Learning To Walk

Learning To Walk:

A Schoolteacher and an Inmate's Journey into Manhood

A Lesson Before Dying, by Ernest J. Gaines, tells the story of a schoolteacher and an inmate's journey into manhood. Jefferson, a young black man in the south, is wrongly tried and convicted of the murder of a white storeowner. Being black and poor and uneducated, Jefferson's lawyer refers to him as a hog, incapable of having the mental capacity to plan a murder, or even to know better than to call the police when he saw one. Grant Wiggins is a local schoolteacher who went to college in hopes of leaving the south and its oppressive environment. After returning home to teach the local children, he finds himself resisting all things that are expected of him, including his aunt's request for him to help Jefferson. With execution hanging over his head, Jefferson's godmother brings the two boys together in hopes of making Jefferson a man. What they accomplished was much more, a bond that led both of them to the understanding of life, themselves, responsibility.

Ernest Gaines grew up on River Lake Plantation in Point Coupee, Louisiana; this was the setting known as Bayonne in his novels. His life was so closely related to the main character of the novel, Grant Wiggins, that writing it should have been like pulling memories out of his mind and laying them on paper. At age nine Gaines began picking cotton on the plantation under the care of his aunt until the age of fifteen when he left the state of Louisiana to join his parents in California. Grant Wiggins' character also endured the plantation life until he was of age to go to college, where he received the education to become a schoolteacher. Gaines, just like Wiggins, received his education away from the south. As recalled from the novel, Grant had parents who resided in California and he often thought of leaving the south to be with them. On more than one occasion his girlfriend, Vivian, mentioned the subject to him: "You told me then how much you always wanted to get away. And you did, once...You went to California to visit your mother and father--but you wouldn't stay. You couldn't stay." Considering how closely the lives of Ernest Gaines and Grant Wiggins parallel, it can be seen that Gaines left Louisiana for the same reasons that Wiggins was thinking about leaving, to escape the stifling atmosphere of an environment where he and his people couldn't grow. A point that Vivian made in the novel was that Grant couldn't stay away from Louisiana, despite the fact that in his mind it was a pit of quicksand, where he was sinking deeper and deeper into his feelings of helplessness and wasted effort. The fact that he came back shows the social responsibility that Gaines is trying to make the readers realize, and it offers a way for him to take care of the responsibility that he himself may feel that he owes to the south. Creating the works allows Gaines to give back, to bring racial and ethical issues to light, to teach lessons, and return the morals, values, and life lessons that growing up in the south instilled in him, to the people.

Being so closely tied to the setting of the novel allowed Gaines to use the technique of colloquialism to write in a manner that read like the actual speech of individuals in the south. A young boys rendition of The Pledge of Allegiance--"Plege legen toda flag. Ninety state. 'Merica. Er--er--yeah, which it stand. Visibly. Amen."--gives the perfect audio/visual image of the dialect. Allowing readers to, in so many words, hear the speech of the characters, combined with their moods and attitudes, gives them more room to relate to them and understand their thoughts and ideas and gain further understanding of the novel as a whole. People have the tendency to equate diction with intelligence, and if it were an applicable comparison, the way in which the characters of the book spoke (with the exception of Grant, Vivian, and few others) would make it seem as if they were uneducated, and of less value and importance than others. Gaines made it a point to recognize that the way people spoke differed with the race that they were. In one instance, Grant and the Sheriff had two different pronunciations of the word batteries. "I'll see that he gets it. Batries I hope'.... 'Yes, sir, batries,' I said. I had almost said 'batteries.'" This shows how blacks were restrained from growth even through their speech. Though Grant, a black man, spoke the correct and educated enunciation of the word, the fact that the sheriff, a white man, said it in the incorrect manner forced Grant to suppress his intelligence