A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines Page B

of, if Joe had lost? Even the preacher got into it. “Let us wait. Let us wait, children. David will meet Goliath again.” And everyone told everyone else: “They go’n meet again. Just wait.”
    And we waited and waited, and finally the big fight did come. There were two radios in the quarter, one at the Williams’s house, down the quarter, another at the McVays’, up the quarter. I was down the quarter. I was seventeen then. I was not the youngest, nor surely the oldest. I was just one. Praying and hoping for the only hero we knew. There was much noise, much talking, while the people waited for the fight to begin. Once the announcer said that the fighters were in the ring, everyone became silent without anybody having to tell them to do so. There were small children there too, but even they had quit playing and were silent. We held our breath, remembering the first fight. Could God let it happen again? Would He let it happen again?
    Then it was over. And there was nothing but chaos. People screamed. Some shot pistols in the air. There were mock fights. Old men fell down on the floor, as Schmeling did, and had to be helped up. Everybody laughed. Everybody patted everybody else on the back. For days after that fight, for weeks, we held our heads higher than any people on earth had ever done for any reason. I was only seventeen then, but I could remember it, every bit of it—the warm evening, the people, the noise, the pride I saw in those faces.
    Now, while I stood there listening to the old men in their praise of Jackie Robinson, I remembered something else. The little Irishman. I was at the university then. The little Irishman was giving a series of lectures at white universities, but some way or another, our university got him to visit us. How? Only God knows. But we were all gathered in the auditorium—and there stood this little white man with the thick accent, talking to us about Irish literature. He spoke of Yeats, O’Casey, Joyce—names I had never heard before. I sat there listening, listening, trying to remember everything he said. And a name he repeated over and over was Parnell. And he told us how some Irishmen would weep this day at the mention of the name Parnell. Parnell. Parnell. Parnell. Then he spoke of James Joyce. He told about Joyce’s family, his religion, his education, his writing. He spoke of a book called
Dubliners
and a story in the book titled “Ivy Day in the Committee Room.” Regardless of race, regardless of class, that story was universal, he said.
    For days after the lecture, I tried to find that book. But it was not in our library and not in any of the bookstores. I went to Mr. Anderson, my literature teacher, and asked him if he knew how I could get a copy. He said he would see what he could do. A week later, he kept me after class and handed me a collection of stories. It was not Joyce’s
Dubliners
but an anthology of short stories, with “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” included as one of them. Mr. Anderson had gotten a professor at the white university to check the book out of his library for him. “He’s a pretty decent fellow,” Mr. Anderson said about the white professor. “Some of them are, you know. And always remember that. Now take care of that book. You can keep it a week. And it had better come back to me in the same condition in which it left. You do understand me, don’t you, Wiggins?”
    I read the story and reread the story, but I still could not find the universality that the little Irishman had spoken of. All I saw in the story was some Irishmen meeting in a room and talking politics. What had that to do with America, especially with my people? It was not until years later that I saw what he meant. I had gone to bars, to barbershops; I had stood on street corners, and I had gone to many suppers there in the quarter. But I had never really listened to what was being said. Then I began to