The Teacher’s “Lesson:” Ethics and Freedom

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

The Teacher’s “Lesson:” Ethics and Freedom

Enlarging Wright’s textual quest, Gaines makes a thorough revision of the African American male identity in relationship to communal values, social institutions, and racial issues. A Lesson Before Dying thus focuses on an initiatory process, during which Jefferson acquires a polytropic identity. His self-definition changes from an animal-like image to a heroic one, in the context in which Gaines’ “fiction demonstrates his penetrating understanding of the complexities and subtleties of universal nature that affect and are affected by these regional realities” (Hudson 1985, 515). In truth, the South appears as a significant “regional reality” whose ethical principles are part of Jefferson’s self-reconstruction. Unlike Bigger—an uprooted character taken from his native South to Chicago—Jefferson is beneficially affected by the traditional Southern culture, “which includes African-American religion, respect for elders, loyalty to family and neighbors, and common-sense morality, a useful and enduring cultural tradition that can be set against the fragmentation inherent in the long Diaspora” (Folks 1999, 259).²⁶

Gaines creates a constellation of symbolic black figures that contribute to Jefferson’s own development: the teacher (Grant Wiggins), Jefferson’s godmother (Miss Emma), Grant’s lover (Vivian), Grant’s aunt (Tante Lou), the priest (Reverend Ambrose), and the children whom Grant teaches. In addition, a white man significantly named Paul Bonin shows sympathy toward Jefferson, and, as in the Bible, Paul is “converted” to a major understanding of the other’s humanity that transcends racial limits. In this way, Gaines’ reconstruction of black manhood consists in transforming his hero’s invisibility (imprisonment/marginality) into visibility (liberation/centrality) by placing him in relation to the black and white community.

Having an important part in highlighting the principles of the elders, Grant Wiggins makes an important contribution to Jefferson’s conversion. His position is reminiscent of a mediator between the puer and the senex, between Jefferson (the rebellious youth) and Miss Emma (the wise elder). Grant has to assume the role of an educator, as urged by Miss Emma’s words: “I don’t want them to kill no hog. I want a man to go to that chair, on his own two feet” (13). Miss Emma’s words intertextually allude to the famous lines written by the Harlem Renaissance poet Claude McKay: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs/Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot” (1997, 984). By proposing an in-depth transformation through discursive power, McKay’s urge to heroic self-reconstruction resonates with Grant’s ideas. Grant thus realizes that his task of assisting Jefferson in redefining himself implies going against the white system that strives to implant self-denigrating images in young black men. Sensing the implications of such a burdensome enterprise, Grant’s first gesture is one of negation, of refusal to play “God” (31).

As autumn stretches inaudibly into winter, Grant passes through a subtle change and the complex facets of his personality are polished through his interaction with the elders. Together with Miss Emma, Reverend Ambrose, and Tante Lou, Grant pays visits to Jefferson in prison, striving to reach beyond the boy’s inaccessible blankness. Grant’s double task as witness and agent of Jefferson’s trial opens up the text for new symbolic readings:

I was not there, yet I was there. No, I did not go to the trial, I did not hear the verdict, because I knew all the time what it would be. Still, I was there. I was there as much as anyone else was there. Either I sat behind my aunt and his godmother or I sat beside them (3).

Through the technique of indirect directness that suggests both attachment and detachment, the above fragment hints at the narrator’s ubiquitous presentia in absentia, to his position as an insider/outsider able to preserve his perspective and incorporate the views of the others. The paragraph also sets the utterly simple, objective tone of the novel, its � la Hemingway style, and its procedure of not burdening the sentence unnecessarily, as if leaving space for words to breathe.

This metaphorical freedom of words is made explicit in the message of the novel: the importance of liberating oneself from the white normative discourse that reifies blackness. In this respect, the book deeply resonates with Michel Foucault’s views. Throughout his work, Foucault has stressed the impossibility of liberating oneself from the network of power in which one is caught; nevertheless he has maintained that one might become free through discursive subversion as a means of dis-placing “white mythologies.”²⁷ In his late texts, Foucault constructs an “ethics of the concern of the self,” in which one’s self-formation is connected with one’s relationship to the others. He considers that “human freedom is expressed in the deliberate actions individuals perform in response to others and the world,” so that “one can be neither detached from one’s own actions and possibilities nor inconsiderate of others and still be free” (Infinito 2003, 156-57).

Close to Foucault, Gaines emphasizes that the intersecting domains of ethics and freedom are equally important for his characters’ ontological (re)definition. In a creative sense, both ethics and freedom are essential for Jefferson’s and Grant’s self-transformation, as well as for changing the others. Being a teacher, Grant strongly advocates the importance of ethics for a new educational system that assists one’s formation, in an antinomian manner that defies normalized identities.²⁸ Struggling to disrupt various formative discourses, Grant has to fight on several battlefields: the black man’s cell, the black children’s school, the white man’s kitchen, and the black people’s club. Using what Foucault called “technologies of the self” (1988 a), Grant helps Jefferson assume a fully-realized identity by revealing to him his potential for spiritual freedom in spite of the imprisoning conditions. This form of reconstructing manhood is thus achieved only through intense self-examination and dialogue with the others.²⁹

Even if he is placed in the privileged position of a literate person, Grant himself passes through an acute crisis, feeling entrapped within the limitations of his own community. His meandering trajectory in and out of prison symbolically suggests his tormenting struggle to break free: “I was screaming inside. I had told her [his aunt] many, many times how much I hated this place and all I wanted to do was get away” (14-15). Grant’s higher education has contributed to his estrangement from religion—a fact that makes him a persona non grata in the eyes of his community. After paying his parents a visit in California during the summer following his junior year at university, he returns to Bayonne where he remains in the future to teach, “unable to accept what used to be [his] life, unable to leave it” (102). His desire to leave is also hindered by his relationship with his girl friend, Vivian, who is getting divorced and, in order to keep her children, cannot leave Bayonne.³⁰

Moreover, Grant’s frustration is exacerbated by the scarcity of financial means: the poverty of the children and the meager teaching materials. The place where he teaches—the church—functions as a symbolic setting, framing his pedagogic assignment within the community’s religious activity:

My classroom was the church. My classes ranged from primer to sixth grade, my pupils from six years old to thirteen and fourteen. My desk was a table, used as a collection table by the church on Sundays, and also used for the service of the Holy Sacrament on the fourth Sunday of each month. My students’ desks were the benches upon which their parents and grandparents sat during church meeting. The students either got down on their knees and used the benches as desks to write upon, or used the backs of their books upon their laps to write out their assignments (34).

By juxtaposing the church and the school in the same institutionalized space, Gaines makes us consider their equal importance in one’s education. From a Foucaultian perspective, both the church and the school are systems of power that work to discipline either the body or the spirit. Conscious that the church is imbued by white ideology, Grant also admits that his teaching has to follow the white norms meant to “tame” black children by keeping them half-illiterate.³¹

Through Grant, we can envisage the social and economic reasons that made the white people oppose any education for the black Americans in the segregated South of the late 40s—a time when the doctrine “separate but equal” actually meant “separated but unequal.” Seen as “mules and oxen,” the African Americans were needed as a cheap source of labor, so that they were consciously withheld from having access to education (Litwack 1998, 101). As Frank N. Schubert cogently notes, Gaines’ novel is “a strong reminder of the South’s success in the Civil War.” The novel stresses the maintenance “of a two-tiered racial system, albeit without chattel slavery, through a combination of legislation, custom, and outright terror for an entire century. The vocabulary of Gaines’ novel underscores the South’s long-term triumph—‘plantation,’ ‘quarter,’ ‘back door’—as does the entire narrative regarding social arrangements” [Frank N. Schubert, copy in author’s files, 2005].³²

A sample of this disciplining ideology is offered in a key scene, where Dr. Joseph, the school inspector, pays a visit to the school. As in an episode taken out of a slave narrative, Dr. Joseph starts inspecting the children’s hands and teeth. His “lesson” to them lays stress on hard work, leaving little room for intellectual activities: “In other words, hard work was good for the young body. Picking cotton, gathering potatoes, pulling onions, working in the garden—all of that was good exercise for a growing boy or girl” (56). Mispronouncing Wiggins’ name, Dr. Joseph hilariously calls him Higgins, a name that reminds us of the professor in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Indeed, departing from the model offered by Dr. Joseph, Grant assumes the true role of a Pygmalion, one who does not only transform himself, but also models his students internally into “responsible young men and young ladies” (39). Through a Foucaultian lens, his demand from each of his students is to work on his or her self, seeking to “develop and transform oneself, and to attain to a certain mode of being” (Foucault 1984, 282).³³ Grant searches for transgressive ways to break the vicious circle that makes these children either run away from Bayonne or remain at home to live in poverty. His option for a pedagogical ethics that is constructive rather than reductive points to his understanding of education as a liberating process of self-creation, and not as a process of normalization. Grant’s challenging “lesson” gains momentum from the necessity of transforming each student spiritually into a potential agent of change.

NOTES

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