Jefferson’s Notebook: “Humanity Masked with Blackness”

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

Jefferson’s Notebook: “Humanity Masked with Blackness”

Gaines manages to subvert in his novel the preexisting perception of the intra- and inter-racial relations.⁴⁶ Through this communal lesson, not just the black people attain a complex awareness of themselves, but also the white people acquire a new perspective upon blackness.⁴⁷ Whereas at the beginning of the novel, the whites perceive the African Americans in a degrading way, some of them gradually change their point of view. Thus, the white man Paul Bonin starts communicating with Jefferson. Impressed by Jefferson’s transformation and Christ-like courage in the face of death, Paul is “converted” to a new understanding that transcends racial limits.⁴⁸ Witnessing Jefferson’s death, Paul comes to testify for Jefferson’s heroic manhood symbolically ingrained in his message: “Tell Nannan I walked” (254).

Jefferson’s personality is reformed in the process of writing, since his self “is constituted intertextually across a range of discursive practices,” being “active in the negotiation of those discursive practices” (Lloyd 1996, 253-54). Coming from a half-illiterate character, Jefferson’s notebook represents the antithetic response to a racist system whose social, religious, and economic basis is undermined. In a broken confession, his writing emerges as a fundamental means of reconstructing male African American identity.⁴⁹ His �criture masculine⁵⁰has the therapeutic function of overcoming the traumatic events of his inevitable death by transmitting to the others his most intimate thoughts.

The pen and the notebook—that were symbolically given to Jefferson by the teacher—become essential instruments in redefining Jefferson’s polytropic identity. Jefferson’s journal will be preserved and showed to the others in the future; his writing will have the role of communication that takes “the form of a community-making” (Sell 2004, 29), i. e. of creating links between individuals and acknowledging their common beliefs. Gaines therefore succeeds in creating a “narrative of Bildung,” in which Jefferson reenacts a version of the enslaved man who is able to transfigure his existential imprisonment into a liberating “lesson” for the others. Unlike in canonical white texts, the black protagonist is no longer a meek, shadow-like presence reinforcing the splendor of the white character. On the contrary, Gaines’ novel reveals to us the African American man as a standing hero. To paraphrase Ellison, Gaines knew that “in his America humanity masked its face with blackness” (1994 b, 148).⁵¹

Returning to the initial argument of this chapter, we may notice again that the stereotypical assumption undermined in Gaines’ novel is the inability of a black character to transform, to evolve, to be more than a simple pawn in the white people’s legal game. No longer a scapegoat, or a representation of the whites’ fear of otherness, Jefferson gets involved in a redemption project that makes both the black and the white people reconsider their deepest held convictions. In addition, Gaines’ character makes us thoroughly reevaluate previous ideas on male black identity. Thus, Sherley Ann Williams observes, “a hero in the eyes of black people is more likely to be a law-breaker than a law-maker,” so that “good niggers cannot be heroes, for heroes affirm though their actions not only the values of their culture but also their personal worth in their own eyes” (1972, 213). Even if Williams’ remark might be true for many African American fictional works, it is no longer valid in Gaines’ novel, which manages to turn the tables in Jefferson’s favor. While, as Williams affirms, in most former cases “blacks have sought a white-defined heroism only to find that they have negated their own humanity” (1972, 213), in Jefferson’s case, his final endurance remains an exemplary lesson inscribed in both the black and white communal spirit.

NOTES

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