SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “Communal Responsibility in Ernest J. Gaines's A Lesson before Dying.” Mississippi Quarterly 52, no. 2 (spring 1999): 259-71.

In the following essay, Folks examines the Southern rural folk traditions represented in A Lesson before Dying, analyzing their significance in terms of both the conventions of classic realism and the cultural fragmentation of the African American Diaspora.

Ernest J. Gaines's entire career has been marked by a search for a useful African-American cultural tradition. Implicit in his narrative is the recognition that, while cultures change and evolve, the basis for any civilization is an inherited culture with roots in folk and popular tradition. In novels such as The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, In My Father's House, A Gathering of Old Men, and A Lesson before Dying, we see Gaines's efforts to lay bare a cultural tradition and to write narratives in which the past constitutes the basis...