A Must Read: Stand For Nothing, Fall For Anything

A Gathering of Old Men

Ernest Gaines' text was a thriller. Not in the Michael Jackson (we had him) sense but in the page-turning, will the [half-dead] black men shoot anybody, will the black men shoot themselves, will the sheriff go home sense. Out of the four-books-in-four-days books, this has to be my personal favorite, aside from Mama Day and The Miseducation of the Negro but that's neither here nor there. Maybe all three texts are a tie, I don't know. Suffice this all to say, I really, really liked this book. I liked it better than A Lesson Before Dying but that text was also interesting. The protagonist just seemed a little spoiled and out of touch but that also is neither here nor there. 

Anyway...

So A Lesson Before Dying is about 15-20 black men who [finally] take a stand against the oppression, suppression, and depression they had been dealing with for the [overwhelming] majority of their lives. Living in rural Louisiana, a part of the deep[est] South, racial disharmony is par for the course. Black people in general are used to the manifestation of Caucasian fear. This [past] fear is exhibited in the unfounded near phobia of black culture and black Americans. This [past] fear is the foundational reason white people don't want to live, work, or associate with black people. 

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Anyway, of course white people no longer feel this way except in the case of white flight but this used to be the case in America. So the men finally stand up. The old men gather at the behest of one white woman named Candy. *insert low-class white trash joke* Candy is the daughter of the owner of the plantation and she believes it is her responsibility to take care of the men of the plantation. For the men to stand up, they have to stand up to the white men who are [literally] gunning for them as well as the white woman who coddles them. 

The story is narrated by each of the men who decides to stand up. The men recount stories of when they decided to lie down instead of standing up against the racism that was so familiar. One of the stories is reminiscent of the superhuman strength typically seen in Toni Morrison novels where folks go flying off buildings and such, but again that's neither here nor there. Here's an excerpt:

How can a man beat a machine. No way. Well, my brother did. With them two little mules, he beat that tractor the derrick. Them two little mules did all they could, like my brother did. They knowed it was the end if they couldn't make it. They could hear the machine like everybody else could hear the machine, and they knowed they had to pull, pull, pull if they wanted to keep going. My brother and the mules, the mules and my brother. So they pulled for him and pulled for him and pulled for him, sweating, slipping, falling, but pulling for him. Slobber running from their mouths, the bit cutting their lips, the slobber and blood mixing and falling to the ground, yet they pulled, pulled, pulled in all that mud for him. And yes, they did win. They won. But they wasn't supposed to win. How can flesh and blood and nigger win against white man and machine? 

So they beat him.

That is just one of the stories the men who finally stood up tells. And there are more stories and more emotions and more tears but dammit they stand. They stand even though they don't want to. They stand even though they don't know how to. They stand. They stand when their legs hurt. They stand when they can't even see where their feet are planted. They stand. They stand for themselves. They stand for their wives. They stand for their children. And they continue to stand. And when the text closes, the men continue to stand.