In A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines, Jefferson, the young man unjustly given a death sentence for a murder he did not commit, often refers to both his own impending death and the death of Jesus in conversations with his old teacher Grant Wiggins. When discussing Christmas with Grant, Jefferson asks, “‘That’s when He was born, or that’s when He died’ he asked. ‘Who?’ I said. He looked at me, knowing that I knew who he was talking about. ‘Born,’ I said. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Easter when they nailed Him to the cross. And He never said a mumbling word.’” (139). While reading this passage, a song began to hum in my mind…

“Oh didn’t they crucify my Lord? Oh didn’t they crucify my Lord? Yes they crucified my Lord, and He never said a mumblin’ word, He just hung, Lord, Lord, His head and died…”

This is the opening refrain to the traditional African-American folk/gospel song “And He Never Said A Mumblin’ Word”. As with all traditional folk songs, there is no one known author – as the song is sung and passed down orally, there is multiplicity and variation in the versions and thus it belongs to the people and community in which the song exists rather than one individual person. However, one of the earliest known recordings is that made by father-son duo Alan and John Lomax in June 1933, sung by inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (which is better known as “Angola” in reference to the slave plantation that previously occupied the land). I have linked a recording of the song, though this was made at the Mississippi State Penitentiary a few months later, as the original Angola recording was lost to technical fault.

Image of description card for sound recording in Angola, taken from the website of the Library of Congress' American Folklife Center

Many of the Lomax recordings were done in Southern prisons, and thus, because of the disproportionately high Black imprisonment, most of these recordings are historically African-American folk and gospel songs. They are historical in their origin, but still highly contemporary in the issues of suffering imposed on these groups. Angola remains the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, and is also referred to as a “farm” because of its harsh working conditions, with duties that include picking cotton. With a 72% Black population, the ties between this environment and enslavement are clear. The prison industrial complex is notoriously known as modern slavery – since slavery was abolished with the 13th amendment, there has been an exception for convicts, and institutions (and individuals) of white supremacy have ensured that prison demographics remain majority Black.

These are all issues that I have known about for years, but never have I been confronted with them so directly as when I visited the Louisiana State Capitol. Walking into its vicinity, we were first greeted by the utter grandeur of its visage. Peering at this edifice, I thought of Huey P. Long’s fascist ability to construct this in under two years; looking at the statue of his stately appearance erected after his death, I thought of how Huey P. Newton, co-founder of the Black Panther Party hailing from Louisiana, was most likely named after Long. A dictatorial leader dearly loved by those championing ultimate freedom and armed civilians. Two things can be true at once.

The capitol was dazzling, yet its contents were disturbing. After exploring the inside and the lookout point at the very top of the building, Mary, Kiki, and I took an elevator down to what we thought was the ground floor. We ended up in a basement situation and, after seeing a strange room full of suited individuals, decided to explore. After wandering through the hall, we realized there was some sort of committee occurring, and sat down in an adjacent room where the meeting was being televised. After listening for a bit, we learned that the committee was discussing House Bill 321. HB321 proposes to introduce an online database for criminal charges and convictions, specifically targeting court records of juveniles aged 13 and older. The pilot program, if passed, will only be launched in three parishes. Those proposing the bill, led by Republican Representative Debbie Villio, claimed that the choice of these parishes has to do with their technological capabilities of sustaining such a program. However, as pointed out by those opposing HB321, all three of these parishes are majority Black.

Before sitting in on this discussion, I honestly did not understand the casual nature with which such bills are passed from one stage to the next. After harrowing testimonies from victims of violent crimes from both sides, then finishing with the opposition’s clear reasons why such a bill would not actually aid victims’ search for justice against their assailants as well as how many children’s lives could be ruined by the potentiality of such a bill, the representatives were ready to make a decision. Mere seconds after the opposition’s last point, a spokesperson asked the council members for their decisions. It seemed impossible that these senators could have listened, truly listened, to these arguments and immediately afterwards made a decision about the Bill. Were they listening? Or had they already made up their minds before a single speaker stepped foot in their room? “Yea.” “Nay.” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Yes.” Decided. It was “reported with amendments” meaning that it will pass from this house onto the next. The only “Nay” was spoken by the only Black senator. The “Yea” and “Yes”es were spoken by white senators.

Kiki, Mary, and I sat and looked at each other in disbelief as the members dispersed. I thought of a line from A Lesson Before Dying: “Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person. Justice?” (157). Although not as immediate or as literal as Jefferson’s case, this Bill passing might have truly devastating effects on youths pushed into lives of crime, or even those charged without conviction, those with no proof of any crime but only of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Our justice system still decides on the lives of marginalized peoples without their say. While Representative Villio’s pink plaid suit and gray snakeskin pumps appeared villainous and tacky in their appearance, it was her political stronghold that was tacky in its lasting capabilities. Sometimes, it takes one individual human being to continue a legacy of marginalization and pain.

*The courthouse in New Roads, the town that Bayonne was based on.*

However, we know that it also sometimes takes one human to alter the future legacy of another individual’s personhood for the better: Grant Wiggins was that for Jefferson and, ironically, Sheriff Thibodeaux was that for me, albeit in an extremely different way. The courthouse was almost exactly as described in Gaines’ novel: “The courthouse, like most of the public buildings in town, was made of red brick. Built around the turn of the century, it looked like a small castle you might see in the countryside somewhere in Europe. The parking lot that surrounded the courthouse was covered with crushed seashells. A statue of a Confederate soldier stood to the right of the walk that led up to the courthouse door. Above the head of the statue, national, state, and Confederate flags flew on long metal poles. The big clock on the tower struck two as I parked opposite the statue and the flags.” (69)

While there are no Confederate statues or crushed seashells, this was the most profound moment of Bookpacking thus far. I could see Grant Wiggins exiting his car, his gray ‘46 Ford, as that big clock struck two. Walking into the courthouse, I could see his apprehension towards the men who eyed him suspiciously, walking up the steps I could see him following behind Paul, and reaching those dilapidated jail cells, I could see him sitting with Jefferson in his cell where each of his the cells in his body screamed in pain and hurt. We did not follow Paul or Sheriff Guidry, we followed Tammy and a fellow officer. Tammy was like Paul, sweet and understanding; the other officer, in many ways, did remind me of Guidry. Upon entering the courtroom, we discussed youth imprisonment and the implications of HB321. He recounted to us a story that occurred in that very room: once, he had a juvenile girl in the court. He didn’t tell us what she was being tried with, but he told us that she cussed at the judge. He said, “I told her that she had to behave herself, and she hit me in the face right here.” He pointed to his cheek and continued, “I took her right to the floor. She got 18 months for that.” There was a look of pride on his face, a pride and grumble in his throat as he said he took her to the floor. Pride at taking down a young girl – yes, she had hit him, and no we do not know what she was charged with, but it was that pride that struck me. It was not pride at being an officer upholding the peace, but a gloating sneer that he had shut her away for attacking his personhood. He fit right into Gaines’ novel to me.

But everyone else was kind, and in some ways, this was more shocking to me. After exploring the jail cells, after finding tattered documents of gruesome murders and dusty photographs of bloated carcasses, I was in a somber mood. Not only seeing the physical spaces where people’s lives were stripped of them, but seeing images that displayed alternately lifeless bodies – so much pain was held in this space. You could feel it in the air, in that stifling humidity, in that dust and decay. Walking into Sheriff Thibodeaux’s office, seeing his large Blue Lives Matter flag hung on the wall, seeing his jovial nature, I began to cry quietly in my seat at the conference table. It felt like whiplash, too much for my brain to comprehend at once. I felt myself bristle against his kindness, distrusting of what I thought to be a facade. The closest encounters I have had with police before this (besides traffic stops) have been at protests against them.

Eventually, I asked him what his Blue Lives Matter flag meant to him. I knew what it meant to me - a direct backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement aimed at uplifting the voices of Black Americans, so long pushed to the wayside. But his answer took me aback: his friend had made the flag for him, his father and grandfather were both policemen, and he was proud of his service. It seemed that he had no idea that the original purpose of this flag was in direct opposition to the BLM movement. And I slowly started to see how in a small town like this, the issue of corrupt police is limited to a few bad eggs. He knows everyone, and he holds all of his officers to the standard of treating each civilian like their cousin, because if they’re not their own cousin, they’re probably someone else’s on the force. It was a viewpoint that I had heard of, but never truly understood in a context where it could be applicable.

While my opinion of the police state in a broader sense has not changed (the larger institution of policing in America is too far gone to become anything other than an oppressive regime, that’s what it has always been and will continue to be until there is a large-scale revolutionary shift), I see now that smaller police forces actually are able to keep their officers to a high standard, that not all cops are inherently or intentionally forces of oppression - in a place like New Roads, most actually aren’t. It is an entirely different reality than I am used to, and this is a perspective for which I am eternally grateful. In terms of policy making, I think it necessary to combine these attitudes with conversations of institutional policing in order to find a truly progressive and comprehensive future of law and justice. Sheriff Thibodeaux was truly one of the loveliest people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting, and I hope to see his sunny face again one day.

I find this interplay between utter kindness and immeasurable historical pain very profound. The jail was one of the places that struck me the most in this sense, and Gaines’ home was the other space where I felt this so deeply. Cheylon, our marvelous guide to all things Gaines, spoke multiple times about the incongruence between descriptions of physical space in the book and the actual place in real life – the Church/schoolhouse being the best example of this. It was small - very small. I could see Irene Cole standing and commanding the younger students as Grant cracked his ruler over the head of a young boy, hear all of the sounds mixing together in the acoustically tight atmosphere, words climbing over each other to find a home in the mind of the children. Knowing that Gaines grew up on this plantation, I considered how he reimagined the space to feel larger in his novel. It was a literary technique to contrast the city of Bayonne, but it also spoke to his rewriting of his own history. He took back the plantation where he was raised, forced to work as a sharecropper, and turned it into this beautiful home for his children and grandchildren and pets to grow healthy and happy. It is this act of remembrance equal to reimagining that makes Gaines such a profound author and, it seemed, such a gracious human being. He never forgot where he and his people came from, where they struggled. However, where history is unalterable, he found victory in changing his own personal reality. By understanding this through seeing the physical space that he occupied, I further understood Jefferson’s veritable victory of dying with dignity. He, too, could not change the past or the court’s order to execute him, but he could change his mental attitude toward his physical reality (however dismal and cramped it was). Gaines had to return to the South to write his stories because he had to push through his own past of suffering to find victory and success in his mental state by way of the space that he occupied.

It makes sense, then, that he chose his final resting place to be on that same land. The graveyard was small. Very small, actually. There were births and deaths dated from the early 1900s all the way up to 2023, yet I couldn’t help but think of all the bodies that lay deeper in the earth, further back in history, long ago eaten by worms that became fertilizer for the next crop of sugarcane. Blood sugar, the sweetness made possible only by death. Gaines clearly thought about this, too. His gravestone read: to lie with those who have no mark.

With his writing, he gave voice to the historically voiceless, telling the stories of his life and those around him with poignancy and elegance, with full emotional truths even if the facts were sometimes fabricated. Then, even in death, he gives voice to those otherwise forgotten.

Standing by his grave, a movement caught my eye. Two butterflies circled above me then moved to be above his bones. One was black with yellow dots, the other yellow with black dots. Just like Jefferson’s butterfly, the one that Grant saw before he heard the news of his death: “Several feet away from where I sat under the tree was a hill of bull grass. I doubted that I had looked at it once in all the time that I had been sitting there. I probably would not have noticed it at all had a butterfly, a yellow butterfly with dark specks like ink dots on its wings, not lit there. What had brought it there?...I watched it fly over the ditch and down into the quarter, I watched it until I could not see it anymore. Yes, I told myself. It is finally over.” (252). When I was in third grade, my Nonna died. At her funeral, I sat next on the grass and watched a white butterfly flit around the white lillies that sat on her casket. Her best friend came up to me and told me that if a butterfly is at a funeral, that is the deceased loved one coming back to say hello, and that from now on every time I see a white butterfly that will be my Nonna coming to say hello. To this day, I think of her when I see white butterflies. Now, I have no doubt in my mind that these black and yellow butterflies were Jefferson and Gaines, finding comfort in each other and in their new free-flying forms. It is finally over: this book, this experience, their literal and literary lives, but the butterflies, their souls will not cease flight. The reading of Gaines’ work will not end. Now and forever, they will drink from the nectar of the flowers that their sweat gave life to. I hear Cheylon and Andrew calling us to the van. I watch the butterflies take flight over the grave, past the fake purple flowers and into the lush green underbrush. They encircle each other until I can’t see them anymore, and then I turn around to leave.

One of the butterflies explores the air before the second one appeared