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Essay on A Lesson before Dying
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..." (Gaines, 1997) So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice, and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. (Oprah Book Club® Selection, September 1997). The book is a story of two African American men struggling to attain manhood in a prejudiced society. (Publisher’s Weekly, 1993) While at university Grant stops believing in religion. This further isolates him from his aunt and others in the quarter. Reverend Ambrose lectures Grant on what it means to be educated. Grant looks down on the Reverend because he is a self-taught preacher; but he knows himself and he understands his people. (Andrews & Bryant, 1974)
Gaines reprises the jail cell as a site of symbolic action and uses writing to explicate the act of self-discovery that Jefferson, the novel's hero, experiences there. Thus the novel turns on the interaction between Grant and Jefferson who, as black men battered by the vagaries of segregation, find a way to engage in a dialogue that transforms them from a disillusioned schoolteacher and a nearly illiterate young man falsely accused of murder into men whose brief symbiosis empowers them both. Though Jefferson's death is certain, Grant's task -- which becomes Jefferson's legacy -- is to impart some of himself, to demonstrate to Jefferson a way to improvise upon a negative situation till he discovers dignity and purpose.
Rather than moving forward in time to explore the contemporary South, the novel moves backward in time, using allegory to make a commentary on the African American odyssey in the South. Jefferson submits himself to legal authority, and by doing so choose death, thereby calling our attention to the dignity with which he meets it..........
