The Big Read Book Club

Four years ago, Charlottesville joined in The Big Read, a relatively new National Endowment for the Arts program. Participating communities choose one of the books recommended by the event’s Reading Committee, receive a small grant to promote The Big Read in their towns and commit to organizing various public lectures, readings and discussions of their chosen book. “What a great idea, “I thought when I first heard of it. I scanned the schedule of events each year, disappointed to see that most of them took place when I was in Paris. (One of the things you learn when you have a double life is that there is always something interesting going on in the place where you are not.)
Last spring, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I invited a group of friends to discuss the Big Read book at my house. They had a great time and unanimously decreed that I should do it again. Happy to oblige, I organized the second edition of the Big Read Book Club on March 27th this year.


Cake and candy, iced tea and wine fueled the discussion.

Charlottesville’s choice this year was “A Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest J. Gaines. Not only had I never read it; I had never heard of it or its author.
Thank goodness for the Big Read because I wouldn’t have wanted to have missed this book.
Gaines was born in 1933 in Louisiana, the son of a sharecropper. His early education was at a black plantation school that only met for 5 or 6 months of the year. Fortunately for us,it was reinforced by intensive reading at the public library in California when the teenaged boy joined his mother and stepfather who had moved there a few years earlier. Gaines went on to university and, on the basis of short stories published in the college quarterly, won a scholarship to the graduate creative writing program at Stanford.
The young student wrote his early stories because he couldn’t find books about the life he knew in rural Louisiana. "A Lesson Before Dying” is also set in the place and time he knew so well and described so eloquently -- its hardship but also its strong community.
I’m not going to tell you much about the novel because I want you all to read it. (In French the translation is entitled “Dites-leur que je suis un homme”). Both titles, in my opinion, point us in the direction the author wants us to look. So,I was surprised at the turn the early part our discussion took, proving once again that the reader brings to a book as much as he or she takes from it. Most of my friends talked immediately of racism past and present and the disproportionate number of black men – some later proven innocent -- on death row. After a time, I said “In my opinion, that’s just the setting; that’s not what the novel’s about.” Shocked silence. “Consider the title.” I suggested. They did and had lots to say. But their first emotional reaction was the strongest.
All cultures and countries have partly healed wounds. Segregation is one of the United States’. My passport and age say I should share this. But my early years were spent in a small Canadian town with only one black family. And when Martin Luther King spoke in Washington in 1963, I watched it on TV in Jamaica, surrounded by black and brown classmates and teachers.
Once again, I was an outsider. It’s a familiar and, therefore, comfortable position for me. Fortunately, my white American friends and this African American author gave me a deeper understanding of this slowly healing American wound on that March evening. We had a great discussion. Sorry you couldn’t have been there.