Foreword by Attica Locke

It would be hard to overstate the role teachers have played in the lives of African-Americans. For the better part of the twentieth century—a time of great political and cultural transformation in a country that was still wrestling with the big ideas upon which it was founded—African-American teachers were the hope and promise of their race. Even before the Civil Rights Movement and Dr King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Negro teachers were doing the quiet work of moving the hearts and minds of a people out of the fields and into a world of possibility that awaited them on the other side of books. Among black folks, an education has always been seen as a way up and out of poverty and the crushing limitations of systemic racism. And nowhere was this truer than in the South in the 1940s—a time and place that was, in some ways, nearly indistinguishable from the

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days before the Civil War, when black people had few rights and were treated with little more regard than one might afford a farm animal, a common “hog,” to use the language of one of the characters in Ernest Gaines’s novel, A Lesson Before Dying. For a black man at that time, the South could feel as much a prison as the filthy jail cell in which the character Jefferson spends the last days of his life.

I come from a long line of teachers.My grandfather, E.C. Johnson was the principal of the colored

high school in Edna, Texas. My grandmother was a primary school teacher. And all the women on my father’s side taught school for decades. In the 1940s and ’50s, it was the single highest professional achievement for a Negro. Gaines has said of the world in which his novel is set, “You could be a teacher… an undertaker, a barber, an insurance collector… But you could not be an attorney or doctor… You could not be a banker or politician. Not in… the South at that time.” This is, of course, a devastating statement about the societal limitations placed on black men and women of promise. But in that truism, I can’t help but see a small blessing too. Because for a brief period of time in American history, black boys and girls in the South were taught by the brightest and the best in their communities, by men and women, who because of their profession, chose to plant themselves in cities and towns they might have otherwise abandoned for greater opportunity, if any existed. Instead, they set down roots in communities that desperately needed them. Sure, education could be a way out, but it could also be a way in. As it is for the character Grant Wiggins in A Lesson Before Dying.

When Jefferson is convicted of murdering a white man—a crime he did not commit—he is sentenced to death by the electric chair. Grant Wiggins, because of his exalted position as a teacher in the plantation community in which he was raised, is pressured into visiting Jefferson at the parish jail and ultimately tasked with the even greater impossibility of teaching this young, poor, nearly illiterate black man to see himself as a human being, not a “hog,” to know his personhood in a world that daily refuses to acknowledge it. It is a lesson that Grant is initially uninterested in imparting. He has designs

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on escaping his own imprisonment, leaving Louisiana for a better life somewhere else, in California maybe. But as his relationship with the prisoner develops, he is pulled to stay, to fully serve, to be this man’s last teacher. Gaines’s novel turns some of our conventional notions of freedom on their head. It is a soulful, elegant novel that builds to a breathtaking conclusion, one that you will not soon forget.

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