Wow, I just, I’m crying.

A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines [Revised, spoilers hidden 9/12/23]

I think this book deserves to be considered a classic of American literature about Black-white relations in the American South. Two other books I think of in this category (there are several others) are To Kill a Mockingbird and The Help. None are “great literature” in a literary sense – great writing - but they are popular books and they tell stories that need to be told. For those skeptical about The Help as a classic, consider that it has more than 2 million ratings on GR and 85,000 reviews and that it is assigned reading in high school and college courses. So, despite its lack of literary brilliance, I think it’s inevitable that it will come to be thought of as a classic. Of the three, Gaines’ book is the most “genuine,” if I may use that word, because it was written by an African American man who grew up as a son of sharecroppers, picking cotton when he was six years old.



The story is set among the French Creole population in Louisiana, probably about the time the author was growing up, the Jim Crow era. Some French influence remains in the language from Cajun culture in things like calling their aunt ‘Tante’ or their godfather ‘Parain.’

The story starts with Jefferson, a young Black man brought up by his godmother. He’s slow and almost uneducated. One fateful day he takes a ride with two other young Black men who end up in a shootout with a white store clerk. The two Black men and the store clerk all die. Jefferson had nothing to do with it. At his trial, Jefferson’s lawyer points out his ignorance, the ‘lack of slope in his forehead,’ and tells the all-white jury “Why, I would as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.” (And Jefferson’s relations understand what the lawyer is trying to do – it’s their only hope.)

Of course, to the all-white jury, the facts in the case are ‘straightforward’: a white man was killed; a Black man was there; he’s sentenced to die in the electric chair. We know all this a few pages into the book. The trial is not the focus of the book – it’s not a John Grisham novel.

The focus of the story now turns to Grant, a young Black man who is the teacher in a run-down school for Black children. He’s one of the few educated Black men in town; folks call him ‘professor.’ We learn about the school. It’s a public school even though it’s housed in an old church. Grant is the only teacher for six grades. They use worn-out books with missing pages discarded by white students. Kids bring in wood to heat the building in winter. The students kneel in front of the pews to use the seats as desks.

Grant’s parents live in California so he lives with his aunt, the best friend of Jefferson’s godmother. Jefferson’s godmother has one wish before her godson’s execution: that Grant do whatever he can to can to get Jefferson to die like a man and not 'like a hog.'

Grant is reluctant and has no idea how to approach this task during the few months of life Jefferson has left. Grant is educated but agnostic, so the godmother also asks her elderly minister to intervene with Jefferson. It becomes almost a competition between the men: when Jefferson goes to his execution, ‘will he kneel or will he stand’?

Grant and the minister have their work cut out for them: Jefferson is in a stupor, refusing to talk, even to greet visitors nor eat the food his godmother lovingly prepares for him. He says he’s a hog and will die like one. The story line is helped along with a love interest – Grant and a female teacher in a neighboring town.



A lot of the story is a catalog of how whites of that era treated Blacks.  Grant and his aunt need to see a rich white man that his aunt used to work for. They have to ask the rich man for help to get the sheriff to allow Grant and the minister to visit the cell. They enter through the back door and wait for an hour in the kitchen, talking to the cook and maid. When they get into the white man’s office, even the elderly aunt is not offered a chair. The same happens when they talk to the sheriff. Grant buys a radio for Jefferson from a white clerk; he has to argue with her to get a radio that comes in a box rather than the display model. She makes him wait a half hour while she chats with other white people.

Grant talks with a group of white men: “I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be.” Language is the key. He takes the high road in talking of his aunt and says “…she doesn’t feel that …” The white man says: “She doesn’t, huh?”…He emphasized ‘doesn’t.’ I was supposed to have said ‘don’t.’ I was being too smart.”

Are all white people like that? No, one is not. Just one: a young white deputy at the jail who is friendly toward Grant and Jefferson and who tries to help them out with the various obstacles the sheriff puts in their way and with the indignities of searches when they arrive at the jail.

Nor are Blacks immune from racism.  Grant tells us of mulatto men, half Black, half white, who look down on the ‘niggers’ who do field work, like sugar cane cutting. They will only work in bricklaying or carpentry. Grant visits an elderly Black teacher who was a mentor to him and notes that his wife judges the quality of her husband’s visitors by the darkness of their skin – Grant's skin color is suspect. The teacher is a cynic and thinks Grant is wasting his life by staying in this hellhole instead of leaving. He says to Grant: “I am superior to any man blacker than me.” And, if Grant stays, “[they’ll] make you the nigger you were born to be.”

Jefferson keeps a diary in his primitive writing. Those eight pages of misspelled words written without capitalization or punctuation near the end of the book have to be included in any anthology of the saddest things ever written. It’s a real tear-jerker.

As I wrote earlier. I consider this book a classic. I’m giving it a ‘5’ and adding it to my favorites. I wish I had read it sooner.



As a child, the author (1933-2019) lived the impoverished life he wrote about, literally growing up in old slave quarters on a plantation. In his novels he used his background to create the fictional world of Bayonne in St. Raphael Parish, Louisiana. While A Lesson Before Dying is his most-read work, the general public may know him better for the TV movie made from one of his other works, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, modeled on his aunt who raised him. A Lesson Before Dying was also made into an HBO movie.

Top photo: French Creole people from frenchcreoles.com
Photo of a shack that was a home, still standing on the plantation where the author grew up. From myneworleans.com
The author from diverseeducation.com

4.5 stars — I didn't quite know how I felt about this for most of the read.

Picking it up in brief and impatient spurts throughout the busy holiday season probably didn't help any. Then it got swept to the side by Christmas Movies and work stress and holiday travels and everything else. For a brief period of time, I even resented it as a reminder of the shame I felt over not completing my (already pathetically modest) GR Reading Challenge Goal for last year. A silly feeling, I know, but no less persistent or real.

Fast-forward to mid-January and I'm sitting on a beautiful beach in Costa Rica with my sister and parents, awkwardly choking back sobs as I reached its emotionally devastating final pages. (Of course I'd take a novel about systemic racism and the death penalty with me on vacation for a little "light" beach reading).

Wiping away tears and sighing deeply as I closed the book and sat in thoughtful silence for several minutes, I realized the book and its characters had grown to mean much more to me than I'd suspected.

Love when a book sneaks up on me like that. And if the bittersweet memory of crying at the beach doesn’t deserve five stars or close to it, I don't know what does.

This book is set in Louisiana in the 1940s. Grant Wiggins is a teacher on a plantation school, disillusioned with his life and his career.
"When you see that those 5 1/2 months you spend teaching each year are just a waste of time. You'll see that it'll take more than 5 1/2 months to scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered over those brains in the past 300 years."
"I felt like crying, but I refused to cry. There would be many more who would end up like he did. I can't cry for them all, can I?"

Jefferson is waiting to be executed for a crime he witnessed, but didn't commit.
"They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything to do with the crime. The white folks have decided this is the convenient time and place for you to die. Always on Friday, the same time as he died. It can't happen too soom after the recognition of His death because it might upset the sensitive few. it can happen less than two weeks later though because even the sensitive few will have forgotten their Savior's death by then."

Grant visits Jefferson, at the request of his aunt, to prepare him for dying.

"What do I say to him? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I'm still trying to fin dout how a man should live."


Gains writes powerful prose and tells a compelling story. It is brutally forthright and is made more depressing by the fact that this experience is still life for many, even in 2008.

3-3.5 Stars.

A story about race and race relations in the late 1940s. A topic that still resonates in 2015, a notion that I feel makes this novel all the more eye-opening.

Jefferson was in the wrong place at the right time- at a convenient store where his two friends decide to rob and kill the store manager. Both of his friends end up dead as well, so there's no one there to witness Jefferson's innocence. He was an innocent bystander. Unfortunately, it is 1940, the store manager was white and Jefferson is an uneducated black man. He is arrested and sentenced to death by electric chair.

His godmother asks Grant Wiggins, a local schoolteacher, to visit Jefferson in prison and turn him into a man before his death. She doesn't want him to grovel or cry or go to the chair as anything but a man with his head held high. This is no easy task- Jefferson's lawyers compared him to a dumb hog, aka less of a man, during his trial, contending that he's too dumb and incompetent to stand trial. The tactic didn't work to get him off, but now Jefferson is numb, and is convinced that he is no better than a hog. Grant's work is cut out for him- how do you prepare a man for death?

This was no easy read, but I'm very glad to have read it.

This story jumps right into it and leaves no room for imagination. To be beaten down and uplifted in a span of a few pages is what the words in this book gave me. There is no happiness in this book. There is a search for strength, racism, love, and unjust living that cause a community to feel the weight of a son and godmother.

“Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person. Justice?”
As Jefferson is on trial, I was almost shocked at how his lawyer tried to defend him but then I thought of the setting of this book. To prove he was innocent he referred to him as a hog. A hog who lacks intelligence and the will to do anything positive, but a hog who can strike quickly out of fear. In the 1940s down in Louisiana, Jefferson is a young man who is at the wrong place at the wrong time and his fate ends up in the hands of 12 white jurors who convict him he was he took his first breath into the world.

Grant Wiggins is a teacher who’s job is to make Jefferson be a man by the time his execution happens. “What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?” Grant gets lost in himself as he battles with his beliefs and purpose in life. He is conflicted on staying or leaving so that he does not have carry the burden of being a Black man but, “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 along 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”. There is a purpose for every Black man born into the world and sets a good tone and how faith and purpose can teach a man, a community to move forward.

I reread this book recently after many years and was surprised by nearly everything - but not how good it is. I had forgotten most details of the plot, the narrative structure, the characters, so it was almost like reading it for the first time; and the shock and power of the book hit me anew. This book, about a young black man condemned to die for being in the wrong place at the wrong time in the pre-Civil Rights era South and the young black teacher who is asked to teach him to die like a man, is generally described as being about race relations and about human dignity, but it's far more complex and layered than that. It's also about changing times and mores as one generation takes up where another leaves off; about the difference between faith and religion, and the part that each plays in people's lives; about education and understanding, love and lust, and the different kinds of responsibility we all have in our lives - those that are forced on us, those we take on grudgingly, and those we take on willingly but that have far different repercussions than we ever could have imagined. In the end, of course, there is more than one lesson to be taught and learned.

2016: I liked this book and thought it was a good introduction into black literature, culture and history. Grant, our pov character, was quite immature for the most part. He seemed unable to take responsibility for his part in a community he can't quite abandon, but doesn't want to accept as home. However, his aunt and the reverend expected too much of him, I thought, in a situation where there is no right answer. This was spot on though in depicting the passive-aggressive racism of the 1940s in the South. Overall a very important book, but I didn't connect with our main characters as much as I had hoped.

2020: I got so much more out of this upon rereading. It took me a while to understand Grant’s seeming disregard for others, which you could sometimes call cruelty. But I realized he was angry because he was trapped in his community and helpless to do anything to help them, which is the burden on every black man’s shoulders since the beginning of slavery. Each man had to choose himself - living a life with a bit more freedom - or his community, the people he loves, his culture and heritage. Jefferson, too, I didn’t immediately understand why he treated the people trying to help him with such disrespect. But he is consumed with the injustice thrown upon him. He never had a chance at a life of his own. The only white person who ever was on his side equated him to a hog in an attempt to lessen his sentence. Jefferson has to rebuild his humanity in his own mind while also grappling with the knowledge that he will die soon because white people decided he should. Grant and Jefferson and the other characters came to life slowly for me, but were very real at the end. I think this was a bit too nuanced for me when I first read it four years ago, but I really enjoyed it this time.

"Do you know what a myth is, Jefferson?" I asked him. "A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better then anyone else on earth -and that's a myth. The last thing they ever want is to see a black man stand, and think, and show that common humanity that is in us all. It would destroy their myth. They would no longer gave justification for having made us slaves and keeping us in the condition we are in. As long as none of stand, they're safe."

A Lesson Before Dying is an amazing book. Reading it was an emotional experience and I also attended a dramatic reading of a stage adaptation where it did not lose its emotional power. A young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to teach visits a black youth named Jefferson who is on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. Each must learn a lot about himself. The teacher, Grant Wiggins, believes that he must get away from that town, that country, as soon as possible.
"I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be..."
But he is coerced into visiting the young prisoner, Jefferson, who is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell. Jefferson's grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man. As Grant and Jefferson meet and talk they begin to realize the nature of the bonds that hold them and how, perhaps they can both learn about themselves. This is a book of inspiration for those who read and believe in the power of words. But it is also a testament to the belief that you can choose to cause your own change.
Reading A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines was an inspirational experience. The lesson of the title is both demonstrated by the story and felt by the reader. This is a book that I would recommend to anyone who loves reading and life.

This book was recommended to me by another teacher; it was described as a book about a man wrongfully accused of murder and the effort to get him to the electric chair with dignity. I was utterly bored by this book. The tone was too methodically slow and trodding, too much like the setting of the novel itself. I see the "point" of the story, but the end was a huge anti-climax for me.

Absolutely incredible book. I was on my couch sobbing during parts of it. And it takes a lot to make me shed tears. Great writing. Brings you right into the moment.

The third Ernest Gaines novel I've read gets another 5 stars from me. Just as in "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman" and "In My Father's House", I was not quite the same person as I turned the last page that I was when I began. There was a tiny seismic shift inside me that I recognized as another piece of understanding in this complicated dance of racial relations between black and white.

A simple story on the surface: Young Jefferson, a black man, is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is sentenced to the electric chair. His Godmother, Miss Emma, asks the local schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, to visit him in jail and make him understand that he is not a hog with no understanding as the prosecutor decribed him, but a young man that she is proud of. The outcome is known from page one, but the journey is long, complicated, and heart-rending. This is Louisiana in 1948, and the white man is in charge.

As in the other two books I mentioned, the women in this novel are the strong ones, and get things done. Miss Emma and Aunt Lou get what they need through a combination of guilt, bribery and respect. They never hesitate to use them, even on the white people. They know what works. So, apparently, does Ernest J. Gaines. His language is simple and direct, but he can convey a world of emotion and feelings in just a few words. He made me feel humiliation and anger and hurt so many times with just a description of a glance or movement. He made me see that the black man's understanding of the white man has to be many times that of white for black, just as an act of survival.

I ended this novel in tears, not for Jefferson's death, but for his life. "He was the bravest man in the room".