A Lesson Before Dying

The story opens in a courtroom where an anonymous, omniscient narrator describes the scene: “I was not there, yet I was there. […] I was there as much as anyone else was there” (7). The familiarity of this scene—a Black man accused of committing a crime against a white man—can only end in a guilty verdict. And according to the narrator, every Black person in the community already knows this. The omniscient and passive voice of the narrator suggests this is a common scene playing out too many times to have any historical significance anymore. No one, including the accused, is mentioned by name. The trial is just another example of white people exercising their authority over the life and death of a Black man.

There are three very important pieces of information Chapter 1 that serve to introduce and drive the plot. First, there is a flashback from the courtroom to the crime scene where the accused testifies to his own account of being an innocent bystander in the wrong place at the wrong time. Second, his defense attorney argues that he is no more a man than a “hog,” and to send him to the electric chair is akin to electrocuting an animal. Third, the godmother of the accused only hears one word throughout the entire trial: “hog.”

In Chapter 2, the point of view shifts from anonymous omniscient narrator to the first-person perspective of Grant Wiggins, the protagonist. It is likely that he is the narrator in the first chapter as well, though this is never definitively clear. In both Chapters 1 and 2, there is a Black man compared to a cornered animal with no way out. Jefferson, the accused, is trapped by a racist judicial system, and his lawyer literally argues that he is an animal not capable of hatching a plan of any kind. In order for the jury to spare his life, they must find Jefferson less than human. If they see him as a man, they must sentence him to death. There is no way out.

Grant Wiggins feels just as trapped by racist circumstances. When Miss Emma, the godmother to the accused, explains to Grant that the attorney called her godson a hog and she needs him to die a man, Grant feels even more trapped. He considers Jefferson to be dead already. He wants to make a difference, but he hates teaching, and he feels like he can’t breathe in his town. Grant says he only teaches what the white people want him to teach: He feels like he is screaming inside, and no one can hear how trapped he is.

Black authors often use the metaphor of the cornered animal to depict the dire situation of Black men in racist America. The effects of hundreds of years of racist attitudes and culture have created a situation like the one famously depicted by Richard Wright in Native Son. In that story, the main character, Bigger Thomas, accidentally kills a white woman because he panics at how much trouble he could get into for being by himself with a white woman. It does not matter what actually happens or why because Bigger Thomas has no individual agency that is separate from his social conditions. Every action and reaction are predetermined by racism. Like Bigger Thomas, Jefferson and Grant find themselves in the same predicament as the cornered rat in the opening scene of Native Son: no foreseeable way out, nothing in their control, and a feeling that nothing they do will ever really matter. This is the challenge both men must face in A Lesson Before Dying: What does it mean to live and die as a man when you are Black and living in Louisiana in 1947?