I rated this 3 stars at first. Then I changed my mind. This had potential that was never reached. It was very much “assigned reading” in energy. Watch the movie instead at least there are good actors to lessen the monotony.

I read this book so you wouldn’t have to. That’s it. That’s the review.

This review does not really reveal anything about the plot that you don’t see in the blurb for the book. The novel takes place in the late 1940s on a plantation/township similar to the place where the author was born in southern Louisiana in 1933. As a child Gaines would have been very familiar with the way things worked in the Jim Crow South. Usually a “plantation” brings to mind the antebellum era with large white houses, well bred gentlemen and genteel ladies, live oak trees dripping Spanish Moss among fields of cotton and sugarcane. The plantation in this book is a cluster of fairly primitive houses for black workers on a big farm. The only “white” house is owned by the white farmer and that house is getting shabby. The prevailing social structure keeps everyone in their places no matter what their lives are like. The nearby town is segregated—separate but NOT equal. Two sets of every service. A nicer school for whites, a funeral home for whites, churches for whites, bars for whites. A lesser set of services are back-of-town for the blacks. School, funeral home, bars, etc. A strange system will not allow mixed mulatto people to go to white bars so they resentfully go to the black bar but think they are in a higher social strata.

Of course nothing is really equal as this story will tell you. It concerns a young black man who is tried and convicted pro forma for a murder he didn’t commit. The central character is the black schoolteacher whose nannan insists he teach the young man to die like a man and not a beast. The lessons in the title are learned by more than the young man.

It is a beautifully written but sad, sad book.

Protagonist Grant Wiggins is a schoolteacher of poor black children at a church in a small town in Louisiana in 1947. As the story opens, his aunt and her friend, Miss Emma, are attending the trial of Miss Emma’s grandson, Jefferson, for murder. Jefferson was in the wrong place at the wrong time and did not kill the white proprietor, but due to the deep racism of the time and place, the jury presumes he is guilty. He is sentenced to death. Miss Emma asks Grant to visit Jefferson in jail to help him feel a sense of self-respect before he dies.

The story shows the struggles of the black community living in the era of Jim Crow laws and segregation. It brings them to a personal level, showing how difficult it is to live with dignity in the shadow of racism. And of course, this is a lesson our society is still learning. It is easy for the reader to empathize with Grant and Jefferson and develop a sense of outrage at the injustices they face. Grant has no desire to attempt to “teach” moral knowledge, but he does it out of courtesy to his aunt and Miss Emma, and initially there is little response from Jefferson. In the end, they both learn “a lesson before dying.”

Themes include bigotry, poverty, education, injustice, social class, religion, and sacrifice. The tone is mostly bleak, but somehow the author ends it with a tiny ray of hope, and this is no small feat considering the subject matter. It is a powerful and emotional story.

Some books, if you don’t like them you feel you’re going to be excommunicated from all decent society and be made to go about wearing sackcloth (still available from Amazon) and ashes and ringing a bell shouting “unclean, unclean”. E.g. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and everything by Marilyn Robinson. These books are so well meaning and uplifting it would be like publicly declaring that you find kittens unattractive or Van Gogh was a bit crap. A Lesson before Dying is one of these novels. It had some great rage against the machine stuff in it but all that business about getting the wrongly accused black kid to walk like a man to the electric chair to make his old aunt happy was a lot of very slow dancing on the head of a pin and the atheist teacher and the faithful old preacher should have gone the full ten rounds, and the chapter of the wrongly accused black kid’s prison diary was totally Flowers For Algernon and should have been snipped. Etc etc etc.

Where’s my bell?

“Unclean, unclean!”

why was this so sad and depressing omg so much better than kindred but also boring so

I liked the description of this book and thought I would really enjoy it, but it ended up being really boring. I could barely force myself to finish.

Set in south Louisiana in 1947 really captured the anger and futility of personal growth in the Jim Crow era. The execution of young black man & his relationship with the protagonist & his elderly aunt and preacher is well done. Really gets inside the mind and is unflinching and non-sentimental. I recommend. Same author wrote the Autobiography of Jane Pittman.

I didn't have to read this one in high school, which was probably a good thing. I don't know that I would have appreciated it then, the way I can now. This was really, really excellent. The last chapter in particular gutted me, but also the unexpected chapter from Jefferson's notebook. The characters were vivid, particularly teacher Grant, deputy Paul, and Sheriff Guidry, not to mention Jefferson himself, on death row for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I love that there's room for questioning God, His existence, and also there's visible strength in the faith for those who do choose to believe. That neither Grant nor the preacher were willing to be something they weren't, nor do something they didn't believe in, but as foils for each other. That so many of the characters, even outside Jefferson, could see bigger things, wanted more, but knew they likely weren't going to get it, for reasons both within and outside of their control, and their resignation to that.

On the surface this novel seems to be fairly simple, but in reality it is quite complex. There are so, so many issues packed into its under-300 pages. At its 'simplest,' it's the story of self-actualization, of achieving selfhood through narrative.

Read with a local group for LEH's RELIC program, "Encounter in Louisiana."

The older and, one hopes, wiser I grow, the more I admire and respect simplicity. Simplicity is not simple. Simplicity means clean lines, all that is unnecessary pared away. Simplicity means choosing that one golden word where ten would only confuse the issue. And, that one word can be clear and true.

Ernest J. Gaines is a master of simplicity. A Lesson Before Dying is clean and clear writing, descriptions that say just enough to evoke an entire scene with all senses engaged, all heart and mind present. His dialogue is bare bone, sparse as the dialogue I so admired as a young writer-in-training, enthralled with that other Ernest—Papa Hemingway, and his unique way of capturing the way that people actually speak rather than the stilted narrative voice of the author him or herself.

“It don’t matter,” I heard him say. He was looking up at the ceiling.

“What don’t matter?”

He didn’t answer.

“What don’t matter, Jefferson?”

“Nothing don’t matter,” he said, looking up at the ceiling but not seeing the ceiling.

“It matter to me, Jefferson,” she said. “You matter to me.”

He looked up at the ceiling, not seeing it.

“Jefferson?”

“Chicken, dirt, it don’t matter,” he said.

“Yeah, it do, Jefferson. Yeah, it do. Dirt?”

“All the same,” he said. “It don’t matter.” (Page 73)

Ah yes, there is that mastery, like a reincarnation of Hemingway, with an artist’s understanding of the way that life moves—not in straight lines, but in circles, ever circling on the same spot, trying out its parameters until it is known, only then shifting to the next circle, a slight distance this way, or that, or even back again. I admire this accuracy portrayed in the written word. The novel becomes life.

The life portrayed in this novel is based on two main characters, set in 1940s Louisiana, the deep south, when racism and segregation ran deep, and a black man was imprisoned just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, innocent that he might be. Jefferson is a simple-minded man who inadvertently ends up in the middle of an armed robbery, and although he has done nothing wrong, is sentenced to die by a legal system that has nothing to do with justice but everything to do with enforcing the status quo. Grant Wiggins seems, at first, Jefferson’s opposite—a black man who is educated and intelligent, a teacher at a church school. Both men, however, live in a prison, even as only one of those has tangible bars.

When Jefferson is called “same as a hog” by his own defense attorney, likening him to a dumb animal in the hopes that the jury will deem him innocent out of sheer lack of enough intelligence to commit a crime, his aunt, Grant’s grandmother, can accept the final verdict of death, but not the image of her nephew dying like an animal. She calls in a favor from Grant, who reluctantly agrees to visit Jefferson in prison and teach him to die like a man.

If this injustice, the death sentence of an innocent man, cannot be changed in a deeply racist society, then one’s attitude about it can be. Jefferson bitterly accepts being called a hog—“it don’t matter”—but the story unfolds in those gorgeously clean lines with the meetings between the two men, some of which are nothing more than sitting together in a prison cell for an hour and staring at the ceiling. There are no lectures, no fist-pounding diatribes, no soapbox rantings to vaguely disguise the views of the author in need of getting something off his chest. There is just this fly-on-the-wall observation of two men sharing space, different yet same, both locked into place, both suppressed by their life sentences to a destiny neither deserves but inflicted upon them because of their race.

So how does a man become a man? What differentiates a man from a dumb animal? Our teachers are not always those with the highest intelligence quotient. Our leaders are sometimes those who are silent, but walk to their destiny, however unfair, with clean conscience and straight spine. Whatever is done to a man matters little. What a man does to himself, and how he handles the circumstances of his life, is all that matters. Live or die, a man does so with honor. Just or unjust, a man answers to himself if he has lived with integrity. If he has, he can walk through any trial, toward any fate, with his head held high.

Edward J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Louisiana, where he is now writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Previous books include The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, A Gathering of Old Men, and several others.

~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet

A black man is wrongly accused of a crime he did not commit, and a schoolteacher is given the task of helping him face his punishment like a man. The facts seem simple, but there is so much more to this little book. Through Grant Wiggins, the articulate yet conflicted narrator, Ernest J. Gaines presents the plight of downtrodden African Americans in the South. Yet he also makes the reader confront what it means to be truly human, and to face one's destiny with true courage.

This is a profound, deeply moving story about a poor, young black man in '40s-era Louisiana, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to die, and the plantation schoolteacher who was given the task of mentally preparing the young man for his execution, and to help him die with dignity. My heart just ached for these characters and what their lives were like back then, but even now, over 70 years later, this novel is relevant. It really packed a wallop with me.