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One
Book Holyoke 2009
About the BOOK
“A Low ashen sky loomed over the plantation, if not over the entire state of Louisiana. A swarm of black birds flew across the road and alighted in a pecan tree in one of the backyards to the left. The entire plantation was deadly quite, except for the singing coming from the church up the quarter behind us.” -from A Lesson Before Dying Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying 91993) poses one of the most universal questions literature can ask: Knowing we are going to die how should we live? It’s a story of an uneducated young black man named Jefferson, accused of the murder of a white shopkeeper, and Grant Wiggins, a college-educated native son of Louisiana, who teaches at a plantation school. In a little more than 250 pages, these two men named for presidents discover a friendship that transforms at least two lives. In the first chapter, the court-appointed lawyer’s idea of a legal strategy for Jefferson is to argue, “Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.” This dehumanizing and unsurprisingly doomed defense rankles the condemned man’s grief-stricken godmother, Miss Emma, and Grant’s aunt, Tante Lou. They convince an unwilling Grant to spend time with Jefferson in his prison cell, so the he might confront death with his head held high. Most of the novel’s violence happens offstage in the first and last chapters. Vital secondary characters punctuate the narrative, including Vivian, Grant’s assertive yet patient Creole girlfriend; Reverend Ambrose, a minister whom the disbelieving Grant ultimately comes to respect; and Paul, a white deputy who stands with Jefferson when Grant cannot. White, black, mulattto, Cajun or Creole; rich, poor, or hanging on; young, old, or running out of time—around all these people, Gaines crafts a story of intimacy and depth. He re-creates the smells of Miss Emma’s fried chicken, the sounds of the blues from Jefferson’s radio, the taste of the sugarcane from the plantation. The school, the parish church, the town bar, and the jailhouse all come alive with indelible wildness. In the tradition of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1961) and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), Gaines uses a capital case to explore the nobility an the barbarism of which human beings are equally capable. The story builds inexorably to Jefferson’s ultimate bid for dignity, both in his prison diary and at the hour of his execution. That Ernest J. Gaines wrings a hopeful ending out of such grim material only testifies to his prodigious gifts as a storyteller. Courtesy of Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before
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