Grant’s Lesson
Though Ernest J. Gaines’ novel, A Lesson Before Dying, centers on the maturation and salvation of the wrongfully condemned Jefferson, it is the transformation in the disillusioned teacher, Grant Wiggins, which is illuminated through his narration. The reader moves with Grant as he regains hope and compassion for his community as he struggles with Jefferson and finally realizes his position in the black community is not as futile as he originally believes.
Upon entering the novel the reader is filled with a sense of entrapment, “No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be” (pg. 3). Instantly we are slapped with Grant’s despondency regarding the station of blacks in the country. As the story progresses Grant is revealed to be a collage graduate who has spent time in California but returned to the little Cajun town of his birth to teach the black students in his community. He occupies this tragic station in life where he is a person of higher education who is well aware of the injustice of his peoples’ lot in life but powerless to change it. Grant is supremely sensitive to the fact he is smarter then most everyone around him, including the whites that make him grovel and dumb him down, “The fat man didn’t like that quick maneuver. I could see it in his face. ‘You’re smart,’ Guidry said. ‘Maybe you’re just a little too smart for your own good’” (pg. 49). Throughout the novel we are privy to the expected social niceties demanded of the black community in deference to their white neighbors and how Grant resists and resents them, “Since Miss Emma was not with us this time, I walked beside the deputy instead of behind him” (pg. 81). All these combine to fill him with rage and hopelessness. He sees nothing redeeming in his pupils as they continue to live the lives of their ancestors. Life in this town is a vicious cycle that keeps the black community dumb, subservient, and poverty stricken. He’s suffocated by the social obligations being put on him and is embittered by them, “Everything you sent me to school for, you’re stripping me of it…Professor Antoine told me that if I stayed here, they were going to break me down to the nigger I was born to be. But he didn’t tell me that my aunt would help them do it” (pg. 79). He doesn’t want anything to do with Jefferson or the rest of the town, he wants to escape somewhere he is treated like the educated man he is.
Grant slowly goes through a personal renaissance in conjuncture with Jefferson’s. “Grant realizes that the powerlessness of Jefferson is, in fact, not so different from the powerlessness he himself feels. While Jefferson is imprisoned in a literally confining structure of white law, Grant is also imprisoned within the structures of white discourse” (Auger 76). As Jefferson takes from him a form of secular salvation, Grant is given hope for the future. He begins to see that his teaching is far from meaningless; rather, it has the potential to sprout greatness in those he nurtures. Grant begins to loose his anger, calming into a composed and less hateful man. He still sees the injustice but now can focus on the hope that some day, multiple individuals like Jefferson shall rise up and demonstrate to the rest of the world just what the black community is made of. Perhaps his own students.
“I don’t know what you’re going to say when you go back in there. But tell them he was the bravest man in that room today. I’m a witness. Grant Wiggins. Tell them so” (pg. 256). As Paul is moved by Jefferson’s transformation under Grant’s tutelage he shows the hope for the transition, when black men are acknowledge for themselves. Grant is Grant Wiggins, not boy, not Higgins. He is acknowledged as a person, the beginning of the great changes to come and that of Grant’s own cleansing as he begins to find peace and accomplishment in himself and his work.
Auger, Philip. “A Lesson About Manhood: Appropriating “The Word” in Ernest Gaines’s “A Lesson before Dying””. The Southern Literary Journal 27 (1995): 74-85.
Gaines, Ernest J. A Lesson Before Dying. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.
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