61 pages • 2 hours read
Ernest J. GainesA Lesson Before Dying
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
Grant and his students prepare for the annual visit from Dr. Joseph Morgan, the superintendent of schools. Irene Cole, a sixth grader, is in charge of the younger students. Dr. Joseph sits at the teacher’s desk and selects various students to come and talk to him about their studies. The students are nervous. He calls on Gloria Hebert from the primer group, and then he calls on Louis Washington Jr., a first grader that Grant wishes had stayed home on this day. The boy’s hands are dirty, and when asked to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, he doesn’t say it correctly.
Dr. Joseph inspects the cleanliness of the children’s hands and teeth. Grant compares this inspection to that of the white slave masters when buying new slaves. Grant finds consolation in that at least Dr. Joseph lets the kids spread their own lips rather than using “some kind of crude instrument” (46). Dr. Joseph continues to call Grant “Higgins” instead of Wiggins, and he compliments him on his good “crop” of students. Grant recalls that Dr. Joseph calls him the same name and says the same things about his students every year. He regrets having drilled them so much. He tries to tell Dr. Joseph that the school needs more paper, pencils, books, and chalk. Dr. Joseph claims that it is the same at the white Schools, but when Grant says his school gets the hand-me-downs from the white schools, the superintendent accuses Grant of “questioning” him. He tells Grant to get the kids off their “lazy butts” and pick pecans to earn money to buy toothbrushes and improve their hygiene.
Chapter 8 Summary
Two old men, Henry Lewis and Amos Thomas make the long-awaited first delivery of wood for heating the church school. Later that afternoon, Grant has the older boys sawing and chopping the wood while the younger kids study. Watching the boys laugh and talk while they work reminds Grant of the way the two old men behaved when they were dropping the wood at the school. Grant knows the two old men never attended school, and Grant questions whether his teaching will help his students break the “vicious circle” of such limited opportunities in life. He fears they will just end up being the ones to bring the wood in another 50 years, despite going to school. Grant remembers chopping the wood at his school, and he realizes that the boys who did it with him were now dead, in the fields, or in jail.
Grant remembers his own teacher, a “mulatto” biracial man named Matthew Antoine, who seemed to hate himself and his students. He advocated running away from the place because there was no freedom in the town, but Grant recalls those who listened to him did worse than if they had stayed. Grant recalls visiting his teacher later in life and listening to Matthew Antoine talk about how Hitler and the KKK had their “reasons” for hating Black people. He tries to tell Grant that one day he will understand that trying to teach the students is a waste of time because they have been too ignorant for too long.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
In Chapters 7-8, the themes of racism and education are more pronounced. Dr. Joseph, the white superintendent, visits the school for the tenth time since Grant started teaching. He calls Grant by the wrong name, and he says exactly the same things about the students that he says every year he visits. Despite this predictability, Grant still makes his students drill and prepare, which he claims to regret. He knows it doesn’t matter if the students know their academics or not. Dr. Joseph is still going to focus his inspection on hygiene and perceived character. Grant compares his inspections to those of slave owners looking to make a new purchase. Grant tries to push for new supplies, but the superintendent chastises him for “questioning” his authority. Again, the history of racism weighs heavily on this interaction which, like the justice system, has a predetermined outcome for the Black teacher and his students. Grant is like a hamster that can’t escape its wheel, destined to repeat the same scene again and again.
In the interaction between Grant and Dr. Joseph, Gaines uses certain words and phrases to emphasize Dr. Joseph’s racism and further the theme of dehumanizing Black people. Grant recognizes that Dr. Joseph treats the children like he’s going to purchase them, and Dr. Joseph calls them a good “crop,” suggesting that they are valuable as a commodity rather than thinking, feeling human beings. Dr. Joseph also calls the children lazy, drawing from a racist stereotype. The irony is that the children chop their own wood to keep the schoolhouse warm, revealing Dr. Joseph’s willful ignorance about the children’s day-to-day lives. We see this ignorance again in his insistence that the white schools are lacking the same supplies; Grant points out that, if that were true, the Black schools wouldn’t be getting the white students’ things secondhand.
Grant struggles with the false promise of education for liberation. He realizes that learning only makes a man more miserable; no matter how smart he is, racism won’t let him get out or get ahead. The term “mulatto” appears in this chapter when the narrator describes Grant’s former teacher, Matthew Antoine. The term “mulatto” is a dated term used by white people to describe biracial people, especially in the American South. In the genre of southern literature, there is a recurring figure known as the “tragic mulatto,” who tends to live on the fringes of society, hating themselves, and not ever being able to fit in or lead a happy life.
Biracial people in the antebellum south were often the descendants or products of white male rape perpetrated against Black women. They were a constant reminder of the powerful and the powerless. White southern author, William Faulkner, made the “tragic mulatto” figure famous. Matthew Antoine fits the “tragic mulatto” archetype because he resents Black people, even when he himself is also Black. He goes so far as to sympathize with the “reasons” Hitler and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) hate Black people.
Grant recalls the meeting with his former teacher to confirm his lot in life. His teacher always hated him because when Antoine went to college, the white students treated him as if he was only Black, like Grant. Antoine wanted his whiteness to count for some respect in society, but that wasn’t going to happen, so he stays in the town where he feels superior to a group of Black people who are not biracial and who are darker skinned than he. Antoine seems to hate Grant because Grant is Black, and he hates that his own blackness negates his whiteness and determines his lot in life. This example of colorism and internalized racism shows the depth and impact racialized histories have on this small community.
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By Ernest J. Gaines
