THIS reprint of Ernest J Gaines’s extraordinary account of an African-American man’s wait before his execution is timely.

It is so not only because the imminent release of Harper Lee’s newly discovered novel Go Set a Watchman is a reminder that African-American novelists are better than even the most well-intentioned white liberals in articulating the pain and corruption of institutionalised racial hatred.

It’s also appropriate given the enduring and vicious state attacks currently being launched against the black population in towns and cities across the US.

Set in 1940s Louisiana, A Lesson Before Dying focuses on the stifling and sweltering combat between interlocking and opposing forces in the months leading up to the execution of Jefferson, a young man convicted of an armed robbery and murder he did not commit.

Spurred on by the patronising and ineffectual arguments of Jefferson’s defence counsel, who refers to his client as being as sentient as a “hog,” his family strive to give him some dignity before death.

They engage local teacher Grant Wiggins to pay a series of prison visits to convince him that he is a man rather than a “hog.”

In Wiggins, Gaines (pictured left) has created a complex and totally credible first-person protagonist. A qualified teacher disillusioned by coming back home and instructing his African-American pupils to a level just suitable enough for them to work in the local cotton and sugar cane fields, Wiggins kicks against the expectations of Jefferson’s family. This is a task he does not want to undertake.

It forces him to confront again the forces of white supremacist hegemony that he knows so well and thus suffers all the humiliations, large and small, heaped upon an African-American with ideas and the education to articulate them.

Wiggins also sets his face against the Reverend Ambrose, who looks to him to help Jefferson find forgiveness in religion alone. He does not believe that is all that Jefferson wants.

Painfully slowly, he builds a relationship with the condemned man, giving him a radio to listen to music and notepaper and a pencil to write his story as a man rather than a “hog.”

The last chapter, with different voices used to document the arrival of the electric chair, is almost Dostoevskyian in its unblinking but horrified narrative.

This is not a feel-good novel, which is probably why unlike To Kill A Mockingbird it hasn’t been made into a film.

Yet it is not without some hope, notably in the person of Paul — the white deputy sheriff at the jail — there is a singular sense that not all of the majority population have been so deformed by the evil of this system of economic and racial exploitation that they cannot reach across in solidarity and a basic humanity.

Review by Paul Simon