A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines is a quiet book with an immense impact.  With his beautiful writing, faultless plot, rich landscape, and fully-realized characters, Gaines asks the question “what makes a man?”  He wants us to examine the question of “humanity” and he gives us his answer through his characters’ responses to the situations invoked by the plot.  When we see them engaged in acts of compassion, selflessness, kindness, and bravery — as well as self-doubt, despair, and hope — we see their humanity.  When we see them strive to do what they can to ease the sufferings of others, we see them as the very best kind of human.  Gaines shows us the ugly side of being human as well, the bigotry and meanness, the self-loathing and the fear.

What slavery did, and racism after it, was every damn thing it could to remove the humanity from a whole race. How better to justify the foul treatment of a man than to deny his human-ness, his capacity to understand or care, his bravery and his intelligence, and his ability to love and to protect.  When Jefferson is found guilty of a crime he merely witnesses — he was in the wrong place at the wrong time — he is described by his own defense attorney as a “hog”  and not many  in the white section of town think much of Jefferson’s life or his impending death by electric shock.  The black community, most living down in the quarters by the plantation where they work, are not surprised by the verdict or by the turn one more black man’s life has taken; a turn for the worst, when the best to be expected is just working and more working.

Two men fight for Jefferson, both on behalf of his aging godmother.  Grant Wiggins, local teacher, is pushed into the fight by guilt, and by his own unacknowledged misery at not knowing how to exist in a society that believes blacks are subhuman, second class, and worthless for anything but heavy labor.  Reverend Ambrose fights for the young man’s soul and is no longer interested in Jefferson’s standing on earth. The godmother, Miss Emma, wants her boy to be a man before he dies, wants to know “that he did not crawl to that white man, that he stood at that last moment and walked“.  The conflict between forging an identity on earth as a man and praying for peace to be found in heaven is established between the two men, with Miss Emma wanting earth and heaven for Jefferson and Jefferson believing in nothing at all.  But that is not the only conflict Gaines explores.

There is the conflict of what a black man wants to do for his family and what hecan do under a racist system that strips him of any power to protect or provide.  There is the conflict between wanting to stay and “change everything that has been going on for three hundred years” and wanting to run away, to be free for once of the suffocating South.  There is the conflict between what organized religion promises and what it can deliver: if all mercy is in the next world, what good is hoping for anything on earth?  And finally, there is the conflict between people who are, to use a phrase used repeatedly in the book, “from good stock”, meaning they are respectful of all others humans black or white, and those who use power to instigate fear, perpetuate hatred, hide their own poverty, and ensure debasement of others. Wiggins portrays his characters living every day with these conflicts, struggling to understand situations that make no sense.

How can a man prosper in a society that strips him of any ability to be strong for his family, to protect them and provide for them, unless he bends down to his knee and makes himself subservient?  And what role does religion play when the institution is used to soften the blow of servitude and not remove it?  Can a man walk tall where the walking tall makes him a target for anger and fear and retribution?  How can a person escape second class citizenship when toilets, theaters, schools, and homes are segregated and inadequate (or flat-out terrible)? The horror of second class citizenship is a prison: there is no breaking free, and knowing that you are stuck is the life sentence.

But this book is more than just a compelling and heartbreaking story of racism.  It is a treatise about the responsibility we all have to be human; to even be, as Wiggins puts out to Jefferson, heroes.  “A hero is someone who does something for other people. He does something that other men don’t and can’t do.  He is different from other men.  He is above other men.  No matter who those other men are, the hero, no matter who he is, is above them…..A hero does for others. He would do anything for people he loves, because he knows it would make their lives better.”  Wiggins wants to explain to Jefferson that he can prove to the white man that he, Jefferson, is a man, a hero, better than them: “To them, you’re nothing but another nigger — no dignity, no heart, no love for your people….I want you to —yes, you – to call them liars.  I want you to show them that you are as much a man – more a man they can ever be.” Wiggins is asking Jefferson to bring down the myth perpetuated by the whites in power that the black man is an animal, “three-fifths human.”  To do that takes an act of heroism.

A Lesson Before Dying is also a story about love, one of our best and most human of emotions.  When Jefferson is first imprisoned he is silent and angry.  “It just don’t matter,” he mutters.  “Nothing don’t matter.“  His godmother answers “It matter to me, Jefferson.  You matter to me.” I thought my heart would burst.  What every parent wants to give their children is the conviction that is does matter: they matter, life matters, other people matter.  And the bedrock of feeling that life does indeed matter is knowing that you matter so much to another person.  Jefferson learns that, and he learns the reciprocity of love, that he has a community hoping for him.

Jefferson changes:  he was convinced he was a hog when he was sentenced.  His own lawyer said so and he thinks it’s true, given his lifetime of hard work and never enough to eat and never the warm touch of a woman or the love of his own mother.  But through Jefferson’s time spent with Wiggins and through the working of his own mind, we see that he come to understand his humanity, hebecomes “free in his mind” and is no longer beholden to centuries of being told the black man is no good.  Wiggins changes too: he realizes that each step that works to chip away the myth of the almighty white man and the less-than-human black man is important.  Both men recognize the horrors of what they’ve had to endure but they are  determined to believe in something better, if not for themselves, then for the people behind them, the community from which they came. A hero leaves behind the conviction that life does matter. A life well-lived, for others as well as for your own human self.