“A White-Defined Heroism:” Beyond Assumptions

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter VII

“Tell Nannan I Walked”

Reconstructing Manhood in Ernest J. Gaines’

A Lesson Before Dying

“A White-Defined Heroism:” Beyond Assumptions

Stripped of their humanity, their names and social status, African Americans strangely creep inside canonized white narratives, in which they serve as contrasting images for defining white heroes. In these works, the authorial focus has generally been on the white protagonists’ quest, whose heroism is Narcissistically highlighted by a black presence “playing” in the background. Acknowledging that “literary blackness” is part of the world of “literary whiteness,” Toni Morrison criticizes the assumption that “traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States” (1992, 4-5). As she powerfully stresses in Playing in the Dark, the main characteristics of the American literature are actually shaped as a response “to a dark, abiding, signifying Africanist presence,” which is “crucial to [the white writers’] sense of Americanness” (6).

What would have happened, we can ask with Morrison, if such a black character as Hemingway’s Wesley had been individualized, given a standing role in a narrative in which his only function was to underline the white man’s omnipotence.¹ And to move the discussion a little further, what if Twain could have conceived a black Huck, so that Jim’s role in the “adventure” would no longer have been secondary?² And how would “The Bear” have looked had Faulkner taken the slaves out of Ike McCaslin’s revelation of the Southerners’ sinful condition as part of his story of initiation?³ All these texts, as well as countless others, foreground instances of white heroes whose identity development feeds on the marginal black presence.⁴ In order to let the “subaltern” speak, African American authors had to face the difficult task of transforming this invisible African American presence into the central element of a complex racial, spiritual, and cultural adventure. From a silent, subjugated figure, from being simply a substitute of the white man, the black protagonist metamorphoses into a polytropic character, whose restorative presence changes for the better the others’ destiny.

In the motley landscape of contemporary African American writers, Ernest J. Gaines has a distinguished place, as his fame grew after the 1970s with the publication of his famous revisionary slave narrative, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. In his novels—Catherine Carmier (1964), Of Love and Dust (1967), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), In My Father’s House (1978), A Gathering of Old Men (1983), A Lesson Before Dying (1993)—Gaines explores in depth the dehumanizing consequences of racial discrimination, the collision between past and present mentalities, and the importance of resistance to the myth of white supremacy.⁵

Gaines’ novel A Lesson Before Dying (winner of the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award) represents an intricate instance of the subtle ways in which authorial consciousness succeeds in disassociating blacks from degrading images. The author challenges the representation of black manhood as a simple contrast for the white man’s superego, and even more, he presents black heroism as the central element of his narrative. In order to accomplish his task, Gaines reaches down to the lowest social strata and pushes forward the most miserable character—an epitome for the “wretched of the earth.”

The author chooses the period of the late 1940s, a difficult time when major changes take place: the postwar economic uncertainty, the tensions in a racially segregated South where Jim Crow customs still prevailed, the growing Southern resistance to integration and recognizing black civil rights. Documenting the violent changes of the time, Gaines focuses on an event that shakes a small Cajun Louisiana community: the trial of a young black man, Jefferson, who is accidentally involved in shooting a white storekeeper. Accused of murder, Jefferson is condemned to death in the electric chair several months later. During his imprisonment, Jefferson dares to reinvent himself and proves to be an example of humanity for both the black and the white characters. He significantly appears as a polytropic hero whose emancipatory movement from physical bondage to spiritual liberation takes place within the circumscribed area of panoptic white power. Jefferson’s story is told from the perspective of a black intellectual narrator, Grant Wiggins, the character-observer who renders both his and the others’ inner struggle. Being a schoolteacher, Grant’s Socratic maieutic mission is to awaken Jefferson’s conscience, to transform his self-crushing image into a heroic effigy.⁶

The framing argument of this chapter is provided by Gaines’ rewriting of the seminal image of black identity present in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940). After insisting on the similar ways in which Wright and Gaines depict the image of the criminal, the analysis will move to various methods used by Gaines in order to enlarge Wright’s naturalistic view on existential isolation. While Wright’s setting is the urban area of Chicago after the Great Migration (a cityscape where Bigger gets alienated from the others), Gaines places his hero in relation to the supportive community of his Southern background. Moreover, while Wright reinforces the stereotype of the rebellious “violent man”⁷ or “bad Nigger”⁸ in order to disclose the social mechanisms of his behavior, Gaines focuses on an innocent victim whose spiritual transformation is stressed. Helped by the teacher’s educational method, Jefferson’s heroic behavior comes to contradict the degrading views of black identity prescribed by the white system.

Furthermore, the present analysis discusses Gaines’ novel in connection to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Tackling the notion of the dominant white discourse and shaking the buttresses of the white educational institution, both Ellison and Gaines produce a harsh critique of black existence either as a continuous flight or as a mere imitation of white models. Drawing on the perspective opened by Ellison, Gaines condemns the false pedagogy that manipulates students according to white rules, to which he opposes a form of resistance pedagogy. Using a shared notion of “communal responsibility,”⁹ Gaines reconceptualizes the African American identity as heroic behavior that subverts the preexisting forms of power. One of the main aims of the novel is to reshape identity through discourse, to free the black character from former stultifying associations.

Ultimately, the chapter demonstrates that A Lesson Before Dying has to do with transcendence. Its message refers not only to trespassing racial and social lines, but also to one’s ability to move beyond designated limits by means of religious belief or faith in a black communal hero. Gaines does not simply restore Jefferson’s dignity, humanity, and sense of liberation in the face of death. He also places him in a religious environment, where his Christ-like behavior resonates deeply into the community’s conscience.¹⁰ His final words inscribed in his journal bear witness of the transformative power of language. As the novel’s symbolic “lesson,” they encompass a whole peratology—a science of crossing one’s limits—in which the student/teacher roles are interchangeable.

NOTES

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