A Lesson Before Dying Analysis

In Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, readers truly get the impression that the south is defined by one thing: race. Although modern southerners know that the South is made up of and worth far more than its racial past, race does define many aspects of southern society, including memory, sense of place, the taste of the South, the voices of the South, and expressions of power.

Race relations in the South are most powerfully impacted by memory, and racial memory affects all other aspects of the South. As shown in A Lesson Before Dying, race relations had not changed drastically in the years since slavery. Jefferson represents the way most white people saw black people – poor, uneducated, simple, and unquestionably guilty. Whites did not view him as an equal; in fact, the white community of Bayonne, Louisiana, hardly saw Jefferson as human. Jefferson worked on a white plantation for poor wages and represents the archetypal view of a black person during slave times. In the late 1940s, Jefferson is hardly removed from the memory of the plantation south and slavery, and is proof of the power of the southern imaginary. Around ninety years after slavery ended, life for Jefferson and those like him had hardly changed.

The fictional setting of A Lesson Before Dying, Bayonne, Louisiana, is based on a real Louisiana town and has a background of Cajun culture, which is an important part of the culture of Louisiana and the South as a whole. Gaines does not go into depth to explain Cajun culture, however, and spends more time carefully describing the injustices of segregation. Readers also see in the novel that despite the Cajun culture all around them and their immersion in it, the African American characters in the novel do not identi...

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... and doomed to failure. Racism has shaken Grant to the very core and rattled his beliefs in teaching, where he could express his power and act for change in the community. However, through helping Jefferson to be strong and express his own power over his self-worth, Grant regains his belief in his role as a teacher and the impact he can have on his community.

Race shapes every part of the South because race relations, slavery, and the Civil War were what caused the South to declare itself as an “other” in the first place. A Lesson Before Dying illustrates a time of poor race relations in the south and the impacts racism had on all aspects of society. Although race relations in the South have continually improved since the 1940s, southerners will always navigate the dichotomy of protecting Southern history and memory while striving for racial equality and justice.