Book Note: A Lesson Before Dying

There’s something a little bit scary in picking a book for a group of people to read. You start to feel like the book has to be a representation of you. Like, if you don’t pick a great book, then it’s proof that you’re not very well-read, or intelligent, or successful. Of course, what’s dumb about that is the fact that I’d never feel like that about someone else, if they picked a non-great book, but I always assume others will think that of me. At any rate, I agonized over picking my SDBEE book on the last round, because the book I picked before, Easter Island, was a complete disappointment. I think I bought about twelve or thirteen books before finally settling on A Lesson Before Dying  as my choice. The thing that sold me on it was hearing a bit of it read at a library program:

 

I had gone to bars, to barbershops; I had stood on street corners, and I had gone to many suppers there in the quarter. But I had never really listened to what was being said. Then I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, how they talked about the dead and about how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere.

 

That little bit made me think the novel would “feel” a certain way, that it would involve Great Lessons into the plot, Big Ideas. It only partly came through for me with that “feel” I thought it would have, but I’m still glad I read it.

 

In the novel, Grant Wiggins’ cousin Jefferson is tried and convicted of murder. Jefferson’s defense attorney had a strange defense for his client: the jury couldn’t find him guilty, because whether or not he actually killed the (white) man in the little country store, he couldn’t be guilty of the crime. Guilt would require an element of being a human, and Jefferson? Well, he wasn’t human. He wasn’t a man. He was an unthinking animal.  “This skull here holds no plans,” the defense attorney explains. “What you see here is a thing that acts on command. A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. . . What justice would there be to take this life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.” Obviously, this sort of defense has an enormous impact upon Jefferson, who feels (understandably) hopeless about his life. Grant’s godmother and aunt ask him to start visiting Jefferson at the prison, to help convince him that the defense attorney is wrong, to help him believe that he is a man before he dies.

 

Grant is the school teacher for the black children in the community, so in a way he has escaped some of the small-town racism, at least for the time of his education. But in a way, his education makes life more difficult for him, because he sees so clearly the problems inherent in his community. The way that racism promotes not just a sense of worthlessness at the very core of an individual, but a cycle of poverty and hopelessness, too. He wants to break away from that cycle not by breaking it, but by leaving the small town where he grew up and is now teaching. He feels hopeless in the face of his community’s expectations for him; they don’t just want him to teach their children but to change their prospects, to make things different in the world. Grant explains it to his girlfriend Vivian like this:

 

 We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slvery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be te one to change the vicious circle—which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind.

 

Grant can’t change the cycle of racism—but Jefferson can. “What she wants,” Grant explains about Jefferson’s mother, “to hear first is that he did not crawl to that white man, that he stood at that last moment and walked.” So Grant has this seemingly impossible task: to teach Jefferson that he is a man while Grant is, himself, questioning his ability to be a man, too. That questioning, the way that it hung on and on and on, is what made me not love Grant as much as I wanted to. It takes him forever to change much about himself. For several months, he only goes to visit Jefferson out of a sense of the task being impossible to get out of. Slowly, slowly he does make some changes, and by the end of the novel you are able to see that both Grant and Jefferson have had a lesson before the death that happens.

 

This is a powerful novel. It fills you up with the frustration of being trapped because of the color of your skin. It serves as a reminder of the ways our country cannot go backward—the things we cannot ever do again. It forces you to think: what is a hero, really? and: what do I do in my life to be courageous? Bitterness, the way it holds you back from your goals, is a big motif, as well as the idea of whether or not a person can truly change. The power of music, of memory, of writing, of food all come up. It is what the blurb on the cover, from the Chicago Tribune, says it is: “an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed, and taught beyond the rest of our lives.” But at the same time, I didn’t love it. To steal Britt’s words: “I didn’t like it, but it was good.” I think my discontent with the novel all stems from Grant’s stubborness. Probably he is created in a way that is realistic; probably the way he acts and feels are the way a man in his situation really would feel. I don’t need him to be all sunshine and rainbows (of course! I wouldn’t be me as a reader if I needed that!) but I did need to be able to find something I liked about him, and it took most of the novel before I felt any affection.

 

Still, though, I did. And I am glad I read it. I’ve continued to think about it, months after I finished it. I’ve used it already, but “powerful” is the best word to describe this book, despite my lack of connection with the protagonist. Because you are so firmly inside the head of a black man, it is nearly like the veil between imagination and reality is stripped away. In fact, as I wrote that, I realized: maybe my not loving the book doesn’t come from my annoyance with Grant. Maybe it comes from how completely it made me feel like I was experiencing the harsh realities of racism—something I don’t want to experience and something I, in my whiteness, have always assumed I wouldn’t have to feel.

Comments

[Britt]

Oh man! Reading this makes me mad at Grant all over again :)I totally agree with your last statement, though. It's not so much about Grant, but the reality of racism that his story made us feel.