expected, and refuses to talk to him.  At one point, he brings a dish of Jefferson's godmother's food, which Jefferson eats on the floor with no hands--like a hog.

It's not hard to see where this novel is going, where, in fact, it has to go: Jefferson opens up to Grant, and Grant is able to help him walk toward his fate with dignity, but Jefferson too turns out to have something to teach Grant.  (The ambiguity is baked into the title, yeah?)  I often felt like A Lesson Before Dying moved with a kind of cinematic necessity.  The voice of black and Creole Louisiana is powerful and effective, but I often felt the heavy hand of Gaines behind it.  (It's hard to put that critique into the right words; I don't doubt that everyone in the parish is thinking constantly about Jefferson and the date of his execution, or thinking through it in sophisticated and traumatic terms, just that the scriptlike directness of the dialogue detracted from the sense of place and atmosphere.)

The best part of the book, I felt, was when Jefferson gets to speak in his own words, writing his final thoughts down, diary-style in a notepad that Grant's bought him:

i just can't sleep no mo cause evertime i shet my eyes i see that dore an fore i get there i wake up and i dont go back to sleep cause i dont want walk to that door no mo cause i dont know what back o there if its where they gon put that cher or if it spose to mean def or the grave or heven i dont know

The rawness of Jefferson's language, contrasted with Grant's proud and educated voice, rings forth with a truth and pathos I wanted more of from A Lesson Before Dying.  Jefferson is terrified, brave, dignified, human--no hog.  It's hard to read his words without thinking of the nearly three thousand people on death row in the United States right now, whose dignity and humanity, like Jefferson's, have been taken from them--no matter whether, like Jefferson, they are innocent.  And though the novel is flawed and little less compelling than I'd hoped, it didn't have to do much to evoke rage and despair from me.  A Lesson Before Dying captures the stifling social borders of the mid-century South--it drives you nearly insane to see the way the intelligent and accomplished Grant is abused and minimized by white power-holders.  It would be comforting to think of it, like Green Book, as a historical snapshot of a time past which we've progressed, but Jefferson's story is sadly timely.