A Lesson Before Dying

A whole new person

‘You don’t fight racism with racism, the best way to fight racism is with solidarity.’ This quote by Bobby Seale shows what the characters in the book had to go through with all the hate from other races. Life in the 1940s were not easy for African Americans and almost impossible to live a well life in the Deep South, where racism was the highest. So to help a man with little education and little time left on earth is a really big accomplishment for that time and that race. In Ernest Gaines novel A Lesson before Dying the character Jefferson is innocent, angry, and limited.

Jefferson is as innocent as it gets because he really had little to zero education and did not know any better to take money from the register, when he had a very small amount of money at home. Ever since he was 6 he worked harder than most men do now during current day and for white people who did not care about him at all. Jefferson looks at all the dead people on the floor he knows that he is going to jail because he was a black man with a dead white man on the floor and the white court would not see him innocent at all. Even his lawyer says “he took the money out of hunger and plain stupidity” on page seven. It was not even Jefferson’s idea to go to the store but the other two people picked him up in their car, he really had nothing to do with them.

Another big characteristic of Jefferson’s shown in the book is his anger. He gets really angry at everyone because he did nothing at all and was sentenced to death. When everyone visits him on page seventy three he says “ it don’t matter, nothing matters “and then gets mad at the people only trying to help him. All his anger shows by him losing faith in God and he questions why all this is happening to him. As his death comes closer he shows how he hates white people and you can’t really blame him after the way the white race treated the blacks during this time.