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.

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

Over 1,300 posts on Fifty Books Project, and not one mention of one of the luminaries of American literature, Norman Mailer. Maybe he falls a little outside our purview, or maybe he’s overlooked nowdays as one of the “great male narcissists [who] dominated postwar American fiction”¹, as David Foster Wallace called them, for their supposed misogyny and nearsightedness... or maybe it’s just because there’s a lot of reading to do and only so much time in which to do it.

I had never read Mailer either, in spite of having a copy of The Naked and the Dead sitting on my bookshelf for a few years, but The Executioner’s Song caught my attention in the bookstore for two reasons--it was huge, and the premise--a man, Gary Gilmore, is given the death penalty and executed--didn’t seem like enough to support the length. Not to mention that it was a true story and I’d never heard of Gary Gilmore. So my interest was piqued.

In some ways, the single-sentence summary above does the book justice--it is single-minded in the sense that it keeps the execution front and center throughout--but, of course, further explication is necessary. Gilmore spent over half of his life behind bars, beginning as a juvenile. In 1976, he was paroled and sent to live with his cousin Brenda in Provo, Utah, the heart of Mormon country. During this time he struck up a tempestuous, intense relationship with a young single mother named Nicole Baker, and, after an unusually severe fight and breakup, killed two men, execution style, over a two night period. He was caught and sentenced to death, notable because, at the time, the U.S. was currently in the midst of a moratorium on the death penalty, imposed by Furman vs Georgia in 1972.

The death sentence happens less than halfway through the book. The rest is the story of Gilmore’s fight to be allowed to die and the media circus that surrounded him. Because of the moratorium, numerous civil rights groups, including the ACLU, were fighting Gilmore’s execution, even though he wished for his sentence to be carried out, because they feared, correctly, that if Gilmore was executed, many others would be executed in short order.

Normally, in a story like this, there are clearly defined heroes and villains, and, in true stories, if the facts don’t point to a clear dichotomy, the author usually chooses sides and, inadvertently or not, paints one side more sympathetically. Not so Mailer in The Executioner’s Song. As long as it is, the novel is a picture of restraint, with Mailer refusing to cast Gilmore as a misguided saint or his antagonists, such as they are, as anything other than complicated people with (generally) legitimate reasons for the things they do. It would have been far easier as a reader if I could have seen Gilmore as a monster or the ACLU lawyers as hypocrites, but Mailer’s thoroughness doesn’t really allow for such simplistic line-drawing. Even Gilmore’s motivations for the murders are in question: were they emotional responses to his problems with Nicole? Inevitable behaviors for a bad seed like Gary? Indicators of some deeper mental issue? Results of repressed pedophilic impulses? Deus Ex Machinas handed down from unfeeling gods? We’re never told, and the length of The Executioner’s Song serves as a challenge. Mailer seems to be saying, “Here’s all the information. Figure it out.”

There are moments in The Executioner’s Song that cut deep, like Mailer’s sensitive portraits of the two men Gilmore killed, but even here, he resists the urge to beatify, communicating the facts in flat, affectless prose that works even better than cloying melodrama. Gilmore’s letters to Nicole are the same way--of course, love letters from a man on death row are going to contain some pathos, but Mailer doesn’t edit, and their contents reveal Gilmore’s duality as well as his humanity, his intense longing beside his almost feral brutality. Finally, after Gilmore’s execution, the one spot where a little bit of punch-pulling might be in order, Mailer refuses look away from the grislier aspects of Gilmore’s death--including his autopsy, described in some detail--and the unresolved grief of his victims’ families and Nicole, who Mailer even dares to suggest may someday forget Gilmore, ostensibly her soulmate throughout his time on death row. At risk of hitting the point too many times, Mailer refuses to espouse one simple answer to the questions he raises. It’s what makes The Executioner’s Song worthwhile, what justifies its length, and it’s a good argument for why Mailer, great male narcissist or not, deserves to be part of the “great authors” conversation.

¹The others being John Updike and Philip Roth, who we at 50B apparently love.

The Death of Innocents by Sister Helen Prejean

The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder. - Justice Harry Blackmun

Capital punishment means them without the capital get the punishment.

(As The Death of Innocents primarily focuses on Sister Prejean's experiences as the spiritual advisor to two innocent men who were killed by the state, in this review I will try to stay focused on the execution of innocent men and not wander into arguments for and against the death penalty in general).

In a word, this book was heartbreaking. Sister Prejean tells the story of two men, Dobie Williams and Joe O'Dell, who were falsely convicted of murder and were killed for it. She begins with Dobie Williams, a black man with an IQ of 65 who was convicted for breaking into a house and murdering a woman in her bathroom. Prejean tells the story of his trial, including the total incompetence of his attorney, the suspect nature of the prosecution's evidence, and the ridiculousness of the prosecution's version of what it thought happened. Though there's no way for the reader to really know if Williams was actually innocent, Prejean lays out a case so compelling that you can't doubt it. And plus, she's a nun, so you it's not hard to believe she's telling the truth. Prejean also tells the reader about Williams's last hours on earth, the dignity with which he accepted his fate, and the heart rending effect the execution had on his family.

Next, Prejean tells the story of Joe O'Dell, who was convicted for raping and murdering a woman after she left a night club. Again, Prejean recounts the facts of O'Dell's trial. After a string of incompetent or conflicted attorneys, O'Dell finally says screw it, and represents himself. He is, of course, woefully unable to stand up to the prosecutors, and even though O'Dell has an alibi that could have been substantiated and there is substantial physical evidence that shows he wasn't connected to the crime, he is still convicted. Much of the blame lays at the feet of the prosecution (who blocked O'Dell's access to crucial evidence), while the rest can be heaped on the courts for refusing to grant him evidentiary hearings so he could prove his innocence. Prejean also tells the moving story of how O'Dell met Lori Urs, who was his staunchest and most aggressive advocate, and how they fell in love and got married hours before he was killed. O'Dell's last words before he died were, "This is the happiest day of my life. I married Lori today. . . Lori, I will love you through all eternity." Prejean's account is incredibly moving.

Finally, Prejean addresses arguments for and against the death penalty, including the Catholic church's enlightening views on the subject.

And now I'll hop up on my soapbox. Whether or not you believe in the death penalty in theory is completely irrelevant to the discussion about whether we should abolish it. The fact remains that as it stands today the courts are just not able to fairly and competently use it, as the stories of Dobie Williams and Joe O'Dell show so tragically and clearly. Even though most of the Supreme Court disagrees with me, I believe that the death penalty is unconstitutional as it stands today. You don't even have to go to the 8th Amendment (which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment) to get there, either, although you certainly could. I believe it is unconstitutional because of the 5th and 14th Amendments, which state that a person shall not be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." As it stands today, there simply is not any process that is sufficient to uphold that standard, as Williams and O'Dell show.

For those of you who don't know me, I am a third year law student, so this issue hits close to home. I believe that if everyone does their job, the judge, the jury, the prosecution, the defense, etc, then justice will be carried out. It is for this reason that if I thought I would be at all competent in a court room (and didn't have a mountain of debt looming over me when I graduate) I would become a public defender. Basically, we just aren't good enough at determining a person's guilt or innocence to enforce an irrevocable punishment. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, more than 100 people have been released from death row because they were later found to be innocent. From 1976 through 2004, when the book was written, approximately one out of every eight people sentenced to death were later found to be innocent. Some might say that that is just proof that the system works, but the way the system actually functions makes those lucky people exonerated post-conviction seem like a seed found by the proverbial blind chicken. Here are just a few of the reasons the system is flawed: cops have too much unchecked power; prosecutors have access to evidence and witnesses that the defense doesn't; in many cases, prosecutors and judges have to run for election (a concept that would be laughable if it weren't so horrifying), which gives them an incentive to push for the death penalty to appear tough on crime; defense attorneys assigned to indigent defendants (the vast majority of people sentenced to die are too poor to hire their own attorney) are often egregiously bad (falling asleep during your client's trial was only recently found to be an example of incompetent lawyering bad enough to warrant relief, but being drunk or on drugs isn't); and finally, many times the appeals process focuses more on procedure than substance, making it nearly impossible to fix the aforementioned errors (one man's appeal was denied because his attorney labeled it a notice of appeal instead of a petition for appeal, which the court found too presumptuous).

I'm going to wrap this up because I've gone on long enough (I haven't even gotten to how capricious and racist the enforcement of the death penalty is). To end, this is a moving, intelligent, well written book that asks questions and poses arguments that everyone should consider so we can stop the slaughter of innocent people at the hands of the government they trust to protect them.

The Chamber by John Grisham

Until two years ago, I had never read a Grisham novel. I obviously knew of his work through the various film adaptations of his books, films that I mostly enjoyed. I decided that I would read his books in order, since I have been told on more than one occasion that his earlier books are better than his later ones. While I liked A Time to Kill, I thought that the ending was a little lacking. I felt the same way about The Firm. I was beginning to wonder if Grisham was one of those writers who have trouble concluding their stories. The Pelican Brief and The Client were both improvements. Both were taut thrillers that came to a satisfying close.

Brent (a fellow 50 Booker) had recommended The Chamber to me a couple of times, telling me that it is one of his favorite Grisham novels, right up there with The Rainmaker – incidentally, that is the next of Grisham’s novels. The Chamber marked a slight departure from Grisham’s previous works. It was much slower paced, both the story and characters took a while to develop. But, any hack can write quick, spastic action (see Dan Brown’s bibliography). It is much more difficult to create a slow-moving story that is interesting and entertaining for the reader. With The Chamber, Grisham does exactly that.

The storyline of the book is rather simple. Sam Cayhall is on death row in Mississippi for a crime that he committed when he was much younger and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He is in his sixties and a month away from the gas chamber, when his lawyer grandson – who had not previously met him – arrives to take up his case. Grisham describes the legal battles that take place in the ensuing weeks. Throughout this time, Adam Hall gets a lesson in his extended family history, often learning things that he wished he hadn’t. As with his two previous books, Grisham ends The Chamber well.

Although it is just a novel, I don’t know how someone could read this book and not give some serious thought to the death penalty.