Getting Off to a Good Start in 2012: A Lesson Before Dying

This is the first book officially on the '12 Bucket List but after enjoying The Table Comes First, I am most delighted to find I like Ernest Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying. Little did I know that he wrote The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, one of those movies I never got around to seeing either.

Although Gaines wrote ALBD in 1993, it is set in the pre-Freedom Rider South where the locality is still referred to as the "plantation" and not the Parish in Louisiana. The main characters are a young black teacher who returns home after is college education to teach in the black church and a teenage boy who is found guilty of murder when he is with two of his friends and they are shot when accosting a liquor store owner. The all white jury convicts him; his defense attorney pleads for mercy, claiming nothing is served from electrocuting him, an act that is as insignificant as doing it to a hog.

Grant Wiggins, the teacher, is badgered by his aunt to visit Jefferson in jail and make him "a man" so his nannan can be proud of him. That is the lesson, explicitly to be learned, but both Jefferson and Grant grow and gain tremendous insights into their position in their closed, biased, family-driven society. The story is a bit overblown and maybe dated, but it is so well written. Gaines prose sings. His depiction of rural Louisiana is just as vivid as Pat Conroy's of Charleston, just the other side of the tracks.

There was only one page that I dog-eared. I seem to be looking for those paragraphs or pages where the author just has to intrude, to speak as himself and not through a character. Often those selections are the real ur-story, the why the book was written. This kind of bleeding into the plot or purpose strikes me as an irresistible temptation: the more professional, business-related writing I do, the more the itch to intrude affects me. A writer has to express himself, why else write. It is all graffiti, the "I was here and this is what I had to say"... even when I was asked to pretend to be someone else.

So the self-evidence I found in Gaines' novel, in the voice of Grant giving his lesson to Jefferson: "Let me explain it to you ... 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 cycle -- and 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 all of the others who have run away and left their burdens behind. So, he, too. must run away if he is to hold on to his sanity and have a life of his own ... What (she) wants from him ... is to change everything that has been going on for three hundred years." Grant is laden not just with a family obligation, but a Savior like demand of his time, place and people.

It is a story of ties and expectations, family and cultural demands and myths that circumscribe and eat away at all characters. It shows us all how to live beyond frustrations and biases. I cried at the end, wrapped up in the story, and reserved another Gaines to deepen my exposure to his talents.