Change in Society; Through the Church

Melissa Lara
Prof. Broadous

PAS 113B

Project Text

Ernest Gaines based his story on his memories of childhood. He was born on a Louisiana plantation during the Great Depression. Like the schoolchildren in A Lesson Before Dying, he worked in the fields digging potatoes. His great aunt, Augustine Jefferson, whom he considers one of the most courageous people he ever knew, raised him. This may explain why he gives the hero the name ‘Jefferson’ This may also be a reason why the setting of the novel is in a plantation. As told in the Biography of Ernest Gaines, the only school for African American children in the district was conducted in a single room of the black church. School was open for less than half the year; from the age of nine, Ernest Gaines and the other children were sent to labor alongside their elders in the fields, harvesting vegetables and cotton. Pointe Coupee Parish offered no public high school to its black citizens. For three years, Gaines attended St. Augustine's School, a segregated Catholic school in the parish seat at New Roads, Louisiana. Just like in the novel a church was used as a school and they had very few resources. Throughout the novel, A Lesson Before Dying, the church is used as symbolize of hope that society will change. Aunt Tante Lou is Grant’s aunt. She raised him from a baby because his parents left the South for California. She understands duty to family and community. Miss Emma like Tante Lou embodies self-sacrifice. She has spent her life raising Jefferson as his Godmother. Thus, she feels slighted when the defense attorney labels Jefferson a ‘hog’ because it renders her life’s work meaningless – she didn’t raise a hog. Miss Emma, Tante Lou, and Reverend Ambrose believe that God helps them, they use this belief to comfort themselves in the face of prejudice, hope and injustice. 

The Crown Prosecution Service stated, that prejudice is based upon the victim's disability, race, religion, belief, sexual orientation, and transgender identity. People have to fight against not fitting in with a certain group. Throughout the novel there is a lot of prejudice. In the film, Prejudice: More Than Black and White is shows that we are all prejudice it is part of who we are and how society has taught us. The church has always been a symbol of hope to a majority part of the society. But this does not prejudice. This is where Grant falls. From the start Grant is an angry, bitter, and self-absorbed person. He is angry at a society that, despite his university degree, will only allow him to teach other blacks. He blames his community for burdening him with unreasonable expectations and suffocating him instead of allowing him to leave Louisiana and pursue his own path. Most of all, he loathes himself for playing his role in a segregationist society and his own inability to somehow break free.

In the reverend’s eyes, when Grant unconditionally rejects God and the church, he rejects the possibility that anything can be done to improve society. Reverend Ambrose confronts Grant in Chapter 27, asking him, “You think a man can’t kneel and stand?” The reverend suggests that kneeling before God does not humble people, it gives them dignity. When Grant recognizes that his rejection of the church stems from his own inability to engage actively with his community, he moves closer to a dignified existence. Before this occurs Vivian suggests that Grant start going to church again, if only to keep him from being bored on Sundays, but he insists that he no longer believes. He no longer believes because he sees no point in this because he has done everything he can to succeed as a black man but a white man will see him no different as a uneducated black man. When Grant takes Vivian (his girlfriend) to meet Tante Lou and Miss Emma he announces that he will marry her one-day. In the book A Lesson Before Dying while Grant makes coffee for the women, Tante Lou interrogates Vivian about her religion and her relationship with her parents. Although the old woman seems angry, she eventually judges Vivian to be “a lady of quality” (116) and implores her not to give up on God. Tante Lou never looses the hope or faith of God even though she lightly disapproves of their relationship she remains faithful to her belief that God will always give hope.

There were many injustices done in this novel. Jefferson was accused of a crime he did not commit but since he was African- American he was accused of it. He got the death penalty and was accused by his oppressors not by his peers. The jury was all white including his own lawyer.