Ernest Gaines’ 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. The novel provides a unique outlook on the status of African Americans in the South, after World War II and before the Civil Rights Movement. We see a Jim Crow South through the eyes of a formally educated African American teacher who often feels helpless and alienated from his own country.

Wikipedia tells me: “Gaines has been a MacArthur Foundationfellow, awarded the National Humanities Medal, and inducted into the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Letters) as a Chevalier.

He was among the fifth generation of his sharecropper family to be born on a plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. This became the setting and premise for many of his later works. He was the eldest of 12 children, raised by his aunt, who was crippled and had to crawl to get around the house. Although born generations after the end of slavery, Gaines grew up impoverished, living in old slave quarters on a plantation.”

 

And here is the quote, fitting for these post election days, don’t you think?

Question everything. Every stripe, every star, every word spoken. Everything.