“Everything you sent me to school for, you 're stopping me of it,’I told my aunt…” The humiliation I had to go trough, going into that man’s kitchen… Now going up to that jail… Anything to humiliate me. All the things you wanted me to escape by going to school. Years ago, Professor Antoine told me that if I stayed here, they were going to break me down to the nigger I was born to be. But he didn 't tell me that my aunt would help them do it” (Gaines, 79). In a Lesson Before Dying, growing up a black man in a southern state proved itself hard enough for Grant. Not to mention the job as a school teacher that he hates, living in a place that he hates even more, and being instructed by his aunt to teach a convict to be a “man” before his