A Lesson Before Dying: A Book Review

In an instance of being in the wrong place at the wrong time with

the wrong people, twenty-one-year old Jefferson finds the life he once knew suddenly altered forever. As a resident in a little Cajun town in Louisiana called Bayonne, the vicissitude experienced by this young black man finds him spiraling downward from the image of a man to that of a "hog." The only hope for a regaining his manhood is through the intervention of ones Grant Wiggins, the plantation school teacher, who is asked by Jefferson's godmother to make sure that "no hog sets in that chair." However, this teacher is dealing with issues of his own as he attempts to come to terms concerning his own place within a passive society.

Another read for tenth graders, A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines reveals the continued myth of one race's superiority over another in the 1940s although the southern practice influencing the attitudes of the people was abolished nearly eighty years earlier. Much of the author's writing is influenced by his own personal experiences in the same area he once called home as a boy.