Jack Butler's "Jujitsu for Christ"--originally published in
1986--follows the adventures of Roger Wing, a white born-again
Christian and karate instructor who opens a martial arts studio in
downtown Jackson, Mississippi, during the tensest years of the
Civil Rights era. Ambivalent about his religion and his region, he
befriends the Gandys, an African-American family--parents A. L. and
Snower Mae, teenaged son T. J., daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, and
youngest son Marcus--who has moved to Jackson from the Delta in
hopes of greater opportunity for their children.As the political
heat rises, Roger and the Gandys find their lives intersecting in
unexpected ways. Their often-hilarious interactions are told
against the backdrop of Mississippi's racial trauma--Governor Ross
Barnett's "I Love Mississippi" speech at the 1962 Ole Miss-Kentucky
football game in Jackson; the riots at the University of
Mississippi over James Meredith's admission; the fieldwork of
Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; and
the lingering aura of Emmett Till's lynching.Drawing not only on
William Faulkner's gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County but also
on Edgar Rice Burroughs's high-adventure Martian pulps, "Jujitsu
for Christ" powerfully illuminates vexed questions of racial
identity and American history, revealing complexities and
subtleties too often overlooked. It is a remarkable novel about the
civil rights era, and how our memories of that era continue to
shape our political landscape and to resonate in contemporary
conversations about southern identity. But, mostly, it's very
funny, in a mode that's experimental, playful, sexy, and disturbing
all at once.Butler offers a new foreword to the novel. Brannon
Costello, a scholar of contemporary southern literature and fan of
Butler's work, writes an afterword that situates the novel in its
historical context and in the southern literary canon.
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