In the fictional Louisiana town of Bayonne in the late 1940s, Jefferson, a young Black man with little schooling, is present when a liquor-store robbery leaves the white owner and two Black robbers dead. The sole survivor, he is convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair — after his own defense attorney pleads for mercy by arguing that executing him would be like putting a hog in the chair. Jefferson's godmother, Miss Emma, is determined that he will not die thinking himself a hog, and she presses Grant Wiggins, the plantation schoolteacher, to visit the jail and teach Jefferson to stand and die as a man. Grant, embittered and longing to leave the South, takes up the task reluctantly. Through their halting visits, a notebook, and a radio, both men are changed — Jefferson toward a hard-won dignity, Grant toward an understanding of his own obligation to the community he wanted to escape.
Author: Ernest J. Gaines · Original publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (New York), 1993
