Race, Justice and Integrity in the Old South
[Bawer is an American critic and editor. In the following largely positive review, he discusses the spiritual development of the characters in A Lesson before Dying.]
Bayonne, the fictitious Louisiana river town in which Ernest J. Gaines has set all eight of his novels, is not far from the Mississippi lowlands immortalized by William Faulkner. Yet if Faulkner's lush, penetrating prose seems eminently suited to the region's sultry climate and racial tensions, Mr. Gaines's novels are written in a low-key, matter-of-fact prose that may surprise the first-time reader.
Consider, for example, Mr. Gaines's newest novel, A Lesson Before Dying, which takes place during the late 1940s. Jefferson, a guileless young black man, has been wrongly accused of complicity in the murder of a white liquor-store owner. His attorney tells the all-white jury that Jefferson is incapable of planning such a crime. For he is not a man, really, but "a thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn."
The strategy doesn't work and Jefferson is sentenced to death. His ailing godmother has only one wish: that Jefferson—who has been as devastated by his lawyer's line of defense as by the verdict—will go to the electric chair with his head up, knowing himself to be not a "thing" but a man. To this end, she asks Grant Wiggins, the collegeeducated teacher at Bayonne's black school, to meet with Jefferson regularly. Wiggins (the narrator) is loath to get involved; he doesn't share the old lady's fervent religious faith and doesn't appreciate being put in a position where he has to toady to the ignorant white bigots who work at the jail house.
Wiggins is a Southern-black variation on that old Humphrey Bogart movie cliche, the cynical reluctant hero. He's constantly complaining about the pointlessness of his presence in Bayonne, where the only thing an educated black man can do is teach reading, writing and arithmetic to kids who will grow up to become field workers on some plantation. Yet as we learn from some contrived expository dialogue between Wiggins and his lover, Vivian (a one-dimensional character whose role never rises above the functional), he's already gone off to California once, only to return home. Deep down, he's committed to this place and feels needed here.
And indeed he is. By his conduct on the day of his execution, Jefferson will either inspire or demoralize his fellow blacks in Bayonne, and challenge or confirm his white executioners' image of blacks. Wiggins comes to realize that for Jefferson to see himself as a man is important not just to Jefferson but to the entire town.
So Wiggins perseveres. The breakthrough comes when Jefferson, who has been sad, surly and self-deprecating, turns to Wiggins and tells him to thank his students for sending him pecans. This line recalls the climactic scene in the celebrated 1974 TV movie The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, based on Mr. Gaines's best-selling novel, in which the ancient Miss Jane strikes a blow for desegregation by drinking from a whites-only water fountain. Jefferson's thank you is a similar, seemingly trivial, everyday act that carries huge moral significance.
Mr. Gaines's fiction has continually attested to the psychological and symbolic importance of apparently minor gestures. Mr. Gaines reminds us movingly of many things: that the simplest of acts can be heroic, that it is important to set...
(This entire section contains 897 words.)
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a moral example for others (especially the young), that struggles against inequity are carried on individual by individual and that everyone who participates in such struggles wages a battle not only in the world but within himself. By the book's end—which surprises with its power—it is clear not only what the lesson referred to in the title is, but also that Jefferson is not the only one who has learned it.
While this book's heart is most assuredly in the right place, it is, in a number of ways, rather disappointing. While Wiggins makes a credible enough protagonist, the transformation of Jefferson from self-disparaging "thing" to self-respecting man doesn't quite convince. Too often the book feels formulaic, written to outline. Its characters don't rise sufficiently off the page and its setting fails to burst into life with sights, smells and sounds.
Yet to complain about the lack of local color is to miss the point. Mr. Gaines's plain style ultimately proves appropriate because his book is less about the riverfront milieu than about the naked moral truths of these people's shared predicament. And Mr. Gaines knows that predicament inside out; he understands the workings of institutionalized prejudice and captures perfectly the complex tensions between black and white.
In the end, what is most surprising about this book is its tough, unsentimental spiritual power. Jefferson, whom we first encounter as a supposed subhuman, has by the final pages emerged (though Mr. Gaines doesn't lean too hard on the comparison) as a Christ figure, an exemplary victim, while Wiggins—whom his aunt condemns as an atheist—has grown from a secular into a spiritual teacher. Its deficiencies notwithstanding, A Lesson Before Dying is a very special book about prejudice, the value of individual integrity and the extraordinary resources of the human spirit.
