A Lesson Before Dying

1. A Lesson Before Dying

2. Ernest James Gaines

3. Ernest J Gaines • Born: • The River Lake Plantation • Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, 1933. • House that once served as slave quarters on the plantation.

4. Family • Family: • Aunt Augusteen Jefferson • crippled from birth • 6 brothers and sisters. • His mother and stepfather,, left Point Coupee to try to search out a better life. • Gaines joined them at the age of 15 in Vallejo, California. • His stepfather urged him to hang out in the public library to keep him out of trouble.

5. School • One room in the back of the town’s black church. • Only in session for half the year • children were needed for vegetable and cotton picking

6. Writing • Storytelling and the oral tradition: • town norm in Point Coupee • Sparked Gaines’ interest in weaving his own tales. • Began writing his own stories. • Unable to find literature that accurately portrayed Southern African-American life • Attended San Francisco State University • after serving in the U.S. Army • published several stories

7. Works • Catherine Cormier 1964 • Of Love and Dust 1966 • The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman 1971 • In My Father’s House 1978 • A Gathering of Old Men 1983 • A Lesson Before Dying 1993

8. Now • Writer-in-Residence at The University of Louisiana, Lafayette since 1983 • Currently, he and his wife live on a house they had built on The River Lake Plantation where he grew up.

9. What do you think is the most important piece of information about Ernest Gaines for a future reader of A Lesson Before Dying?

10. A Lesson Before Dying

11. Setting • Takes place in the 1940s • Pointe Coupee, LA • Spans the years before the Civil Rights Act when Jim Crow laws were in effect

12. Purposes • To accurately portray the feelings, tensions, and emotions of African Americans living in the South during this time period. • To capture the struggle of being a person striving for dignity in a universe that denies it. • To exhibit a journey to self-discovery.

13. Civil Rights Timeline

14. 1787- Slavery is made illegal in the Northwest Territory. The U.S Constitution states that Congress may not ban the slave trade until 1808. 1793- Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton gin greatly increases the demand for slave labor. A federal fugitive slave law is enacted, providing for the return slaves who had escaped and crossed state lines. 1820- The Missouri Compromise bans slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri.

15. 1831- Nat Turner, an enslaved African-American preacher, leads the most significant slave uprising in American history. He and his band of followers launch a short, bloody, rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. The militia quells the rebellion, and Turner is eventually hanged. As a consequence, Virginia institutes much stricter slave laws. 1849- Harriet Tubman escapes from slavery and becomes one of the most effective and celebrated leaders of the Underground Railroad. 1852- Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin is published. It becomes one of the most influential works to stir anti-slavery sentiments.

16. 1857- The Dred Scott case holds that Congress does not have the right to ban slavery in states and, furthermore, that slaves are not citizens. 1861 -The Confederacy is founded when the deep South secedes, and the Civil War begins. 1863- President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring "that all persons held as slaves" within the Confederate states "are, and henceforward shall be free."

17. 1865- The Civil War ends (April 9). Lincoln is assassinated (April 14). Thirteenth amendment is ratified, prohibiting slavery. 1868- Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution is ratified, defining citizenship. Individuals born or naturalized in the United States are American citizens, including those born as slaves. This nullifies the Dred Scott Case (1857), which had ruled that blacks were not citizens

18. 1896- Plessy v. Ferguson: This landmark Supreme Court decision holds that racial segregation is constitutional, paving the way for the repressive Jim Crow laws in the South. 1880s-1964- Jim Crow Era: Between one and two million black farmers left the South during the first Great Migration from 1914 to 1930, in search of work in northern cities where factory owners promised, but never provided, high-wage jobs. In the 1940s, with the outbreak of World War II, a second Great Migration brought black farmers from the rural areas in the South to the urban, industrial areas.

19. 1920s- The Harlem Renaissance flourishes in the 1920s and 1930s. This literary, artistic, and intellectual movement fosters a new black cultural identity. 1947- Jackie Robinson breaks Major League Baseball's color barrier when he is signed to the Brooklyn Dodgers by Branch Rickey.

20. 1954- Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kans. declares that racial segregation in schools is unconstitutional (May 17). 1955- A young black boy, Emmett Till, is brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi. Two white men charged with the crime are acquitted by an all-white jury. They later boast about committing the murder. The public outrage generated by the case helps spur the civil rights movement (Aug.). Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat at the front of the "colored section" of a bus to a white passenger (Dec.1). In response to her arrest Montgomery's black community launch a successful year-long bus boycott. Montgomery's buses are desegregated on Dec. 21, 1956.

21. 1964- President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act, the most sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. It prohibits discrimination of all kinds based on race, color, religion, or national origin. 1965- Voting Rights Act.

22. Literary Elements

23. Subtext • Thoughts not expressed directly in the text such as emotions and tension. • The unspoken content under the spoken dialogue. • Can be used to explain a character’s: • Inner thoughts and motives • Motivations, attitudes, and emotional undercurrents. • Implicit meaning or theme of a literary text. • Underlying personality of a dramatic character as implied or indicated by a script or text.

24. Example: • The woman looked at the politician out of the corner of her eyes and whispered, “The people hold you up as the only honest politician government. It would be a such shame if something made their opinion change—if the news tomorrow showed solid proof of you cheating on your taxes or something like that.” • The SUBTEXT of this dialogue is a threat of blackmail.

25. Tone/Mood • Tone: Definitive stance the author adopts in shaping a specific emotional perspective towards the subject of the literary work. • Author’s attitude: Sometimesshown through a character who is not the narrator. • May be stated or implied. • Diction is key. • Mood: emotional atmosphere created by an author

26. Example: • Charlie surveyed the classroom, congratulating himself for snatching the higher test grade, the smug smirk on his face growing brighter and brighter as he confirmed the inferiority of his peers. • The author's TONE is: exaggerated, somewhat cynical

27. Conflict • Internal Conflict: Man vs. Self • Examples: Guilty Conscience, Indecision • External Conflict: struggle with a force outside one’s self • Man vs. Man • Examples: physically fighting, prank war • Man vs. Nature • Examples: surviving in a desert, hurricane, fighting cancer • Man vs. Society • Example: victim of stereotyping, dystopia/evil governments

28. Symbolism • Specific object that is used to represent or suggest another • Universal vs. Literary • Literary Symbolism: The author’s use of one object, character, color or figure to represent or suggest an abstract concept. • Specific to a particular story. • One of the keys to interpreting text.