Introduction to the Novel

Louisiana Homecoming

Ernest J. Gaines spent most of his writing career in the San Francisco Bay area. His agent, Dorothea Oppenheimer, discouraged him from taking teaching positions for fear teaching would derail his writing career (Gaudet and Wooten 126). However, when invited to become writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in the early 1980s, he took the opportunity to return to the region that inspired his writing. While at USL (now renamed University of Louisiana at Lafayette), he had the idea for A Lesson Before Dying. He first imagined it as a contemporary story—that is, taking place in the early 1980s—about a prisoner on death row at the State Penitentiary of Louisiana. Living in Louisiana at the time made a significant difference to how the story took shape. Gaines wanted his story to reflect the realities of its setting. So, he started talking to people in the area who had experience with the criminal legal system.

It turned out, sending a teacher to visit someone on death row would likely not work. However, during the 1940s, the State had a traveling electric chair nicknamed Gruesome Gertie that they sent to Parish jails where condemned men, and one woman, awaited execution. Gaines learned about Willie Francis, a Black sixteen-year-old sentenced to death in 1945. Francis’s case became well-known because the first attempt to electrocute him failed. A year later, the second attempt succeeded. Gaines decided to set Jefferson’s story in 1948, about the same time as Francis’s case. Importantly, 1948 was also the same year Gaines left Louisiana to continue his education in California. Having decided on the time period, he started gathering more information. He asked a former sheriff how a teacher might get access to someone awaiting execution in a Parish jail. He asked an attorney about the emotional state of a client on death row. He asked for details about Gruesome Gertie, still in use at Angola in the 1980s. His Louisiana homecoming sparked the idea for A Lesson, enabled the research, and encouraged Gaines to imagine the through line connecting the historical moment of his departure to the contemporary moment of his return.

No wonder then that the novel dramatizes the tensions its narrator, Grant Wiggins, experiences upon his homecoming to a rural Louisiana location where he grew up. Grant, like Gaines, leaves to continue his education and returns to teach. He feels stuck, stifled, and disrespected living and working on the plantation where his ancestors had been enslaved. Yet, at the same time, he feels tied to the land and the community. With Grant as narrator, the novel achieves a remarkable ambivalence that persists through the conclusion of the novel. Even as Jefferson, the hero of the story, finds dignity and self-actualization in the face of injustice, Grant remains conflicted about his role as an educator. He wants to help his students be free but of himself he says, “I am a slave” (251). Several times throughout the novel Grant expresses a desire to start over elsewhere. During his college years he visited his parents in California, then returned to Louisiana to finish his degree. “But I had been running in place ever since,” he reflects, “unable to accept what used to be my life, unable to leave it” (102). Despite their many similarities, Gaines seems to have felt much less ambivalent about Louisiana than his character. He settled into life in Louisiana. He married in 1993, the same year A Lesson came out, and eventually retired in Oscar, LA, where he spent the first fifteen years of his life.

Apex of Success

Gaines had a momentous year in 1993. In addition to publishing A Lesson and getting married, he won the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Colloquially known as “the genius grant,” the honor befitted an author receiving strong book reviews from the most prominent periodicals in the United States. The March 29^th issue of Time magazine noted Gaines’s “dramatic instinct for conveying the malevolence of racism and injustice.” The New York Times review later that summer emphasized his facility with characters: “the characters, black and white, are humanly complex and have some redeeming quality.” And in a year-end roundup of notable books, People called the novel a “powerful tale” that “resonates with grace and pathos.” The publication of A Lesson represented the height of Gaines’s success as a novelist. His reputation grew even stronger when Oprah selected the novel for her book club in 1997. Two years later, HBO released an adaptation of the novel for screen starring Don Cheadle as Grant. In the following years he would go on to win the National Humanities Medal and the National Medal of the Arts.

The money that came with the MacArthur Fellowship, along with strong book sales, allowed Gaines to turn his attention toward preserving parts of his community. He and his wife, Dianne, started a non-profit to preserve the Mount Zion Riverlake Cemetery, where Gaines is now buried alongside many of his ancestors. At the time, the cemetery was overrun with wild growth. Many graves were in disrepair. The non-profit contributed to restoring it and securing its future. Gaines would later restore the community church that inspired the school setting in A Lesson. It now sits behind the house he built in Oscar, LA on the same land he worked as a child. Early in his career he wanted to memorialize his community by writing about them. Toward the end of his career, having returned to Louisiana, he preserved his community by investing in its future. The last inhabitants of Cherie Quarters left in the 1980s. Gaines’s community work ensured that the memory of those who lived there would remain.

A Generation Later

Gaines died in 2019, more than thirty years after starting work on A Lesson. It remains his most successful novel, even exceeding the reputation of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Although the novel dramatizes the Jim Crow era, it speaks to concerns Gaines had about his contemporary moment, including the federal expansion of the death penalty. For instance, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 added sixty new offenses to the category of crimes punishable by death. That law also allocated billions of dollars to increase the number of police officers across the country and to fund prisons. The same year President Clinton signed the crime bill into law, Justice Blackmun wrote a dissenting opinion for a case involving the death penalty. He explained that despite decades of attempts to make death sentences fairer, “the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake.” The population of prisoners on death row in the United States grew dramatically during the last two decades of the twentieth century, rising from about 700 people in 1980 to about 3,600 people in 2000 (Death Penalty Information Center).

Some of the problems A Lesson highlights have grown even more urgent since its publication. Injustices in both education and criminal legal systems persist. For instance, one recent study “found that segregation between white and Black students has increased 64 percent since 1988 in the 100 largest districts” (Spector). And mass incarceration, which accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, continues to impact Black communities at a disproportionate rate. In Louisiana, which has the nation’s highest incarceration rate, the prison population is about two-thirds Black despite the state population being only one-third Black. Policy and law appear to have rolled back many of the hard-won gains achieved by the Civil Rights Movement.

In recent decades, the school-to-prison pipeline has emerged at the intersection of legal and educational systems. The concept refers to the incorporation of policing in schools and the tendency to focus on discipline over education. So-called zero tolerance policies impose harsh punishments while ignoring student circumstances. The impact of such policies falls on vulnerable students and under-resourced schools, exacerbating already unequal circumstances (ACLU). Although the school-to-prison pipeline names a recent development, A Lesson points to related problems when Grant muses on the fate of people he attended school with: “There was always news coming back to the quarter about someone who had been killed or sent to prison for killing someone else... And there were others who did not go anywhere but simply died slower” (62). Education did not lead to upward mobility or freedom for those students in the rural plantation school. Instead, school became another institution that organized and maintained inequalities across class and racial differences. A generation after its publication, the novel remains as relevant as ever, helping us see how our contemporary society reproduces social dynamics forged under Jim Crow.