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Throughout A Lesson Before Dying, there are images that mention heat, warmth, and fire. The most obvious such image is that of the schoolhouse, which can only remain open during the coldest months of the year when everyone in the community donates firewood to power the church heater. In general, Gaines associates warmth and heat with optimism, hope, and inspiration: when Grant is on the point of abandoning Jefferson, he visits his girlfriend Vivian Baptiste and feels the warmth of her body, inspiring him to remain where he is. Conversely, when Jefferson visits his old schoolmaster, Matthew Antoine, he learns that Antoine has lost all the heat in his body—a process that parallels Antoine’s complete lack of optimism about the future of the schoolchildren and the Black community. Hope, then, is the fuel that drives Grant’s community. The fact that Grant continues to arrange for the classroom to be heated suggests that he still has some hope for his children’s futures—perhaps they’ll be able to use their knowledge and education to improve their lives, and the lives of others.
Fire, Heat, and Warmth Quotes in A Lesson Before Dying
The A Lesson Before Dying quotes below all refer to the symbol of Fire, Heat, and Warmth. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 8
Quotes
“We got our first load of wood last week,” I told him. “Nothing changes,” he said. “I guess I’m a genuine teacher now,” I said. He nodded, and coughed. He didn’t seem to want to talk. Still, I sat there, both of us gazing into the fire. “Any advice?” I asked him. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “Just do the best you can. But it won’t matter.”
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Chapter 10
Quotes
“Everything you sent me to school for, you’re stripping me of it,” I told my aunt. They were looking at the fire, and I stood behind them with the bag of food. “The humiliation I had to go through, going into that man’s kitchen. The hours I had to wait while they ate and drank and socialized before they would even see me. Now going up to that jail. To watch them put their dirty hands on that food. To search my body each time as if I’m some kind of common criminal. Maybe today they’ll want to look into my mouth, or my nostrils, or make me strip. Anything to humiliate me. All the things you wanted me to escape by going to school. Years ago, Professor Antoine told me that if I stayed here, they were going to break me down to the nigger I was born to be. But he didn’t tell me that my aunt would help them do it.”
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Fire, Heat, and Warmth Symbol Timeline in A Lesson Before Dying
The timeline below shows where the symbol Fire, Heat, and Warmth appears in A Lesson Before Dying. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...and thinks about all the work he has to do, in particular, finding wood to heat the school. He teaches about twenty families’ children, and he asks each family to send...
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Chapter 8
...Henry Lewis and Amos Thomas, bring a load of wood, carried by a mule, to heat the school through the winter. As they take the wood around the school, Grant continues...
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...years of ignorance in only five and a half months. He said that he was cold, and would always be cold; he added that God would take care of the Black...
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