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A Lesson Before Dying (Oprah's Book Club)
by: Ernest J. Gaines |
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Binding: Paperback Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54 EAN: 9780375702709 Edition: 1 ISBN: 0375702709 Label: Vintage Manufacturer: Vintage Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: 1994-09 Publisher: Vintage Release Date: September 28, 1997 Studio: Vintage Features:
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| Customer Reviews | ||
  - "...that's what we all are...all of us on this earth, a piece of drifting wood, until we-each one of us, individually-decide......to become something else." It's late October of 1949 (p 87) when, grudgingly, a 28-year-old teacher named Grant Wiggins agrees to his septuagenarian aunt's request on behalf of her (similarly elderly) friend, that he meet with her imprisoned 21-year-old godson, Jefferson, to make a man out of him in preparation for his execution (p 20), "I want a man to go set in that chair..." in spite of his initial defeatist feelings about the situation (p 14) "There's nothing I can do anymore, nothing any of us can do anymore." Since obtaining his degree, Mr. Wiggins, a teacher at the same church school he attended as a child, has gained the respect of blacks, but resentment from whites. He has his work cut out for him in trying to transform this simple young man, who is understandably upset at his defense attorney's choice of words during closing arguments (he describes him as being less than human, going so far as to compare him to a hog) and holds on to that feeling in disregarding the efforts of the visitors to his jail cell. Jefferson is guilty of little more than being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong era in American history, and, in the confusion of criminal circumstances, making a foolish, and ultimately fatal, decision. Over a period of about six months, Wiggins helps change Jefferson, local persons both black and white, and, unintentionally, himself for the better due to his efforts on behalf of the condemned man. A Lesson Before Dying, a book about capital punishment and the ruinousness of racial injustice, is a better book than Helen Prejean's Dead Man Walking (which I read just prior to this one). Also good: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell. Rating:  - An important story with a dull deliveryThis book is often compared with To Kill A Mockingbird. They both deliver lessons of the inherent injustice of racially defined societal hierarchies. The insecure obtuse nature of whites makes life a discouraging grind for blacks. This book delivers that message well. It also makes another point clear. Young black men with potential face a choice of staying local in a certain futility of trying to make a positive change or they escape and abandon their friends and family to another generation of discouragement. The point of the book is clear but that clarity is so direct that the book is rendered somewhat dull. Harper Lee delivers similar messages with the type of irony and lovable characters that are the artistic means of great story telling. Ernest J. Gaines delivers this story with a blunt hammer, hence my assessment of 'Important but dull'. Rating: - A Master of Simple Language With a Powerful MessageThe older and, one hopes, wiser I grow, the more I admire and respect simplicity. Simplicity is not simple. Simplicity means clean lines, all that is unnecessary pared away. Simplicity means choosing that one golden word where ten would only confuse the issue. And, that one word can be clear and true. Ernest J. Gaines is a master of simplicity. A Lesson Before Dying is clean and clear writing, descriptions that say just enough to evoke an entire scene with all senses engaged, all heart and mind present. His dialogue is bare bone, sparse as the dialogue I so admired as a young writer-in-training, enthralled with that other Ernest--Papa Hemingway, and his unique way of capturing the way that people actually speak rather than the stilted narrative voice of the author him or herself. "It don't matter," I heard him say. He was looking up at the ceiling. "What don't matter?" He didn't answer. "What don't matter, Jefferson?" "Nothing don't matter," he said, looking up at the ceiling but not seeing the ceiling. "It matter to me, Jefferson," she said. "You matter to me." He looked up at the ceiling, not seeing it. "Jefferson?" "Chicken, dirt, it don't matter," he said. "Yeah, it do, Jefferson. Yeah, it do. Dirt?" "All the same," he said. "It don't matter." (Page 73) Ah yes, there is that mastery, like a reincarnation of Hemingway, with an artist's understanding of the way that life moves--not in straight lines, but in circles, ever circling on the same spot, trying out its parameters until it is known, only then shifting to the next circle, a slight distance this way, or that, or even back again. I admire this accuracy portrayed in the written word. The novel becomes life. The life portrayed in this novel is based on two main characters, set in 1940s Louisiana, the deep south, when racism and segregation ran deep, and a black man was imprisoned just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, innocent that he might be. Jefferson is a simple-minded man who inadvertently ends up in the middle of an armed robbery, and although he has done nothing wrong, is sentenced to die by a legal system that has nothing to do with justice but everything to do with enforcing the status quo. Grant Wiggins seems, at first, Jefferson's opposite--a black man who is educated and intelligent, a teacher at a church school. Both men, however, live in a prison, even as only one of those has tangible bars. When Jefferson is called "same as a hog" by his own defense attorney, likening him to a dumb animal in the hopes that the jury will deem him innocent out of sheer lack of enough intelligence to commit a crime, his aunt, Grant's grandmother, can accept the final verdict of death, but not the image of her nephew dying like an animal. She calls in a favor from Grant, who reluctantly agrees to visit Jefferson in prison and teach him to die like a man. If this injustice, the death sentence of an innocent man, cannot be changed in a deeply racist society, then one's attitude about it can be. Jefferson bitterly accepts being called a hog--"it don't matter"--but the story unfolds in those gorgeously clean lines with the meetings between the two men, some of which are nothing more than sitting together in a prison cell for an hour and staring at the ceiling. There are no lectures, no fist-pounding diatribes, no soapbox rantings to vaguely disguise the views of the author in need of getting something off his chest. There is just this fly-on-the-wall observation of two men sharing space, different yet same, both locked into place, both suppressed by their life sentences to a destiny neither deserves but inflicted upon them because of their race. So how does a man become a man? What differentiates a man from a dumb animal? Our teachers are not always those with the highest intelligence quotient. Our leaders are sometimes those who are silent, but walk to their destiny, however unfair, with clean conscience and straight spine. Whatever is done to a man matters little. What a man does to himself, and how he handles the circumstances of his life, is all that matters. Live or die, a man does so with honor. Just or unjust, a man answers to himself if he has lived with integrity. If he has, he can walk through any trial, toward any fate, with his head held high. Edward J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Louisiana, where he is now writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Previous books include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and several others. ~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet Rating:  - I wasn't impressedI was decidedly "meh" about this book. I think it addresses several important issues -- the plight of young black men in the early 40s, the state of the justice system at the time, the usefulness of religion -- but I think those issues could have been addressed in a better way. The main character, Grant, is not particularly likable. He's bitter, unmotivated, and at times, just plain mean. In fact, most of the characters in the book are not particularly likable. Most of them appear to be downright miserable. A sign of the times? I don't know, but you'd think *someone* in the novel would be a joyful person. Jefferson, the imprisoned man, is an interesting character, but even his turn-around is a little anti-climatic. With the build-up of the novel and the title and the praise and all, I expected much more of an epiphany at the end. For me, the pay-off just wasn't there. If I hadn't been reading this for my book club, I wouldn't have finished it. Rating: - A Lesson For Us All"A Lesson before Dying," by Ernest J. Gaines, paints the picture of a young African-American man in the late 1940's in the racially segregated Cajun community of Louisiana, who is wrongly convicted of killing three men. When Jefferson is convicted, his lawyer, in an attempt to salvage him from a awful fate, compares him to a dumb hog, an animal that does not make any real decisions or plans, and says he is simply a "fool" (Gaines 7). Sadly all this insult is to no avail and Jefferson is sentenced to death by electrocution, with just a few months to contemplate his life as a dirty "hog" (Gaines 8) in his hollow cell. The book is a narrative of this time. After his conviction, Jefferson's godmother Miss Emma becomes determined to help him leave life as a man, and head straight to heaven. She arranges Grant Wiggins, a local university graduate and current teacher, to teach him, unwilling as he is, how to be a man and end up heaven. Their story, of teacher and student, leads through Grant's teachings of being rational and believing in oneself. They both end up learning about life, death and the meaning of being a good person. Although there is defiance on Grant's part and fright on Jefferson's, they both come to their senses by emotionally feeding each other. Grant, although well educated, is lost despite his word of the contrary. He is against the snooty people of the upper white class, yet shows to the people around him that he is well educated and not to be forgotten about. He is immovably in love with Vivienne, a mother and in the process-divorcee, and stuck in the job he dislikes, but never moves across to the other side of greener grass. He only grudgingly consents to help Jefferson and all visits are tainted with silent resentment. After helping with this sad case of death on the horizon Grant is brought down to eye level and made to think about his flaws, and to break out of the sad rut he is stuck in. Jefferson on the other hand is blatantly lost, he's young, broke, and foolish. His musings are those of a "hog" (Gaines 1) who can't think for itself, but it doesn't matter he'd die soon enough. Broken down by the critical opinions of those who shut him in a cell and left to reflect the last months of life as a hog he gains courage from Grant's outward certainty. I am against the death penalty, thus this story resonates with me. I think the death penalty is a conflicting idea of ensuring justice, yet Gaines attacks the challenging task of displaying the grief sufficiently. The way Ernest J. Gaines poetically infuses the story with Grant's and Jefferson's internalized hate is invigorating. He stealthily hides simple phrases that make the reader feel as though you sit watching this tale unfold. Quick snip-its of the feeling and meaning of a split second are caught on paper. Gaines tells the experience of the trial from Grant's point of view, "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 1). Although there is the common theme of overbearing cliches: the African-American man suffering for the crimes he hasn't committed, finding yourself from the lessons of others, and the inevitable fate nonchalantly ignored by the apathetic characters, Gaines pulls them off with a unique twist. The dialogue at the beginning of the book is a bit vapid with nothing crunchy to snack on, yet only towards the end, the story entails a juicy sauntering of pain and emotion. The way Gaines describes the moment when Grant is sitting, staring at a hill of bull grass when he knows that Jefferson has past, is luminous, "I probably would not have noticed it all had a butterfly, a yellow butterfly with dark specks...not lit there. There was no odor that I could detect to have attracted it...I watched it closely, the way it opened its wings and closed them...then flew away. I watched it fly down the ditch and over the quarter, I watched it until I could not see it anymore. Yes, I told myself. It is finally over" (Gaines 251, 252). From this he evokes a strong willed unconscionable grief within this simple and delicate imagery. Although the beginning is a bit dull, the ending is strong and poetic with the message of appreciating life and grasping tight to the will and courage we attain, that makes this book a strong message to the lost at heart. |
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