A Lesson Before Dying takes an
unconventional approach to the paradigm of the hero’s journey. Grant’s “mission” does not entail a physical or geographical
journey. He merely has to drive the thirteen miles from “the Quarters” to the
town of Bayonne, repeatedly, where Jefferson sits in a jail cell awaiting his
execution. Unlike the Bundrens, he has a nice, new 1946 Ford to get him there
and back, and the travel itself is not rigorous. There are familiar elements
from the hero’s journey paradigm, however—he must pass through a series of
obstacles in order to take this trip, from “humiliating” himself by imploring
Henri Pichot to talk the sheriff into authorizing these visits to having his
pockets and Miss Emma’s picnic basket thoroughly searched each time he takes
that long walk down the corridor, “as if I’m some kind of common criminal” (63)—and
when we first encounter Jefferson in his cell he seems very far away indeed.
Grant’s task—to make Jefferson “a man” before he meets his death—seems astronomically
difficult, under the circumstances, and Grant’s been trying to “refuse the call”
from the moment he’s first enlisted.
Rather
than having to venture elsewhere in order to prove himself a hero, Grant must
go inward, to the “belly of the beast” (or “innermost cave,” to borrow Campbell’s phrase) in the segregated South. Although
Bayonne is all-too-familiar to Grant, as he grew up in the Quarters, there’s a
potent sense of him entering hostile, enemy territory as he goes into Bayonne:
the courthouse proudly sports the “national, state, and Confederate flags,” and
Grant must walk past a “statue of a Confederate soldier” to enter the seat of
state power over black lives (69). We see a jail populated by a hostile white sheriff
and deputy, and black inmates who look like children. It’s a journey he really would
rather not make, and we see Grant exhibit a range of quasi-adolescent efforts
to avoid it, sulking, dragging his feet, and fantasizing about running away and
leaving it all behind.
We
see an ironic inversion of the hero’s journey paradigm here, where “staying
home” and confronting the legacies of slavery and institutional racism by
trying to “reach” this doomed young man requires more heroic courage than
leaving home for the unknown. Grant had viewed college as his ticket out of the
Quarters—a chance to “not be one of the others” (63), as his aunt puts it—and he
seems disappointed in himself for coming back home afterward. The humiliation
he endures in order to gain the “privilege” of visiting Jefferson “strips” him
of “everything [Tante Lou] sent [him] to school for” (79). We know his parents
have left Louisiana for California, following the route of many African Americans in the 1940s, who fled the South for West Coast war-industry
jobs. Grant visited them once, but as Vivian says, “‘You couldn’t stay. You had
to come back’” (30). It’s not only the Jefferson dilemma that generates this
restlessness in Grant—he’s felt this way for a long time. Staying home and
working as a teacher in this impoverished, sharecropper community is itself
cast as an exercise in futility, with Grant perpetuating the cycle of racism and poverty.
In
the annals of the “heroic teacher” paradigm, Grant would seem to be a poor
candidate for the role: this isn’t Stand
and Deliver or Dead Poets Society.
Grant is a teacher with deep-seated doubts about whether teaching even matters,
a member of his community who sees himself as an outsider, with his education a
“burden” that makes him aware of the futility and the “cycle,” but unable to do
anything to change it. He’d be better off without his education, perhaps—he could
unload wood like these other guys, joke around, not worry so much. Nothing
about Grant’s teaching seems “inspirational”—he thwacks students with a
yardstick for writing sentences crooked or counting on their fingers, and he’s
compelled to drill them like military enlistees in important skills like
pledging allegiance to the flag that flies outside the jail where Jefferson
will be executed, “hating himself” for doing it.
In a
flashback in chapter 8, we learn that Grant didn’t come up with this whole “run
away and be free of all this” motif on his own. He’s had a “mentor,” of sorts—and
again, we see a familiar paradigm inverted. Grant’s own former teacher, Matthew
Antoine, serves the structural role of the mentor in this journey—he’s the one
who gives this young teacher his “knowledge,” his ostensible power to change
lives through the magic of education, the eager student who would follow in the
teacher’s footsteps. We’ve seen this montage in movies before: the fiery,
bright student whose love for knowledge and justice is ignited by his own
teacher, and we see the student rise to be a master himself, to heroically
throw in with the good fight in the classroom. But Gaines pitches a curveball
in the form of Grant’s mentor, and Antoine is maybe the least inspirational
teacher-figure in American literature (with Addie Bundren running a close
second, perhaps). He not only doesn’t inspire Grant, he vehemently warns Grant away from pursuing knowledge and
education. Grant’s persistence doesn’t impress the old grouch, as in the
familiar paradigm; it only irritates him further. “There was no love there for
each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything at all. He
hated me, and I knew it” (64). But Grant has
learned some lessons from Antoine, and we see his anti-mentor’s legacy popping
up throughout the novel, every time Grant speaks of the futility of his
enterprise and his desire to run away and leave it all behind. If the “journey”
in this novel requires staying home and facing Jefferson and his fate head-on,
in the belly of the beast, with Vivian serving as an ally to encourage Grant at every
turn, Antoine represents the most prominent voice urging him to give up, to
flee, to not even bother. He would seem to agree with Jefferson’s initial
assessment: “It don’t matter.”
Despite
calling himself a coward for not having run away himself—“‘I was afraid to run
away. What am I? Look at me. Where else could I have felt superior to so many
but here?’” (65)—Antoine generally depicts flight as a bid for freedom, a
sensible ducking of any responsibility to try and contribute to the community
in favor of going elsewhere, anywhere
else. Grant’s teacher is not flattered by his student’s newfound desire to
learn (“When he saw that I wanted to learn, he hated me even more than he did
the others”) and depicts knowledge as a “burden” (63). He has no faith in the
power of education to affect change: “When you see that those five and a half
months you spend in that church each year are just a waste of time . . . [y]ou’ll
see that it’ll take more than five and a half months to wipe away—peel—scrape away
the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those
brains in the past three hundred years. You’ll see” (64). We are confronted
with the curious prospect of a mentor who begs his mentee to not follow his
footsteps.
Early
in the novel, before the “journey” of encounters with Jefferson in his cell
begins, Gaines includes a powerful, authoritative voice that seems to undermine
the value of the journey itself. If all
education in this underfunded, one-room church is futile and doomed to fail
from the start, how much more doomed
is Grant’s attempt to “make Jefferson a man?” Grant is thoroughly pessimistic
about his prospects from the beginning, telling his aunt and Miss Emma, “Jefferson
is dead. It is only a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months—but he’s
already dead. The past twenty-one years, we’ve done all we could for Jefferson.
He’s dead now. And I can’t raise the dead” (14). Antoine couldn’t have said it
better himself. Perhaps he’d be proud of his mentee after all.
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