Ernest Gaines — A Lesson Before Dying

Ernest Gaines was born in 1933 on River Lake Plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, where his family had lived as enslaved people and then sharecroppers for generations. He left at fifteen. He never stopped writing about it. *A Lesson Before Dying* is set in fictional Bayonne, late 1940s, in a small Cajun community during Jim Crow. Jefferson, a young Black man, is the sole survivor of a liquor store shootout that left three men dead. His attorney tells the jury, "What justice would there be to take his life? Justice, gentlemen? Why, I would as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this." Jefferson is sentenced to death. His godmother, Miss Emma Glenn, and Tante Lou — the aunt of local schoolteacher Grant Wiggins — ask Wiggins to turn Jefferson from a "hog" to a "man." Wiggins left for university and returned to teach. He resists at first. Over the course of the novel, the two men form a close friendship as they both come to comprehend the importance of resistance and defying conformity. Wiggins also forms a bond with the white Deputy Paul Bonin. Before Jefferson's execution, Wiggins brings him a notebook to help him find his identity. Wiggins does not attend the execution. After, Paul visits and tells him, "Jefferson was the strongest man in that crowded room." The novel is based on the true story of Willie Francis, a young Black man who survived a failed electrocution in Louisiana in 1946. Gaines used his childhood home, town, and surrounding areas as inspiration. Riverlake Plantation, his childhood home, was used as a setting for part of the novel. *The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman* is set in the plantation country of the False River area where he grew up. *A Lesson Before Dying* won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. On May 22, 1999, HBO premiered the film adaptation, which subsequently received two Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award. Gaines died in 2019. He is buried in Oscar, on the plantation where he was born. The Ernest J. Gaines Center at UL Lafayette holds his papers, correspondence, and manuscripts.