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By Ernest J. Gaines
Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club Selection: 1997
In a small Cajun community in 1940s Louisiana, a young black man is about to go to the electric chair for murder. A white
shopkeeper had died during a robbery gone bad; though the young man on trial had not been armed and had not pulled the
trigger, in that time and place, there could be no doubt of the verdict or the penalty.
"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..." So begins Grant Wiggins, the narrator of Ernest J. Gaines's powerful exploration of race, injustice,
and resistance, A Lesson Before Dying. If young Jefferson, the accused, is confined by the law to an iron-barred cell, Grant
Wiggins is no less a prisoner of social convention. University educated, Grant has returned to the tiny plantation town of
his youth, where the only job available to him is teaching in the small plantation church school. More than 75 years after
the close of the Civil War, antebellum attitudes still prevail: African Americans go to the kitchen door when visiting whites
and the two races are rigidly separated by custom and by law. Grant, trapped in a career he doesn't enjoy, eaten up by
resentment at his station in life, and angered by the injustice he sees all around him, dreams of taking his girlfriend Vivian
and leaving Louisiana forever. But when Jefferson is convicted and sentenced to die, his grandmother, Miss Emma, begs Grant for
one last favor: to teach her grandson to die like a man.
As Grant struggles to impart a sense of pride to Jefferson before he must face his death, he learns an important lesson as well:
heroism is not always expressed through action--sometimes the simple act of resisting the inevitable is enough. Populated by
strong, unforgettable characters, Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson Before Dying offers a lesson for a lifetime.
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