by Cathryn_Conroy: He was barely a grown-up…really just a boy. He made one unwise decision, accepting a ride with friends who ended up robbing a liquor store and killing the White owner. Before he died, the owner shot back and killed the two Black robbers, leaving the boy/man standing there amidst the carnage. Guilty! And sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Written by Ernest J. Gaines, this elegiac novel is the story of that young Black man named Jefferson, in the months following his trial and before his execution. It is 1948, and segregation is the law of the land in Cajun country. While he is being held in the sordid and wretched small town jail of (fictional) Bayonne, Louisiana, Jefferson’s godmother Miss Emma, whom he calls Nannan, asks her best friend’s nephew, Grant Wiggins, to regularly visit Jefferson. In a misguided and deeply hurtful attempt to help his client, Jefferson’s defense attorney told the all-white male jury that Jefferson was nothing more than a hog. And who would put a hog in the electric chair? The argument failed to win Jefferson an acquittal and only served to change his own opinion of himself.
Meanwhile, Jefferson has sunk into a deep depression, barely eating or sleeping, and yelling out about being nothing more than a hog. It is Grant’s job to try to turn him into a man before he meets his death, a job Grant is reluctant to do. Grant is a teacher—his nickname among the Blacks in his tightknit community is Professor—and he is struggling in his job to teach all the Black children in one room in the church’s sanctuary.
And now he must give a man who has been sentenced to death a lesson on living, to help Jefferson regain a sense of dignity and self-respect that he lost in the courtroom when he was so harshly labeled a hog. The lesson they both learn is something filled with grace and redemption—and power!—as both men realize that Jefferson has only one freedom left as he languishes in chains and in a lonely cell: He has the ability to choose whether he accepts death or not. His freedom is in the power of his mind.
This is a worthwhile novel to read—it is listed in “1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List,” by James Mustich—but it is also a tough book to read not only because it is inherently tragic and deeply sad, but also because of the overt and cruel racism that affects all the Black characters.
Emotionally searing and deeply tragic, this is a novel filled with difficult, heartbreaking truths about living and dying—and most of all, loving.
