CR's Book of the Year celebration begins today
Published: Feb 3 2006

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In Ernest J. Gaines’ 1993 novel “A Lesson Before Dying” the Louisiana Cajun community is beset by a different, but no less devastating hurricane than the one that ravaged the area in 2005.

“I think something changed for us in the nation in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina,” Pat McCutcheon said. “We had dirty laundry that we didn’t know about (and) that dirty laundry happened to be most exposed in Louisiana.”

The College of the Redwoods’ English professor and poet was referring to the developing national controversy surrounding the federal government’s alleged discrepancy in services provided to poverty-entrenched households in and around New Orleans.

That’s a large reason why the college has selected Gaines’ novel as its “Book of the Year.”

The campus and community kick-off celebration will be held today at 7 p.m. with a screening of the movie version at CR’s Forum Theater. A discussion will follow.

Bless My Soul Café’s Sweet Mama Janisse will be stationed in the breezeway outside the theater with New Orleans-style Cajun finger food, which will be set to Cajun and Zydeco music.

Today’s program is the first in a series of Book of the Year events that will take place in 2006. For more information, phone (707) 476-4327 or visit www.redwoods.edu/departments/english/book-year/index.htm.

Gaines was born in 1933 on the River Lake plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, La., the setting for most of his fiction.

He has published eight books of fiction, including “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.”

He has been awarded a MacArthur Foundation grant for writings of “rare historical resonance.”

“A Lesson Before Dying” won the 1993 National Book Critics Circle Award.

The novel is set in a small community in the 1940s and is narrated by Grant Wiggins, who has left the plantation town and attended a university. He returns to town, but the only job available to him is teaching in the small church school.

Another resident, Jefferson, a young black man and developmentally slow, is found guilty of the murder he didn’t commit of a white shopkeeper. He faces the electric chair.

Jefferson’s grandmother asks Grant to “teach” her grandson before he dies that her grandson is a man.

“When Jefferson is in the courtroom and being accused, the lawyer for his defense says, ‘We’re not murdering a man here. … This is just basically an animal,’” McCutcheon said. “What he calls him is a ‘hog.’ … This is the guy who is defending him.”

McCutcheon said the book, at first, was not all-inspiring for her, particularly since she didn’t like the characters.

“Before long I realized that’s exactly what Gaines wanted,” she said. “There’s nothing to like in that situation. … The kind of change it’s showing is achingly slow. … Both men are different by the end of the book.”

Finally, Grant convinces Jefferson to write his thoughts in whatever way they are able to manifest themselves.

This figures into what McCutcheon considers essential about the Book of the Year program.

It introduces community residents to ideas and cultures they might not otherwise know and, mostly, it introduces people to writing and books, she said.

Last year, the Book of the Year program was cut due to severe budget constraints, she said.

“I teach English, but I also coordinate the honors program,” McCutcheon said. “I told them that and they were devastated. … They decided they would like the honors program to take that on with whatever extent we could with no budget.”

McCutcheon said she has written two funding proposals to campus sources and CR President Casey Crabill has been supportive.

The program will last throughout 2006 and not just the school calendar year. If money can be raised, the author will be invited to the campus in the fall, McCutcheon said.

Plus, she said, she’d like the program to expand to CR’s Del Norte and Fort Bragg campuses.

“It’s not just the students and faculty here that are being asked to partake,” McCutcheon said.

The goal is to reach as many people as possible and get them to pick up the book and read it.

“We would like to extend the conversation to include the community,” she said.