Lesson Before Dying

by Ernest J. Gaines

  “Smothered chicken, smothered beefsteaks, shrimp stew,” she said.

  There was only one other person in the café, and he sat at the counter eating the stewed shrimps.

  “Shrimps any good?” I asked Thelma.

  “All my food’s good,” she said.

  “Shrimps,” I told her.

  While Thelma dished up my food, I went to the telephone in the corner by the toilet. It took Vivian a while to answer, and she didn’t sound too happy about it.

  “Did I get you at a bad time?” I asked her.

  “Getting these children something to eat,” she said. “Where are you?”

  “The Rainbow Club.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I need to see you, baby. I need to talk,” I said.

  “Is something the matter?”

  “I just need to talk to you, baby, that’s all.”

  “You want to come over here? I can fix you a sandwich.”

  “No, I’m going to eat here at the café.”

  “I’ll see if I can get Dora,” she said. “If I can’t, you’ll have to come over here. I can’t leave the children alone.”

  “I understand.”

  Thelma had the stewed shrimps, a green salad of lettuce, tomato, and cucumber, a piece of corn bread, and a glass of water on the counter, waiting for me.

  “Anything else to go with that?” she asked.

  “This’ll do.”

  “Here or a table?” she asked.

  “The counter is good.”

  “What you doing in town on Monday?” she asked. “Calling Miss Fine Brown?”

  I nodded.

  “Figgers,” Thelma said, and smiled.

  Thelma’s mouth was full of gold teeth, solid gold as well as gold crowned. She also wore perfume that was strong enough to keep you a good distance away from her. I figured that’s where most of their money went, on those gold teeth, that perfume, and payment on the new white Cadillac that Joe had parked before the door. But they were good people, both of them. When I was broke, I could always get a meal and pay later, and the same went for the bar.

  I talked with Thelma awhile after I finished eating, then I paid her and went back to the other side.

  “Usual?” Claiborne asked me. He knew what I drank, but he would always ask.

  I nodded.

  “What you doing here on Monday?” he asked, while pouring me a brandy.

  “I needed a drink,” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  He poured a glass of ice water and set it on the bar beside the brandy.

  “I think I know now,” he said.

  Car lights had just flashed upon the front of the club, and I could hear the tires on the crushed seashells just right of the door, and sure enough it was Vivian, and the men at the bar looked around at her when she came in. She was quite tall, five seven, five eight, and she wore a green wool sweater and a green and brown plaid skirt, and both fit her very well. She had soft light brown skin and high cheekbones and greenish-brown eyes, and her nostrils and lips showed some thickness, but not much. Her hair was long and black, and she kept it twisted into a bun and pinned at the back of her head. Vivian Baptiste was a beautiful woman, and she knew it; but she didn’t flaunt it, it was just there. She came up to me, and a couple of the other men at the bar nodded and spoke to her. One tipped his hat and called her Miss Lady.

  “You made it,” I said.

  “I got Dora.”

  “Usual?” Claiborne asked her.

  She nodded toward my drink.

  “Shirley can bring it to your table,” Claiborne said.

  “It won’t tire her out, I hope.”

  Claiborne grunted at me.

  It was a slow night. The few people at the bar were holding on to their glasses and not buying any more. Shirley, the waitress, was sitting on a barstool at the far end, and she had not moved once since I had been there. Vivian and I went to a table far over into the corner, where we could be alone.

  “I’m glad you came,” I said, and kissed her.

  Shirley brought the drinks and set them before us on paper napkins. Before leaving, she looked at me out of the corner of her eye to let me know she didn’t like my remark at the bar.

  Vivian and I touched glasses and drank.

  “What is the matter, Grant?” she asked.

  “I just had to see you.”

  “Is something the matter?”

  “When was the last time I told you I loved you?”

  “A second ago.”

  “I should say it more often,” I said.

  “What is the matter, Grant?” she asked me again.

  “You want to leave from here tonight?” I asked her. “You want to go home and pack your clothes and get the children and leave from here tonight?”

  She looked at me as though she was trying to figure out whether I was serious or not.

  “No,” she said.

  “Why not?” I asked her.

  “Because the whole thing is just too crazy,” she said.

  “People do it all the time. Just pack up and leave.”

  “Some people can, but we can’t,” she said. “We’re teachers, and we have a commitment.”

  “You hit the nail on the head there, lady—commitment. Commitment to what—to live and die in this hellhole, when we can leave and live like other people?”

  “How much have you had to drink, Grant?”

  “A whole fucking barrel of commitment,” I said, and raised my glass.

  “Do you want me to leave, Grant?” she asked. “You know I don’t like it when you talk like that.”

  “No, I don’t want you to leave. Please don’t leave me,” I told her.

  She reached over and touched my hand, then she began to rub the knuckles with her fingers.

  “I need to go someplace where I can feel I’m living,” I said. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life teaching school in a plantation church. I want to be with you, someplace where we could have a choice of things to do. I don’t feel alive here. I’m not living here. I know we can do better someplace else.”

  “I’m still married,” Vivian said. “A separation is not a divorce. I can’t go anywhere until all this is over with.”

  “That’s not what’s keeping you here. Even after the divorce, you’ll still feel committed,” I said.

  “And you, Grant?”

  “I’m tired of feeling committed.”

  “Then why haven’t you gone?”

  “Because of you.”

  “That’s not true, Grant, and you know it,” she said. “We met only three years ago. I was still married—pregnant with my second child. You told me then how much you always wanted to get away. And you did, once. You remember that? You went to California to visit your mother and father—but you wouldn’t stay. You couldn’t stay. You had to come back. Why did you come back, Grant? Why?”

  “I want to go now, and I want you to go with me.”

  “I’m still married, Grant.”

  “After the divorce?”

  She nodded. “After the divorce I’ll do whatever you want me to do—as long as you’re responsible for what you do.”

  “In other words, if I fail, I would have to blame myself the rest of my life for trying, is that it?”

  “I’ll leave all that up to you, Grant, if you still want me after the divorce.”

  “I’ll always want you,” I said, and touched her hand. “And if you don’t know that by now, I don’t know what you do know about me.”

  A couple from one of the other tables had gotten up and chosen a record on the jukebox. It was a blues, the tempo slow, and the two people danced close together. I needed Vivian closer to me than she was now, and I asked her if she wanted to dance.

  We left the table, and I took her in my arms, and I could feel her breasts through that sweater, and I could feel her thighs through that plaid skirt, and now I felt very good.

  We danced for a while. I didn’t want to s
ay it, but I had to say it.

  “They gave him death,” I said.

  She and I had talked about it on the weekend, and I did not want to talk about it now, or even think about it now, but it was the only thing that stayed on my mind. I could feel her body go tense against me.

  We danced awhile.

  “They want me to visit him.”

  “That would be nice, Grant.”

  “They want me to make him a man before he dies.”

  She stopped dancing, and she stood back to look at me. Her face was twisted into a painful, questioning frown.

  “The public defender, trying to get him off, called him a dumb animal,” I told her. “He said it would be like tying a hog down into that chair and executing him—an animal that didn’t know what any of it was all about. The jury, twelve white men good and true, still sentenced him to death. Now his godmother wants me to visit him and make him know—prove to these white men—that he’s not a hog, that he’s a man. I’m supposed to make him a man. Who am I? God?”

  The record ended, and we went back to our table.

  “I still don’t know if the sheriff will even let me visit him. And suppose he did; what then? What do I say to him? Do I know what a man is? Do I know how a man is supposed to die? I’m still trying to find out how a man should live. Am I supposed to tell someone how to die who has never lived?”

  Vivian lowered her head.

  “Suppose I was allowed to visit him, and suppose I reached him and made him realize that he was as much a man as any other man; then what? He’s still going to die. The next day, the next week, the next month. So what will I have accomplished? What will I have done? Why not let the hog die without knowing anything?”

  Vivian raised her head to look at me, and she was crying. I took one of her hands in both of mine.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do this to you. I don’t want to do this to you. I just didn’t know where else to turn.”

  “I want you to come to me, Grant,” she said. “I want you to always come to me.”

  Shirley walked over to the table to pick up our empty glasses.

  “Y’all want anything mo’?” she asked.

  “Another round,” I told her. She left.

  “I want you to go up there,” Vivian said.

  “They make those decisions, sweetheart, I don’t.”

  “If they say yes, I want you to go for me.”

  “For you?”

  “For us, Grant.”

  I looked at her, and she looked back at me. She had meant what she said.

  “I don’t know if I can take it. I really don’t.”

  “I know you can.”

  “I’ll need you every moment.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Shirley came back with the drinks and set them on clean, dry paper napkins. She looked at me again that same way, to let me know she didn’t like my remark at the bar earlier.

  “Shirley is still mad,” Vivian said, after she had gone.

  “I’ll leave her a good tip,” I said.

  Vivian raised her glass to me and smiled.

  “You have the most beautiful smile,” I said.

  She smiled again.

  “What are you doing this weekend?” I asked her.

  “Homework and housework—what else?”

  “Would you like to go to Baton Rouge one night, Friday or Saturday? I’ll pay Dora.”

  “Friday sounds good,” she said.

  We had friends in Baton Rouge who knew about her pending divorce and knew about my aunt, and they let us stay awhile at their place while they went out to a bar. Sometimes we would join them at the bar later, other times we would just leave the key in an envelope with a thank you note. But we were both getting very tired of that.

  We touched glasses and finished our drinks, then we left.

  5

  WE PLEDGED ALLEGIANCE to the flag. The flag hung limp from a ten-foot bamboo pole in the corner of the white picket fence that surrounded the church. Beyond the flag I could see smoke rising from the chimneys in the quarter, and beyond the houses and chimneys I could hear the tractors harvesting sugarcane in the fields. The sky was ashy gray, and the air chilly enough for a sweater. I told the children to go inside and begin their Bible verses.

  After listening to one or two of the verses, I tuned out the rest of them. I had heard them all many times. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” “Let not your heart be troubled, believe in God, believe also in me.” “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” “Jesus wept.” And on and on and on. I had listened to them almost six years, and I knew who would say what, just as I knew what each child would wear to school, and who would or would not know his or her lesson. I knew, too, which of them would do something for themselves and which of them never would, regardless of what I did. So each day I listened for a moment, then turned it off and planned the rest of the day.

  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. Ventilation into the church was by way of the four windows on either side, and from the front and back doors. Our heat came from a wood-burning stove in the center of the church. There was a blackboard on the back wall, and another on the right side wall. Behind my desk was the pulpit and the altar. There were three pictures on the wall behind the altar. One was a head-and-chest black-and-white photo of the minister in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie; the other two pictures were color prints of Jesus: The Last Supper and Christ knocking on a door.

  This was my school. I was supposed to teach six months out of the year, but actually I taught only five and a half months, from late October to the middle of April, when the children were not needed in the field.

  I assigned three of my sixth-grade students to teach the primer, first, and second grades, while I taught third and fourth. Only by assigning the upper-grade students to teach the lower grades was it possible to reach all the students every day. I devoted the last two hours in the afternoon to the fifth and sixth grades.

  While the classes separated and moved to their respective areas, I asked my third and fourth graders to go to the back of the church to work on the blackboards. The third-grade class would do arithmetic on the board on the back wall, and the fourth graders would write sentences on the board on the right side wall. I moved from one blackboard to the other with my yard-long Westcott ruler.

  I still felt bad about the problem I was having at home with my aunt. The night before, when I returned from Bayonne, I had gone to her room to say good night, but she pretended to be asleep, just to avoid speaking to me. And this morning, when I passed her on my way into the kitchen, she said over her shoulder, “Food there if you want it. Or you can go back where you had supper last night.”

  Breakfast was two fried eggs, grits, a piece of salt pork, and a biscuit. I ate at the kitchen table, looking across the yard. The crabgrass was wet from the night’s heavy dew. I looked back over my shoulder a couple of times, but I couldn’t hear my aunt anywhere in the house. After I finished eating, I washed my plate in the pan of soap water that she had left on the shelf in the kitchen window. I tried once more to speak to her before leaving for school, but to avoid me this time she pretended to make up her bed, which I knew she had already done two hours earlier. At a quarter to nine I left the house. She had gone out into the garden.

  Every little thing was irritating me. I caught one of the students trying to figure out a simple multiplication problem on his fingers, and I slashed him har
d across the butt with the Westcott ruler. He jerked around too fast and looked at me too angrily for my liking.

  “Your hand,” I said.

  He held out his right hand, palm up. He still held the piece of chalk.

  “Put that chalk down. I can’t afford to break it.”

  He passed the piece of chalk to his left hand and held out the right hand to me again. I brought the Westcott down into his palm.

  “You figure things out with your brains, not with your fingers,” I told him.

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Wiggins.”

  He turned back to the board and stared at the problem at least half a minute. It was cold in the back of the church, but standing two feet away from the boy, I could see that he was sweating. He raised his left hand up to his eyes to wipe away tears, then he stared at the problem again.

  “Well, others have to work too, you know.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Wiggins.”

  The back of his neck shone with sweat. He wiped his eyes again. Then he wrote down an answer, large, awkward—and, of course, incorrect.

  “You used enough chalk for five times that many problems,” I told him. “Where do you think we’re going to get more chalk when this runs out?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Well?” I said.

  “I don’t know, Mr. Wiggins,” he said, staring at the board, not daring to look at me.

  “I’d have to buy it,” I said. “The school board doesn’t give it away. They already gave me what they said was enough for the year. They’re not giving us any more. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Wiggins.”