Summer 2001 |
Notes on A Lesson Before Dying |
|
| NEWS Authors Resources Titles HOME
SECTION 3 LINKS |
[additional commentaries on Lesson] Mike Rios Eng 7757 Dr. R. Nordquist Notes on A Lesson Before Dying Who is this novel primarily about? Is it about Jefferson, the man who has been falsely convicted of murder and sentenced to death? The man who seems to be at the center of all of the characters’ actions? The man who, according to Miss Emma and Reverend Ambrose, must learn to die like a man? Or is it about Grant Wiggins, the man who must teach Jefferson? Or is it about both of them? Jefferson and Grant are the central characters in A Lesson Before Dying. Jefferson, although he does not appear in most of the novel (he is confined to both the prison and certain chapters and scenes, so that we get the feeling of going along with Grant to visit Jefferson every time we encounter him on a page), is the individual with the most at stake, his life. He is an innocent man on death row. But is it fair to say that he is innocent? He does steal money from a dead man’s cash register. And yet, the narrator—Grant—seems to want his reader to take Jefferson’s economic status into consideration: Jefferson "knew taking the money was wrong. His nannan had told him never to steal. He didn’t want to steal. But he didn’t have a solitary dime in his pocket" (6). Is it fair of Grant to ask this of the reader? Does it matter at all? Or does Jefferson’s stealing money somehow serve to shed some insight into his situation, poverty? Does his poverty excuse his crime? Even so, perhaps the reader should not focus on it; after all, he is innocent of murder, and clearly should not be executed for stealing money. There is a larger crime to take into account here. But how do we know that he did not kill Mr. Gropé? Should we take his word, which comes not directly from his lips but from Grant’s recounting? What are we to make of the fact that we never actually hear Jefferson say, "I did not kill Mr. Gropé?" And what about Grant’s words? He admits that he was not present during the trial. And he was definitely not present during the robbery. And yet, he was there, during the trial. How? What are we supposed to make of his opening sentence? How can he not be there, and yet be there? Is Grant’s omniscience somehow representative of the connectedness of the black community he belongs to? And where does this connectedness come from, if it exists? Have the injustice, prejudice, and racism that blacks experienced brought them closer to each other? Have they come together in order to better deal with such forces? Or does their connectedness originate from some other place, some other time before slavery? Is it even reasonable to follow this train of thought? Slavery is an issue in this novel. But not directly. Its effects are. Gaines does not seem to want his reader to go back as far as an author like Achebe does in Things Fall Apart (although, admittedly, the time difference between both novels is relatively small). Yes, A Lesson Before Dying deals with history, but it seems concerned more with where its characters are headed rather than where they came from. In the novel, in Bayonne, in the South at this time, slavery does not exist, and yet it does. Throughout the novel we see this paradox played out. Grant is continually treated like a slave, or at least like less than human. He must enter through the kitchen of Pichot’s home, he must remember not to act too smart around the white men. Grant’s students are "inspected" like property and deemed "an excellent crop" (56). And of course, Jefferson is convicted and sentenced based on the color of his skin and not on the evidence, the result of which is to connect the black community a bit. But what of the connectedness of this black community? Does it exist prior to Jefferson’s trial? Or is there a sense of disconnectedness? Among the blacks we see racism, do we not? Vivian’s family was opposed to her husband based on his skin, and Grant’s family acts much the same way at first towards Vivian, both because of her skin and her religion. And Grant himself seems disconnected. He is torn between many things. He wants to leave Bayonne, and indeed he has left only to return and once again wish to leave (a cycle that mirrors, in a sense, Gaines’ life and his creation of this novel: he left his hometown to receive an education and returned through his writing; American society has left—some would say run away—from some of its history and must return via narratives such as A Lesson Before Dying). He is torn between believing in God and believing in Heaven, and an afterlife. He is torn between enduring the racism in Bayonne and fighting against it. Grant is always in a state of ambivalence, a sort of, let’s say inbetweenness. A perfect example: The opening paragraph of chapter 17. Grant tells us that he "could never stay angry long over anything. But [he] could never believe in anything, either, for very long." Here is a man who has not yet found himself, who cannot hold on to what is perhaps the easiest emotion there is to sustain, anger, for very long let alone a belief. Any belief. And when does this thought and admission occur? Well, "between Monday when [he] talked to Miss Emma, and Friday, when [he] visited Jefferson again." Grant cannot even relate a specific date to us. It is as if he is more comfortable defining his actions or thoughts or self in terms of what surrounds them rather than where they lie, because he is not quite sure where that really is. Is this where Gaines feels blacks are? Are blacks somehow trapped in this state of inbeweenness, unsure of where they lie? Certainly at this period in history they were. They were told they were free but treated as if they were slaves still. And what about the time in which Gaines wrote his novel? Were blacks unsure of themselves, were they there, and yet not there? Which brings us back to his paradoxical opening sentence. Perhaps it is not truly emblematic of his black community’s connectedness. Perhaps it symbolizes disconnectedness. Grant is obviously disconnected from his community (religion, education). But the members of this community are disconnected from each other as well, are they not? How? Do they share the same kind of faith? The kind of faith Miss Emma has? (And what kind of faith is it? Faith in God, Jesus, Heaven?) If so, why would they need Jefferson to die like a man? Because there is no question that Miss Emma feels her community needs Jefferson to do this. She wants Jefferson to learn that he is a man, that he is worth more than what he has come to believe by way of prejudice and—unknown to her—by way of Miss Emma’s (and dare we say the black community’s) lack of teaching him otherwise. She wants him to learn this so that he can reach others, so that he can teach every black individual that he or she is a human and not a hog, so that every individual can live as a human if Jefferson can die like one. Does Jefferson learn to die like a man? Yes. Does he learn that the way he dies can make a difference? Yes. Is he the only one that learns something? Does Grant not learn something too? He learns that "they [blacks] must believe, if only to free the mind, if not the body" (251). He learns who he is. He says, "I am a slave" (251). And because he says that he is a slave we know that he is not, or rather that he will no longer be a slave—that he will change. But he never says that he believes, that he must believe. But in a way he does. Because perhaps the "we" includes him. Jefferson’s execution touches many different people in Bayonne. The chapter itself is written from many points of views, illustrating how much a part of the town’s lives this death has become. And we know that it has become a part of Grant’s life. So, has Grant connected with his community at the end of the novel? Yes, it seems that way. And what about us? Do we not learn a lesson too? What is this lesson? Maybe it’s a lesson about faith. Maybe it’s a lesson about God. Though it does not have to be. Maybe it’s a lesson about us. Maybe it’s a lesson about connections. Maybe we have connected with Jefferson and Grant and Miss Emma. Maybe we are part of that "we" Grant uses. Maybe we are whom this novel is truly about. And maybe we are closer to changing "everything that has been going on for three hundred years" as a result (167). ______________ |
|
