Not Your Everyday Hero Firefighters save lives, so they must be heros. Hercules has strength and courage, so he must be a hero. Superman saved a whole city, so he has got to be a hero. What about the everyday hero? The hero that doesn’t expect a reward for their good deed. The hero that does something because it’s just the right thing to do. Who determines who a hero is? Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Tall or short, skinny or fat, and even black or white. In the novel A Lesson Before Dying, the hero of the story cannot fly, he does not have the most strength or courage and he hasn’t saved any lives, much less a whole city. The hero in this story is a black man - charged for murder. Throughout A Lesson Before Dying Jefferson, an uneducated black man, is found guilty of murder for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. A white man died, so the logical reasoning during the 1940’s must be that a black man is guilty. From the moment Jefferson’s defense attorney stated, “‘Why, I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this’,” Jefferson and the majority of all the white men living in the Bayonne, Louisiana believed Jefferson was a hog who was going to die in the chair (Gaines 8). While Jefferson is sitting on death row, Grant Wiggins is sent by Jefferson’s godmother, Miss Emma, to make Jefferson walk to “the chair” as a man - not a hog. During the first few visits by Grant to Jefferson, the responses and actions Jefferson says and does are not very hopeful. Although, in time Jefferson will undergo a transformation. A transformation that started with Jefferson on his knees with his head inside a bag of food eating and stating numerous comments such as, “Hogs don’t give nothing. Hogs don’t leave nothing” (Gaines 83, 139). Jefferson’s transformation to being a hero was shown at the visit when Grant explained what a hero is to him. Grant states,