E rnest J. Gaines was born on a Louisiana plantation in 1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. At age fifteen, Gaines moved to Vallejo, California, where he joined his parents, who had moved there during World War II. In Vallejo, Gaines discovered the public library. Since he could not find many books written about African-Americans, he decided to write his own. A few years later, he enrolled at San Francisco State University and took writing courses at Stanford University. Gaines published published several novels on the topic closest to his own heart: the black communities of Louisiana. The most successful of these was A Lesson Before Dying, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and, in 1993, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. This book highlights the tension inherent in the lives of African-Americans during the 1940s with the Jim Crow laws, the racial segregation and racial violence. At that time, the Black’s community could be compared to christian community at its beginning: discriminated, oppressed and relinquished. Nevertheless there is a not insignificant different: christians people had a Messiah to save them, Jesus. Blacks had nobody, but they tried to find one. Gaines shows us how simple guy can become an icon of hope. But can we say even so that Jefferson is a Christ-like figure? In one hand, we’ll see all the historical and biblical clues which are scattered all along the book, then we’ll study the wish of the Black community to find a Messiah.

To begin, the main and the most important clue that we notice at the first reading because it’s the theme of the book, is that Jeff, an poor orphan was executed for something that he didn’t do. Indeed, Jefferson was wrongfully accused of robbing and murdering a white man and sentenced to death. This situation shows him as a martyr, in the same way as Saint Stephen, dead by stoning, Saint Blandina, impaled by a wild steer or Saint Lawrence “grilled” to death and in the same way as