An A-plus In Humanity

By R.Z. Sheppard

TITLE: A LESSON BEFORE DYING

AUTHOR: ERNEST J. GAINES

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 256 PAGES; $21

THE BOTTOM LINE: With the art of a story-teller and the skills of a novelist, Gaines makes the difficult look easy.

A Lesson Before Dying is, like Ernest Gaines' best-known novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, set in rural Louisiana. The year is 1948, and the particulars have a familiar ring. A young, black male is convicted of murder and sentenced to death on inconclusive evidence. The youth, called Jefferson, had the bad luck to be in a white man's store at the same time that two acquaintances attempted a robbery. They shoot the owner, but not before he fires effectively at them. Left with three dead men on the floor, Jefferson panics and helps himself to a bottle of whiskey and the contents of the cash register as two customers walk through the door.

The impulsive action ensures Jefferson a date with Gruesome Gerty, the state's portable electric chair, even though his lawyer argues that the accused is incapable of premeditating a murder. "No, gentlemen, this skull here holds no plans," the defense claims. "What you see here is a thing . . . to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn." In effect, Jefferson is not condemned to die like a man but be destroyed like a beast. Worse still, he believes that he is no better than a dumb animal.

The job of persuading him otherwise falls to the local schoolteacher, Grant Wiggins, who has seen something of the world before returning south to teach at the black grammar school. Burdened with his own frustrations, not the least of which is downplaying his intelligence and college education when dealing with whites, Wiggins reluctantly undertakes to instruct Jefferson in his humanity. In short, to teach him how to die.

The lesson succeeds appropriately through an act of language. Wiggins gets the young man to write his thoughts in a journal, nine pages of semiliterate dialect that should not work in 20th century fiction but does because Gaines delivers a written equivalent of authentic oral expression, not a romanticized rendering of black English.

That is not all the author gets just right. The year may be 1948, but the plantation manners are circa 1848. There is an ominous courtesy between the races. The whites are soft-spoken and patronizing. The blacks reply with exaggerated deference and little eye contact. Few writers have caught this routine indignity as well as Gaines. Fewer still have his dramatic instinct for conveying the malevolence of racism and injustice without the usual accompanying self-righteousness.