I hate the term “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”. It’s something that I think we all have heard in English and History classes growing up. This phrase served to allow us to envision how people felt way back then, or at least, that was the intent of it. It is used to make students feel like they have a better understanding of the lives of others living before them. This is such an ignorant mindset. I know that I can’t imagine. I will never understand. Coming on this Bookpacking trip, part of me wondered if that would be the goal: that reading these books in the places they are set would solely be to relate to the characters. However, I have found the experience to be so much more…
A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest Gaines has been my favorite novel to Bookpacking, and not because of the book itself. I was so appreciative of how much time we spent learning and discussing Ernest Gaines as an author. We first went to the city of New Roads, which is where Ernest Gaines was born and raised. It is a small Southern town that follows the False River. From first glance, it looks picturesque and perfect. New Roads seems like the epitome of the South from its architecture to the people. However, Gaines never focuses on this aspect of Bayonne in the novel. He never describes Bayonne using any descriptive imagery. The only time he tries to define the town of Bayonne is in the beginning of the novel. Gaines talks about a divided town, one that separates people based on their race. He talks about how the church, movie theater, and schools for the white people are uptown, while these same buildings for black people were in the back of the town. Anybody driving through New Roads (like we did initially) only sees uptown. Even to this day, the city of New Roads does not want to acknowledge “the back of town”. They want to leave people who drive by having the buildings uptown as their definition of New Roads. It does feel quite fake at times. Gaines barely talks about the uptown of Bayonne in his book. Most of the places referenced in A Lesson Before Dying take place in this back of town. He changes the spotlight and perspective of New Roads/Bayonne. By reading this book, I didn’t look at New Roads only in the way that it wants us to view it. I didn’t look out the window and look at “uptown” New Roads. I tried to look at Gaines’ Bayonne. Like we have observed in many Southern towns, they want to hide their history and look as though their town is a happy place. Gaines’ novels disrupt this. They remind us to look past these picturesque lakefront houses with the white picket fences. We don’t take these rural towns as they want us to. Gaines writes about a Bayonne that rarely describes its beauty, because sometimes we forget to look past the beauty ourselves.
During our first day in New Roads, we had the opportunity to visit the courthouse and see the old jail cells. When our guide Tammy took us up to where the cells once were, there were boxes full of records everywhere. We had to brush away cobwebs to go through the unorganized files that told so much of the history of this town. I remember Andrew mentioning how somebody could probably dedicate their entire career just to going through the history in these boxes. This then led me to ask Tammy a question. Is there any plan for New Roads to digitize or make these records accessible? She replied by saying that they didn’t have any plans to do so. I was shocked to think that these files were sitting up here just collecting dust. So many stories, so many lives, and so many historic accounts. A lot of the history of New Roads could be found in the reports living in the courthouse. Yet, much of this, again, is history that the town of New Roads doesn’t want to acknowledge as part of their history. They want us to see the stunning outside of the courthouse building, which houses a huge part of the town’s history on the inside. New Roads wants to move forward, when really, so much of it is still stuck in the past. They’ve kept all this hidden away, and most strangers passing through have no idea what that courthouse holds. It appears New Roads did not want to admit anything wrong with their town. A Lesson Before Dying wants to bring forth this history that the town wants to ignore. Gaines does this in such a powerful way. While we were walking around the cell staring at these records, I kept thinking about the scene in A Lesson Before Dying where the entire town can hear the buzzing of the electric chair. They make comments like “my God, the whole town can hear that thing” or “The sound was too horrible. Just too horrible”. The sound forces people to acknowledge what is happening in their town. It made people uncomfortable, and they wanted to forget, but they couldn’t. They had to live with knowing what was about to happen down the street, rather than just pretend it wasn’t happening. It seems like a stretch, but to me it felt like keeping those stories in those cells was the town’s way of not wanting to see itself as anything other than a peaceful and sleepy Southern town.
I think that this was my favorite book to Bookpack because of how much time we spent learning about Ernest Gaines as an author. We visited his home which he built after purchasing the land which he was born and raised on. He has preserved so much history. We first went into a church that Ernest and Diane had restored based on the original building that Ernest was taught in living in the quarter. We were given insight into where Grant taught his students. There weren’t any desks, just a few church pews. Grant’s frustration with his limits as an educator were made apparent. After seeing the classroom, we went to the graveyard. The people buried here included Ernest and his family, as well as many people who worked on the property. They were given proper tombstones that told their names and stories. Enslaved people who worked in the same place were buried in the sugarcane fields where their families don’t know where they lie. Ernest Gaines’ efforts of bringing this history out into the open started to create a new way of seeing New Roads for me. This has always been there, but the tireless work of the Gaines family has brought it to light.
In the beginning of my blog, I mention how I hate the term “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”. I thought about this a lot when we were in New Roads. The definition of Bookpacking (at least in my eyes) was to have a better understanding of a novel by visiting the places they are set in. I think for many of us, this means trying to relate to or understand the characters. However, I think there are some books where this can lead to ignorance. Standing in those jail cells, I’m sure people tried to think that they understood Jefferson’s character better: that they could put themselves in his shoes by standing behind the bars for maybe 15 seconds. But we can’t. I think it’s ridiculous for somebody’s takeaway from Bookpacking A Lesson Before Dying to be that they understood Jefferson better. I know that I will never understand. Honestly, I struggled to write this blog, because I wasn’t sure how I was connecting my experience reading the book to my time in New Roads. I realized that it had less to do with the novel itself, but more of the legacy that Ernest Gaines left on the town. He brought the “back of town” as he calls it into the spotlight. I looked at New Roads in a new light because of him. This was the first book where I was able to create my own definition of Bookpacking. For me, it is not about “relating” to the characters. Bookpacking for me is understanding the author’s perspective and how they brought the spotlight to communities or areas that are often left out of the conversation. We all have our own way to Bookpack, and I think reading A Lesson Before Dying showed me how I can take away the most from this experience.
