The Louisiana State Capitol and the Pointe Coupée Parish Courthouse, the governing bodies of Louisiana of both local and federal scale, were some of the most memorable locations from the past month. Not because of its politics or its exciting legislation, but because of the people who I connected with and the Southern hospitality. Often, Southern hospitality is commonly linked with food service and social situations, but in reality, it’s a way of life that permeates every facet of Southern life, even in its politics.

It’s the kind of Southern hospitality and the sheen of kindness and generosity that makes you almost forget about its atrocities and pained history, it’s the kind of authenticity that makes you question how so many contradictions can coexist before you remember human nature and human beings are inherently complex. When reading A Lesson Before Dying, it’s almost instinctual to categorize the protagonists and antagonists by racial group. And in the days leading up to our visit to New Roads, specifically the parish courthouse, it seemed natural to prepare oneself, especially a person of color, against small-town mindsets and possible ignorance which I, wrongly but nonetheless, personified into a rural Southern courthouse. But what’s also essential to the small-town mindset is the kind of generosity and authenticity that treats every stranger as family, that creates home for anyone looking for acceptance.

Sheriff Guidry in A Lesson Before Dying represents part of the Southern population that believes it’s within their pride and identity to uplift values like the Lost Cause and visions of Southern grace and beauty, all of which relied on the cruelty of slavery. And because the injustices faced by Grant and Jefferson at the hands of Guidry feel so tangible and thoroughly distressing, it’s difficult to the extent that it feels immoral to separate fiction and literature from reality, especially when that literature is based in reality. But more importantly, it is that much more difficult to avoid generalization and the stereotyping of individuals of the same position simply because of their identity. And the epitome of these epiphanies is the sheriff of Pointe Coupée Parish Courthouse himself, Sheriff René Thibodeaux.

From the first meeting to the last goodbye, through repeated acts of unforeseen generosity and incomparable warmth and kindness, through open invitation of difficult conversations and difficult criticisms, through the offering of Morganza cake, through his welcome invitation of a childhood tree and a transformative boat ride, I was thoroughly embarrassed – so much so, that the defensive I had subconsciously built and prepared in the days leading up to New Roads, felt incredibly ridiculous and even ignorant on my part.

Southern hospitality, however, like Thibodeaux’s — deeply touching and affecting — they make it easy to forget and subconsciously avoid the conversations that require accountability and introspection, the kind of conversations that glaringly highlight the interpersonal differences and disagreements in belief and value systems that make the differences between physically different groups that much more unjustifiable. It’s this fear of confrontation, fear of dispute that results in regressive legislation, in the oppression of minority groups and in the guarantee that the internal – secret prejudice, generalizing, stereotyping – will flourish, remaining unchallenged.

The hot topics of the Black Lives Matter Movement and the opposing Blue Lives Matter Movement, of reparations and critical race theory seem unnecessary, especially for small towns and tight-knit communities where “color doesn’t matter.” But people of color experience and know that color only doesn’t matter in interpersonal relationships, in situations where there are no stakes but kindness and is based on the guise that equality has been achieved – both of which are created and used to convenience and absolve white guilt. Personified in the Louisiana State Capitol, on the ground floor where Senate committees gathered in the hearing rooms that accompanied each side of the gray carpet floor. Sitting down at a senate committee hearing discussing House Bill 321, I had the plan to only sit for 10 minutes until I spent the next half hour popping into every room, getting bite-sized samples of Louisiana politics. As the screen started to blur and it increasingly started to feel like I was in Sunday church and hearing the pastor continually drone on with his sermon in the background, I wanted to know which team to root for – partially to wake myself up but also out of sheer confusion and curiosity as to the bill’s proposition.

Hurriedly google-ing “house bill 321 louisiana state,” the first search result contained even more convoluted language and it became I started to weigh whether more thorough research and reading was worth it when after all of it, it would simply be about another routine zoning law that didn’t even pertain to the states that I lived in. But luckily, in the next article, I learned that House Bill 321 signified deeply flawed targeting and prejudice against juvenile offenders, children, in the criminal justice system. Because of child protection laws, the criminal records and accusations of juvenile offenders are sealed and only made available to the district attorney and the plaintiff. But with the potential passing of Bill 321, juvenile records would be made public, uploaded on an online database for any future employer or institution to access and weaponize against. Although it wouldn’t be sweeping legislation for the state, it isn’t surprising that the program will be piloted in five parishes, Orleans, Caddo, Bossier, Lafayette and East Baton Rouge, that have majority Black populations. And with Black adolescents facing a higher probability of conviction than white youths–due to a number of reasons such as over policing and the school-to-prison pipeline–this bill enforces the prison industrial complex, obstructing the hope for rehabilitation and maintaining a hierarchical system that targets a historically oppressed group.

The various themes of oppression that both Jefferson and Grant face in A Lesson Before Dying during the Jim Crow South remain relevant, even at the forefront of American politics, 80 years later. The dehumanization Grant faces when the sheriff searches his body when visiting the courthouse and when Pichot makes him wait in his kitchen for hours, the dehumanization Jefferson faces when his defense debases him to a hog and when the townspeople complain of his own execution, still persists–subtly–but still persists in the proposed legislation that disguises its discrimination as concern for public safety. And being written and created in the same capitol building built by the governor who swore to nail every kind of corruption in American politics for every person of every race and creed is legislation actively hunting and damning Black youths for life.

Despite seeing the Henri Pichot’s and Sheriff Guidry’s who believed in maintaining an older, traditional hierarchy, on the other side, we also saw the Grants, Miss Emmas and Tante Lous fighting for the dignity and rights of people who have had it stripped away for most of history. Those fighting against the bill in front of the Senate like Ashley Hill Hamilton of the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights embodied Tante Lou and Miss Emma, those who doggedly fought for their community with the refusal of taking anything but “yes” as an answer. Those like criminal defense attorney Sarah Omojola embodied Grant who spoke about the fight with a realistic cynicism and tiredness that entailed years of being entrenched in a system that made little progress and easily regressed, being entrenched in a cycle that often felt hopeless. In the same fight a century later, remnants of Ernest Gaines’ characters are reenvisioned in our modern activists and scholars.