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Classroom of the Soul
| Article
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11115 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1993 |
2,944 Words |
| Author
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Susan Larson
Susan Larson is the book editor of the New Orleans Times-
Picayune and is currently at work on The Book-Lover's Guide to
New Orleans. |
A LESSON BEFORE DYING
Ernest Gaines
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993
The place is always the same, always recognizable, in Ernest Gaines' fiction; it is the segregated South of the thirties and forties, a place and an era familiar to Gaines through his own history. The small town of Bayonne, with its plantation, its slave quarters, its river, its school and church, its jail, and its road leading to a different, perhaps better, place, has been the rich and fertile turf upon which Gaines has planted his fictional flag, claiming Louisiana as surely and steadily as Faulkner and Welty have claimed Mississippi. In his most recent novel, A Lesson before Dying, Gaines renders that landscape in all its stark simplicity, in black and white and the inevitable shades of gray, befitting a life-and-death story of heroism and honor.
His heroes are an unlikely combination: a schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, and a young, semiliterate man, Jefferson, unjustly sentenced to die in the electric chair, who will be Grant's most challenging student. The two men are brought together through the pressures of two old black women, who know exactly what the older man must give the younger, even though he cannot see it clearly himself.
Grant's responsibility to his community extends far beyond mere classroom hours; as he surveys the community of the slave quarters, the homes of his students, he knows everything that is going on there. When Jefferson is sentenced to the electric chair for a crime he did not commit, Grant can recount that moment as clearly as if he himself had been present; he can see it in his mind's eye. And his community does not question that inevitable, unjust result. Grant knows that what has most offended the collective honor of the black community is the courtroom insult offered by Jefferson's court-appointed defense attorney: "What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this."
Stung by the insult, Jefferson's godmother, Miss Emma, and Grant's aunt, Tante Lou, prevail upon the teacher to educate Jefferson, to make him a man before he dies. It is a task that Grant undertakes unwillingly, with a sense of his own inadequacy. As he tells his lover and fellow schoolteacher, Vivian, "What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never
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