A Lesson Before Dying

Bayonne, Louisiana, 1948. Jefferson, a young Black man, is in a liquor store when a robbery goes wrong and the white owner and two Black men are shot dead. He alone walks out, and the court convicts him of murder. His own lawyer, arguing for his life, tells the jury he would as soon put a hog in the electric chair. That word is what his godmother, Miss Emma, cannot bear. She and her friend Tante Lou press Tante Lou's nephew Grant Wiggins, the teacher at the plantation school and the only college educated Black man in the quarter, to visit Jefferson in the parish jail and teach him to die like a man. Grant, who narrates, wants no part of it. He is bitter about the school, about the deference he has to show Henri Pichot and Sheriff Guidry to get permission, about a South he would leave tomorrow if Vivian, the married teacher he loves, would come with him.

The visits are the book. Jefferson at first will barely speak; Grant keeps coming; Reverend Ambrose comes too, worried that Grant is teaching the boy pride rather than God. Grant borrows the money for a radio, the schoolchildren bring gifts, and he gives Jefferson a notebook, in which Jefferson begins, in his own spelling, to write down what he thinks. Kirkus described that notebook as something like a miracle, water from the rock. The execution is set for April 8. Grant cannot make himself attend. Waiting outside his schoolroom in the church, he watches a butterfly settle on a sprig of bull grass and fly off out of sight, and feels that it is over. Then the young white deputy, Paul Bonin, who has come to respect him, drives up and tells him that Jefferson was the strongest man in that crowded room.

Gaines writes in short, plain sentences with almost no raised voice, and the restraint is the point: Publishers Weekly called the narrative restrained but eloquent, and Kirkus said it is never maudlin and approaches the spare beauty of a classic. It is about 250 pages and reads in a couple of sittings, and it suits readers of To Kill a Mockingbird who want the same period told from inside the quarter.