A Lesson Before Dying

Love and Family Relationships

In A Lesson Before Dying, Mr. Grant Wiggins' life crises were the center of the story. Although he was supposed to make Jefferson into a man, he himself became more of one as a result. Not to say that Jefferson was not in any way transformed from the "hog" he was into an actual man, but I believe this story was really written about Mr. Wiggins. Mr. Wiggins improved as a person greatly in this book, and that helped his relationships with other people for the most part. At the start of the book, he more or less hated Jefferson, but after a while he became his friend and probably the only person Jefferson felt he could trust. The turning point in their relationship was the one visit in which Jefferson told Mr. Wiggins that he wanted a gallon of ice cream, and that he never had enough ice cream in his whole life. At that point Jefferson confided something in Mr. Wiggins, something that I didn't see Jefferson doing often at all in this book. "I saw a slight sm...

Love and motivation from people around Grant in A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines are all directly linked for his eventual change away from the resentments and uncertainties. Without people like Miss Emma or Tante Lou, it seems likely that Grant would have festered in his desolation and spent his life feeling angry and ill-tempered. Ever since, Emma and Tante Lou forced Grant to go visit Jefferson and keep him motivated to stick with the task they've assigned him, it can be said that they are the real force in the novel behind Grant. Vivian, while an equal force in Grant's eventual change in attitude in A Lesson Before Dying, seems to have a different effect. While Grant tends many times to be withdrawn away from interaction with his aunt and Miss Emma, he opens up to Vivian at the end and admits his weakness by laying his somnolent head in her lap.

The first line of A Lesson Before Dying when Grant states offers one of the most important quotes from A Lesson Before Dying "I was there--but I wasn't really there" (1), can not only be taken literally since he wasn't actually at Jefferson's trial, but in the figurative sense as well. Even though he is a part of Tante Lou, Miss Emma, and Vivian's lives, he seems to be only there in presence rather than in spirit. In the first half of A Lesson Before Dying, Grant is always separating himself from the people in his life. The minute gestures Grant makes of what he feels to be his "apartness" seem like they are devotedly felt among his family. For example, both Tante Lou and Miss Emma are always trying to get Grant to eat their food, which for them is a symbolic way of taking care of their men, and similar to Grant, Jefferson ends up doing the same thing when he refuses the food that Miss Emma brings for him. In ways, this refusal on the part of both these men to accept this sign of love and care from his family binds them together. One can assume that this mutual refusal (and finally acceptance) of the food is what helps Grant begin to understand Jefferson. Perhaps this was one of the reasons that Miss Emma and Tante Lou were so certain that Grant could help the condemned man, because they could see the link between them.

Part of Grant's bitterness in the novel stems from his negative feelings about the African American population in his hometown. Grant feels that they are all bending to the will of the whites and seems very frustrated that so few of them do not act out against those who are keeping them down. Also, there is a big difference between Grant's feelings and those of the people in his life since they are all actively involved in the community that Grant seems to have such revulsion for. To Grant, everything seems cyclical which is expressed in the lines, "After listening to one or two of the verses, I tuned out the rest of them. I had heard them all many times," Grant says .The church and community around him are all involved in just seem to Grant to be the same thing, a ferocious circle of compliance.

It is not until Grant learns to put some faith in the people who are trying to make him realize that he can change and become a fully realized man, even if he just thinks they are all bending to the pressures of white society. "Without the hope that these women provide through their belief in redemption in the future, life would be intolerable." In quintessence, this means that without a few members of the black community taking pride in their actions and status as a cohesive unit, life would be even worse for all the African Americans living in Bayonne. The forces in the black community this quote is referring to are Emma, Tante Lou, and Vivian. Without them, Grant, with his feelings of abhorrence, would likely spend his life hating everything around him and this would be excruciating. These three women in Grant's life cause him to take the first steps towards realizing his place in the community, at first by forcing him to take up the issues of injustice surrounding the eventual execution of Jefferson.

The reason that the women in A Lesson Before Dying are so powerful in terms of Grant's helping Jefferson is not only because they are involved with the church (Tante Lou and Emma in particular), but because they take pride in their heritage. Part of this inheritance is directly related to Jefferson's pending execution. Emma wants to see him humanized, rather than compared to a mere animal (a hog). With their dedicated sense of community responsibility, they understand that it is necessary for Grant to take on this accusation, both for the sake of halting his growing sullenness and the representation of the black community in Bayonne. At first Grant despises them for this and dislikes the way they still