I wish more people had been in African American Lit

When we started reading A Lesson Before Dying, we all knew it was a book about an African American who is sentenced to execution. If you had been part of African American Lit last semester, this plot may seem familiar. If you weren't, this is what it reminded me of.

In African American Lit, the first book we read was Richard Wright's Native Son, where a young African American, Bigger Thomas, is convicted of raping and murdering a white woman (he never did rape her, but does end up accidentally suffocating her). Sound familiar? Jefferson is also convicted of a crime, and no matter what the trial is, the result can be predicted from the very beginning: the black man will be sentenced to death.

A Lesson Before Dying is a bit different than Native Son, as it is told from the perspective of someone who interacts with the convict, not the convict themselves like Bigger. Native Son also deals with Bigger on the run from the police and the trial is towards the end of the book instead of right at the beginning.

The main connecting theme between the two novels is a presentation of the condition that African Americans live in. They are perceived as criminals, and outward stimuli often cause them to have no choice but to resort to crime. Both books state that it is the condition that drives African Americans to commit bad deeds more often, and if the conditions around them were better they would be able to live better lives.

I feel strongly that A Lesson Before Dying would have been a very good book to have read in African American Literature, and I am sure I can draw parallels between this book and the variety of other books we discussed in this class. I just wanted to share with people that this kind of book was a type of protest literature for the struggles of African Americans, and that there other books like it.

Comments

  1. MitchellApril 20, 2019 at 12:12 PM

    In some respects, Gaines's novel takes on Wright's naturalism (voiced primarily through Max's extensive defense of Bigger Thomas in part 3) with the provocative choice of making Jefferson's own defense attorney argue (more or less) that the conditions in which Jefferson has been raised have prevented him from fully developing his humanity, and so the commission of a crime is virtually inevitable. This isn't *exactly* the argument Max makes, and Jefferson's defense attorney is a lot more cynical and obviously racist in his logic, but Gaines might be calling out some of the implicit assertions in Wright's novel. Grant's "mission" to make Jefferson undeniably human might be seen as a way of picking up where Wright leaves off with Bigger Thomas.

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