A lesson before dying how many pages

She crosses the black-brown line, to the horror of other Creoles and the subtle animosity of Grant's black relatives.

It is a tribute to Mr. Gaines's skill that he makes the conflicts convincing. Jefferson, chained and securely behind bars, still has one freedom left, and that is the freedom to choose how he accepts death. Despite the novel's gallows humor and an atmosphere of pervasively harsh racism, the characters, black and white, are humanly complex and have some redeeming quality.

At the end, Jefferson's white jailer, in a moving epiphany, is so changed that he suggests the white-black alliance that will emerge a generation later to smash Jim Crow to bits. The New England abolitionist preacher William Ellery Channing observed just before the Civil War that "there are seasons, in human affairs, of inward and outward revolution, when new depths seem to be broken up in the soul, when new wants are unfolded in multitudes, and a new and undefined good is thirsted for.

Ernest J. Read An Excerpt. Gaines By Ernest J. Gaines Best Seller. Category: Historical Fiction Category: Fiction. Sep 28, ISBN Add to Cart. Buy from Other Retailers:. Jan 20, ISBN Paperback —. Also in Vintage Contemporaries. Also by Ernest J. See all books by Ernest J. About Ernest J. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Toni Morrison. James Baldwin. A Brief History of Seven Killings.

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