A Lesson Before Dying: A Book Review

African American Review,  Fall, 1994  by David E. Vancil

A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines's fifth adult novel, is the Louisiana writer's
most compelling work to date. Gaines worked on this book for almost ten years, doing most of
the writing in San Francisco during the summer months between stints as a professor on the
English faculty at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and engagements elsewhere.
Because of the demands on his time and perhaps because of the demands created by the
multiple levels of irony in the book, Gaines despaired of ever finishing this, the best novel of his
career.

Readers of Gaines's previous novels, including “A gathering of Old Men” and the
deservedly famous Autobiography of “Miss Jane Pittman”, are in for a surprise. Gaines
continues to use theme and voice to provide impetus to the story, and as in earlier books, he
experiments with point of view, this time returning to a first-person narrator. Yet this narrator is
neither naive nor dispassionate, but complex and not altogether admirable. Because the narrator
Grant Wiggins is aware and judgmental, his self-deprecatory and scornful voice is often ironic.
By the same token, the structure of the narrative, with its use of Christian stories of redemption,
whether those of Christ himself or those found in morality plays, is full of irony, an irony both
bitter and humorous, tragic and comedic. In no previous work of fiction has Gaines used irony
to such a great extent, employing it in A Lesson both to develop his themes, on the one hand,
and to explore them, on the other. The use of sustained irony, while making great demands on
the reader, allows Gaines's story to occupy linear and cognitive space simultaneously. As a
result of the associative richness emanating from Gaines's multilayered technique, the reader
can empathize with most of the characters--even the worst ones--but still maintain the distance
necessary to understand the complex moral implications of the story.

As narrator, Wiggins is immersed in his own concerns and relates to his community
from a perspective of superiority--a superiority as much bestowed as felt. Yet, despite his
cultural sophistication, Grant is much like everyone else in wanting something better. Only
reluctantly does he assume the role of secular priest, when his God-fearing Aunt Lou asks him
to help prepare a former student, Jefferson, godson to his aunt's friend Miss Emma, to meet his
execution like a man, not the unthinking hog he has been labeled by his white lawyer. The story
soon takes on the trappings of Christ's crucifixion, but with a difference. Before Wiggins, the
disdainful observer, can help another person, he must first be delivered from his own malaise of

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resentment against his people for their history of remaining downtrodden. Also, Grant must
come to terms with his hatred toward whites, who are themselves trapped in roles they have
inherited or accepted blindly. Therefore, redemption is not just an act of acceptance or
acknowledgment, but a process by which individuals may ameliorate conditions and improve
society. Near the end of the novel, Jefferson's barely literate writings, which have been
encouraged by Grant, speak eloquently of his humanity. In a strange and unsettling way,
Jefferson's death allows Grant to live more wholly and to forge an alliance with the white world
in the person of Paul Bonin, a saint of sorts, who is one of Jefferson's jailers and his final
witness.

By the extensive use of literary irony, combined with his grounding in the oral tradition,
Gaines works up his themes of the dilemma of community and self and the nature of race and
freedom in a fully realized manner. The often sly humor found in Gaines's other works is
replaced in large part by large comic scenes or ironic understatement. The comic scenes help
both to alleviate angst and to deflate the smugness of the narrator. They also prepare the reader
for a complex yet life-affirming conclusion to the novel. There may be answers, Gaines
suggests, but no easy ones.

In a memorable comic scene, a white school superintendent visits the schoolhouse.

Wiggins wants to focus on needed school books, but the superintendent is more concerned with
hygiene. He examines the children's gums, Wiggins observes, as if they were horses. Although
sympathetic to Wiggins's request for more books, he tells the teacher that white schools are not
much better off. The reader realizes in this novel set in the years right after World War II that
education opened few opportunities for African Americans in Louisiana and other places.
Wiggins fails to realize that he is more important as a symbol than as a teacher. If the dreamer
himself (Wiggins resembles Professor Higgins in some ways!) is a failure, then at least the
dream must continue to live. So, too, must Jefferson continue to live, at least as potentiality.

Set against the ineffectiveness of black men and the stupid blindness of white men is the
sustaining resilience of women, black and white. They provide the bedrock of family life and
keep the community unified, even if imperfectly because of the continuation of inequality.
Without the hope that these women provide through their belief in redemption in the future, life
would be intolerable. The dream of freedom would fail. Surely Jefferson has received the name

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of a founding father who believed in equality for a reason. It is a bitter irony that this Jefferson
is not free and will be punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The first words of the novel are these: "I was not there, yet I was there." It would
perhaps belabor the point to spell out how both Grant, who has returned from California to
teach, and his charge Jefferson, a repressed and unthinking member of a post-slave society,
achieve a level of self-awareness which allows them to achieve redemption into life. Suffice it
to say that separation from the community of mankind and nature, whether through arrogance or
fear, becomes the spoiler of life. In this context, racists are as much objects of compassion as
scorn. Pity them for they know not what they do.

In this book are many miracles. Evil spirits are cast out. A man who acts like a swine
comes to act as a man. There are at least two other works by Gaines in which the hog motif
appears, but there is no redundancy of treatment. In A Lesson Before Dying, the depiction is the
most graphic. Jefferson literally wallows in his food, so the reader feels relieved and cleansed
when Jefferson finally discovers his humanity.

The use of Christian beliefs is interwoven with the character of the place and people
who inhabit this corner of Gaines's fictional St. Raphael Parish. Here are people, in the years
just after World War II, who go to prayer meetings and long for redemption. There is nothing
phony or forced in this book. Besides carrying an aura of authenticity, the novel is simple to
read and understand, but unlike a parable, which it might be said to parallel in its intent, there is
no simple moral. The nature of morality in its social and individual aspects is itself explored.

Gaines, who has entered his sixtieth year, recently received a prestigious MacArthur
Foundation award. Will he find more time to write now? Given the time it takes to create a book
as accomplished as A Lesson Before Dying, with its ironic use of the Christian story of
redemption mingled with Gaines's themes of individual and group identity in a racially torn
world, it seems unlikely that the author could produce a more superbly crafted book. As he
indicates in the recent Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines, Gaines considers himself first a writer for
young black people and secondly a writer for young people in general. Perhaps he will continue
to write for a young audience, as he did in A Long Day in November (1971), or to write
novellas, his preferred form, and short stories (one of which appeared recently in Southern

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Review). Whatever Gaines decides to do, readers must be thankful for what he continues to find
time to give them.