The Elusiveness of Dignity

I don't want no hog to go set in that chair." Miss Emma's wish fuels the action in this simply told but evocative novel. This black matriarch in rural Louisiana in the late 1940s wants her godson to "die like a man," and she asks the local schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, to accomplish this change.

Her godson Jefferson is a reluctant participant in a shoot-out in a liquor store in which the store's owner and the two robbers are all killed. Jefferson is accused of murder, found guilty, and sentenced to die. His lawyer's defense is that he is so intellectually incompetent that he is incapable of premeditated murder. The lawyer says, "Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this."

Grant, who left his small rural black community to go to university, has returned to teach at the one-room schoolhouse in this Cajun community. He wants to escape, to leave the endless cycle of poverty and move elsewhere with his girlfriend, Vivian. But she is afraid of losing her children to her estranged husband if she runs off. And Grant cannot muster the courage or disgust or whatever it takes to leave. He hates his job because he sees no hope for the children he teaches. They, like he, are stuck in a centuries-old rut, enslaved to the ruling white society.

The two men come together and their fates intertwine when Miss Emma and Tante Lou, Grant's aunt, persuade him to visit Jefferson in jail. Grant, who narrates the story, soon realizes he has his work cut out for him, since Jefferson sees himself as a hog. The novel's main suspense consists of this: Will Jefferson become a man before he is executed? Gaines keeps the suspense alive, but he does so much more.

He takes us through Grant's conflicts with himself, with Vivian, with Tante Lou, and with Rev. Ambrose, who wants Grant, an agnostic, to help him "save" Jefferson. Gaines at times comes close to parodying the "church folk" and their naivete, but in the end he shows their strength, while Grant bemoans his inability to believe.

Gaines also shows the subtle (and not so subtle) racism that permeates life in that setting. A common occurrence is white people making black people wait for them. Grant recounts to Tante Lou his visit to the sheriff's house: "The humiliation I had to go through, going into that man's kitchen. The hours I had to wait while they ate and drank and socialized before they would even see me."

Gaines brings this world alive with knowing detail and insight into his characters' lives. Each character has a mix of faults and good qualities. Grant makes it clear he is "not a hero," and Rev. Ambrose, who seems at first the out-of-touch, Uncle Tom preacher, displays his own heroic traits.

A NOVEL WITH a title like A Lesson Before Dying can hardly avoid a certain didacticism, and Gaines falls into a preachiness at times. The narrator's voice makes a sudden change at one point that reveals a barely disguised agenda: "Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person. Justice?"

Nevertheless, the novel contains poignant insights into the plight of African Americans. Grant explains to Vivian why Miss Emma is so insistent on having a memory of Jefferson as a man: "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....He, too, must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own."

Through this story of a man unjustly sentenced to die, Gaines portrays the rippling effect of racism and injustice on individuals as well as on the entire town, white and black alike. He deftly shows the kinds of things that prop up an unjust system. For example, when a truck delivers the electric chair to the jail, everyone is aware of it, but many of the whites want to deny its existence and what its presence means.

The author has set himself a challenge by presenting a situation that begs for either a cynical or a naive, simplistic solution. Instead of a melodramatic story of people overcoming injustice, Gaines depicts the struggle for dignity while living with injustice. He confronts his characters - and ultimately his readers - with the question Grant asks himself, "What does a person do who knows there is only one more hour to live?" In learning how to die, this fine novel asks, must we not learn how to live?

Gordon Houser is editor of The Mennonite in Newton, Kansas.