What is the mark of a man, especially in the face of death?

        Is leadership possible when you can't change injustice? Can a community hold fast to what's right in a world that's so wrong?

        These are good questions for our time and place.

        They come to us from another time and another place, in an author's mind. I've just been reading A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines.

        It is a modest yet moving story about a plantation schoolteacher in a 1940s Louisiana town. He is asked to teach a young man sentenced to death how to be a man. But in reality, the teacher must forge his own way toward manhood and leadership.

        The book is the talk of the town.
       

After Jim Crow

        Hundreds of adults and students throughout the Cincinnati area are reading and discussing the book for “On the Same Page,” a community-wide book club sponsored in part by The Cincinnati Enquirer and Cincinnati.Com. Other sponsors include Cincinnati Public Schools, Mayor Charlie Luken's office, Cincinnati magazine and public libraries in Cincinnati, Hamilton County and in Boone and Kenton counties in Kentucky.

        In this book, slavery is long over but its vestiges, blatant racism and smoldering resentment, remain.

        Blacks invited into white people's homes still use the rear entrance. Whites patronize blacks without even looking into their faces. There is fear on both sides: whites fear education and ambition among blacks; blacks fear what may happen if they step out of line.

        The hero is reluctant teacher Grant Wiggins. He struggles on nearly every page with whether to stay in such a dehumanizing environment or whether to seek a new life, a career and some respect elsewhere.

        As he struggles to do a job he doesn't really want and isn't sure he believes in, he blurts out sentiments that shed light on an inner pain that few men, few black men at least, would admit to feeling.

        Through Mr. Wiggins, we see that many black men, even professionals, were tremendously hemmed in by the menial roles that whites assigned them. They dared not object to their blunted ambitions, though.

        That wreaked havoc with their sense of self, of manhood.

        Indeed, in the decades since slavery, since Jim Crow, since the time described in this book, many black men still have problems realizing their manhood.
       

A man's job

        Like the teacher, they are socially traumatized, in their minds unable to protect the women in their lives — their mothers, their lovers — and their families from the evil outside. In their communities, they aren't confident they can be the pillars or the role models, leaders capable of bolstering their friends and relations.

        What is the evil outside? It is the same today as in A Lesson Before Dying, the overpowering oppression of institutionalized, codified, societal discrimination.

        Psychologists tell us that feelings of powerlessness can be strong enough to push anyone — black or white — into fleeing from pain, into rationalizing abandonment of loved ones and responsibilities. Why should I stay, some men ask themselves, if I'm not doing “a man's job” for my family or my community?

        In A Lesson, I learned that such vulnerability requires nearly superhuman strength to overcome. It requires more than manhood. Several of the men in the discussion group I attended Tuesday confirmed the lesson.

        It's not an excuse, they said. It's just a fact of life.

        Denise Smith Amos can be reached at 768-8395, or e-mail damos@enquirer.com
       

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