Making a Man

A Lesson Before Dying a novel by Ernest J. Gaines.  From Gaines: Four Novels.  Library of America.  pp. 585-800.  *****

I could make various aesthetic quibbles about A Lesson Before Dying; some minor things drove me crazy as I read, and I wished I could have edited the book (I imagine Gaines suffered from the problem other successful novelists had; he was over 60 and quite celebrated by the time he wrote this book, and editors found him intimidating).  But the overall power of the novel, particularly in the final 50 pages, is overwhelming.  It hit me with an emotional force that few novels have.  I sat with the finale of this novel long after I finished it.

The story is simple and all too typical.  A young intellectually deficient black man named Jefferson is walking in the vicinity of a small town in Louisiana when a couple of guys named Brother and Bear offer him a ride.  He takes it, though with some trepidation, and agrees to go have a drink with them, though he has no money.  The three of them stop at the liquor store, where the proprietor knows Jefferson and his godmother, Miss Emma, but Brother and Bear don’t have enough money for a bottle, and he refuses them.

The men start arguing, both sides have guns, and by the time the whole thing is over, three men are dead and Jefferson doesn’t know what happened.  He just knows he’s scared and disoriented.  He grabs a liquor bottle and takes a few hits to calm himself, then takes some money from the open cash register, because he never have enough.  As he’s walking out, two white men come into the store.  There he stands, holding a liquor bottle and some cash with all that carnage around him.  He’s arrested and charged with the crime.

The trial goes as one would expect with an all-white jury in Louisiana.  In trying to defend him, the court-appointed lawyer used the only defense really available to him, mental deficiency.  At one point he said, “I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.”  Miss Emma, Jefferson’s only family, fixated on that word, as did he.  The jury nevertheless found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death.  He doesn’t name an execution date.  That is to be determined by the local authorities.

We hear all of this from the point of view of Grant Winslow, the one semi-successful black man in town.  He emerged from the dreadful public school system and made it to college in California, where his parents had moved.  He studied education, and has come back to teach, the sole teacher at a school that goes from first grade through high school, and operates for only five and a half months per year; the rest of the time the children are needed in the fields.  Since he is the teacher, Jefferson’s godmother, Miss Emma, asks him to visit Jefferson and help him get ready to die, not as a hog, but as a man.  Miss Emma is good friends with Winslow’s Tante Lou, with whom he lives.  The pressure on him, by these two large and formidable black woman, is considerable.

The brilliant thing that Gaines does in this novel is not to idealize Winslow.  He seems to have taken this job because it is one he could get, not because he has some grand ideal of saving these children from poverty, and he’s not an especially good teacher or happy man.  His happiest moments, in fact, are when he hangs out with his girlfriend Vivian—who teaches at the local Catholic school, is separated from her husband and raising two children—and drinks at a bar called the Rainbow Club in Bayonne.  He doesn’t have any idea how to help Jefferson, or if he will be able to.  And Jefferson himself is deeply embittered, to the point of wanting to see no one, not Winslow, not his godmother, not Reverend Ambrose, the local preacher.  He feels—justifiably—oppressed and ignored.

One night over some brandy at the Rainbow Club, Winslow explains to Vivian what his task actually is, in the most powerful single passage in the book up to then.  “We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery.  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 the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. . . . What [Miss Emma] wants is for him, Jefferson, and me to change everything that has been going on for three hundred years.  She wants it to happen so in case she ever gets out of bed again, she can go to that little church in the quarter and say proudly, ‘You see, I told you—I told you he was a man.’  And if she dies an hour after that, all right.”

I don’t think it spoils too much to say that Winslow—at least from the standpoint of the reader—accomplishes this task, though he was starting absolutely from scratch, with a bitter young man who is lying on the cot in his cell and won’t even turn to face him or speak to him.  He does so in the face of overwhelming and infuriating racism—he has to practically beg the sheriff to let him visit the prisoner—and the pressure from his aunt and Miss Emma and Reverend Ambrose to make Jefferson into a believer, though Winslow is not one himself (he believes in God, but not in the fundamentalist faith that surrounds him).  And though Gaines doesn’t show us the execution, he shows the effects of it on other people in the vicinity, even those who don’t know or care about Jefferson.  The book is an indictment of capital punishment as much as it is of racial injustice.

Gaines apparently based his novel on a real incident, but he made the story into something all his own.  This is not an easy book to read, but it’s vital and powerful, Ernest J. Gaines at his best.