GENERATIONS OF STRUGGLE: Discussion Notes,
Part Two
As might be the case with Marilynne Robinson's Home, in A Lesson Before Dying, "the religious backgrounds inhabited by
the characters and the community generate a mythology of the past and a vision
of a possible future, but the action persistently, and often frustratingly,
remains arrested in the anxious and unfulfilled present" (Ray Horton,
" 'Rituals of the Ordinary': Marilynne Robinson's Aesthetics of Belief and
Finitude. PMLA 132.1 (2017): 126
). Moreover, as Horton proposes
"the experience of being stretched uncomfortably between past and future
(eschatological time) and the way that such an experience, when conceptualized
in a theological or theopoetic framework, opens new avenues of aesthetic perceptivity
(aesthetics of immediacy)" (126). That Gaines's novel addresses a sliver
of African American Louisiana cultural history in tandem with the demands of
the American criminal justice system in 1948 necessitates a more perfect
interpretive union of theological and secular frames. Interpretation of A Lesson Before Dying is more vexed than interpretation of Home.
Therein is a crucial lesson about difference between American and
African American understandings of
criminal justice.
Session 3, June 8: A Lesson Before Dying: Jim Crow and
the Imprisoned Life
Three questions supplied by the African American Resource
Collection, New Orleans Public Library:
1. Jefferson is
convicted of murder in what appears to be a case of "wrong place, wrong
time." His defense attorney describes him as a "hog," a
description Jefferson repeats once he is imprisoned. What prejudices are reflected in that
description? How does Grant combat this
blow to Jefferson's self-esteem?
Before trying to name prejudices, we ought to read the
wording of the text carefully. Prior to
using the word "hog," the attorney informs the jury that Jefferson is
a boy, a fool, "a thing that acts on command"(7). The word "thing" activates
pre-existing attitudes a white juror possessed about black males in a Louisiana
parish circa 1948; the black male was considered to be semi- human, possessing
limited intelligence "inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle
of blackest Africa…." The attorney apologizes for the error of using the
word "man." He bids the
gentlemen of the jury to consider, whether the thing was innocent or not
innocent, "What justice would there be to take this life? Justice,
gentlemen? Why, I would just as soon put
a hog in the electric chair as this" (8). The jury in good conscience can
find an "it" or a thing "guilty of robbery and murder in the
first degree." It is as futile for a thing to appeal a verdict as it is
for a plow to protest that it has been abused.
The prejudices reflected in the description are those which are innate
in American racism.
Pressured by his aunt (Tante Lou) and by Jefferson's
godmother (Miss Emma), Grant Wiggins reluctantly undertakes a series of verbal
and material actions to persuade Jefferson that he is not a thing or a hog but
a human being, a man who is condemned to die. He slowly persuades Jefferson to
recognize that he does possess agency, the human capacity to discriminate
between right and wrong, along with the dignity that no hog can ever possess.
Jefferson leaves evidence in his diary ( Chapter 29) of how his self-esteem is restored. In terms
of literary history, we note the closing lines of Jefferson's diary parallel
the final statement Bigger Thomas makes to his lawyer in Native Son.
2. Grant sees his
small town in Louisiana as a prison and yearns to escape. What holds him back? How does this conflict impact his
relationship with his students? With
Jefferson? With Vivian?
It is difficult for Grant to admit to himself that he is
held back by a sense of commitment and a certain recognition that no man is an
island. His small town, Bayonne, is
thirteen miles away from a plantation where he lives and teaches; it is a rural
scene of action in 1948, the year that President Harry Truman signed Executive
Order 9981 which "barred segregation in the Armed Forces and created the
President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed
Services, to end discrimination in military facilities and units." In
1948, "30% of all the Negroes in school in the South were educated in
buildings contracted under the Rosenwald Fund's aid programs." [Quotations
from Bergman, Peter M. The Chronological History of the Negro in
America (New York: Mentor Books, 1969), page 516] The building in which Grant taught was a
church contracted by the plantation and maintained by people who lived in the
Quarter. Commitment to those people
holds Grant back and leaves him in agony.
Grant teaches his students with tough-love, transferring
to them his desire to be liberated from the "prison" that a
plantation could be. A Lesson Before
Dying conjures memory of what is documented in the film Slavery by Another Name. Although Grant is aware that his university
education has created a barrier between Jefferson and himself, he is equally
aware that both he and Jefferson are located in a mythology of rural Louisiana,
a Southscape, or in the words of Thadious M. Davis [Southscapes: Geographies of
Race, Region, and Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011)], "the incarceral world goes on with its dividing lines, its
racist segregationist codes, its systemic injustices" (302). From the
theopoetic angle, Grant and Jefferson and Vivian remain" arrested in the
anxious and unfulfilled present" (Horton 126). Grant's conflicted feelings create great
tension between Vivian and himself, but those feelings endow his love for
Vivian with maximum honesty.
3. Is the conflict
between Grant and the reverend a generational conflict or a religious one? Do you think their arguments remain relevant
today?
The conflict between Grant and Reverend Ambrose is at
once generational and religious. It is
no mere accident that Grant teaches in a plantation church, yoking the sacred
and the secular in his personhood. It is
Reverend Ambrose who tries to complete the education that Grant did not obtain
from the university, namely that the practice of religion incorporates the
lying and hypocrisy that relieves the intense pain of living. Listen as Reverend Ambrose
"lessons" Grant:
"Yes, you know. You know, all right. That's why you look down on me, because you
know I lie. At wakes, at funerals, at
weddings --- yes, I lie.
I lie at wakes and funerals to relieve pain. 'Cause reading, writing,
and 'rithmetic is not enough. You think
that's all they sent you to school for?
They sent you to school to relieve pain, to relieve hurt ---and if you have to lie to do it, then you
lie.
……
And that's the difference between me and you, boy; that
makes me the educated one, and you the gump.
I know my people. I know what
they gone through. I know they done
cheated themselves, lied to themself
---hoping that one they all love and trust can come back and help relieve the
pain." (A Lesson Before Dying
218)
The arguments and the lesson have extraordinary relevance
in 2017 for us and what we may think about the American criminal justice system
that vicious, subtle, and bereft of spirituality.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. June 6, 2017
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