Ernest J. Gaines A Lesson Before Dying

Imagine waking up every Tuesday morning, ten o’clock sharp to the sound of someone being executed. Imagine having nightmares of executions over and over, sometimes seeing oneself, one’s friends, or one’s family, taking the slow and painful walk to their inevitable demise. Imagine laying awake at night, pondering what those people, who know their time is short, could possibly be thinking in their final hours. This is exactly what Ernest J. Gaines had to do growing up as a child after moving from Louisiana to San Francisco with his parents, having the unfortunate luck of moving close to the state prison. This experience stuck with Gaines of course, and ever since he had wrote his first novel, he knew he had wanted to write one about an execution.

Set in the fictional town of Bayonne, Louisiana during the late 1940’s, A Lesson Before Dying takes the reader on a journey of Grant Wiggins, a black schoolteacher, who is forced to teach Jefferson, a young black man who is wrongfully convicted of murder and sentenced to death, how to be a “man”. In the end, Jefferson is executed, but he does indeed learn how to be a man, and he dies with dignity. According to Philip Auger, a literary critic, it is obvious that “Grant’s own situation is somewhat similar to Jefferson’s in that both he and Jefferson are undergoing a profound change in their own self-perceptions”. Though Auger is correct in that both Grant and Jefferson experience a change in self-perception, Grant’s change is less profound than Jefferson’s. Jefferson, at the beginning of the novel, believes himself to be a “hog”, something far away from being human, but by the end of the novel, in his final moments, Jefferson dies believing that he is indeed a man. Grant, on the other hand, has a far more subtle change in his self

It is made apparent to the reader Jefferson’s perception of himself is extremely degrading, and this perception remains unchanged for over half of the novel. Jefferson first arrives at this realization of himself when he is put on trial for his crimes. Jefferson, being the only survivor of the incident, was wrongfully accused of having robbed a store and killed its owner. Jefferson in fact had nothing to with it, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But in the eyes of the white southern community, a black man was caught running from the scene of a white man’s murder, so the only logical explanation is that the black man killed the white man, and the black man must pay for his crimes. The defense knew that they had little chance of proving Jefferson’s innocence, so they went with the only viable option, reduce Jefferson’s status to that of less than human in hopes that the jury would realize something less than human could not have committed a murder. The defense