Jefferson

In my opinion, Jefferson from A Lesson Before Dying is an extremely likable character. Despite the attitude he gives Ms Emma and Reverend Ambrose and his occasional shittiness to Grant, I think you can’t hold it against him. The kid is in an awful situation and through the entire book you can’t help but sympathize with him. But I think the main reason it’s so easy to sympathize with Jefferson is that he represents all of us (black America).

From the beginning we know that Jefferson’s trial isn’t fair and we feel helpless as the only defense they can give for the child is “he’s too stupid to be guilty.” When you try to dehumanize the innocent (or at least who we assume is innocent) that says something about the regard you hold for them. Also, the trial, because he was a black boy, was not ‘innocent until proven guilty’ but ‘guilty unless proven innocent.’ And we see this replicated today, with around 43% of people in jail being black, despite black people making up only approximately 12% of the American population. It shows that race based judicial injustice didn’t end with Jefferson.

Also, Grant talks a lot about how Jefferson represents all of his students. His conversations with Antoine about how being a teacher doesn’t really matter, trying to help the kids doesn’t really matter because they’ll grow up to “be the niggers they were born to be.” They talk about a cycle and how Jefferson and Grant and everyone else in their town just fits into the cycle and you can't break it. Jefferson represents the average kid in their town pretty closely.

And symbolically he represents black people as well. The talking about Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson reference how these distant people stand somehow for the people in their town. So if Jefferson too can be a hero then doesn't he stand for the people even more because they know him? If the boy cried out for Joe, will Jefferson cry out  for Jackie, will some other black boy someday cry out for Jefferson?

Cooked and Et

To me, as I was reading As I Lay Dying the most emotionally poignant scene in the book was the scene where Vardaman reacts to his mother’s death. All of the family members are dealing with their grief in their own ways and I can appreciate all of the different ways, but the raw sadness displayed in Vardaman’s chapter really gets to me.

He begins with a sense of loss almost. He stands on the edge of the porch and cries and narrates “I can feel where the fish was in the dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not-blood on my hands and overalls. Then it wasn't so.” In my head I interpret this scene as a boy being so lost and so confused and so angry that all he can do to make sense of it all is to compare his mother to a dead fish.

He then is so obsessed with the life he can feel in himself and other beings. “The life in him runs under the skin, under my hand, running through the splotches, smelling up into my nose where the sickness is beginning to cry, vomiting the crying, and then I can breathe, vomiting it. It makes a lot of noise. I can smell the life running up from under my hands, up my arms, and then I cart leave the stall.” I read this as the boy is so sad that the fact that he is alive—the fact that the horse is alive—while his fish and his mother aren’t is sickening to him.

He sets loose the horses in a frenzy. So much emotion and anger built up that he was so frantic to pay this doctor back for what he did.

“I am not crying now. I am not anything. Dewey Dell comes to the hill and calls me. Vardaman. I am not anything. I am quiet. You, Vardaman. I can cry quiet now, feeling and hearing my tears,” Vardaman narrates after Cash and Dewey Dell come to him. He says he’s not anything; he feels empty. These couple sentences affected me the most probably. What’s left inside of Vardaman now that his mother is gone and his fury is gone?

His final lines of “Cooked and et. Cooked and et.” refer back to his fish analogy. It’s like he grows to understand over the course of this chapter what his mother’s death means.

I loved Vardaman so much because I felt a sense of emotional urgency in him that most of the others lacked. I felt that I got more emotional development over this one chapter of Vardaman’s than in Anse’s or Darl’s entire story.