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Jujitsu for Christ
- University Press of Mississippi
- Chapter
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jujitsu for christ You got a black voice and a white voice, Nephew said. A kind voice and a cruel voice. Everybody does, I said. This is a divided country. I want the voices to come together in one whole voice. Everybody don’t, Nephew said. You don’t know yo fellow man. I don’t know about no country, but you sho need making whole. A glad voice and a mourning voice, he said. [44.204.204.14] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:43 GMT) 3 Roger Once, in a place called Jackson, Mississippi, there lived a young man named Roger Wing. He lived in what had been a laundromat and was now Roger Wing’s Studio for Meditation and Self-defense. The building sat back of an overpass in a tangle of narrow alley ways. Would-be customers had to turn sharply just at the base of the overpass, then maneuver their fat Buicks carefully past dilapidated apartments and barbecue joints with walls of corrugated tin. Either this inconvenience, or the black teenagers staring from the stoops of the apartments in summertime, had driven most of the white business away. Roger’s father had died when Roger was almost eight, and, after a year, Roger’s mother had moved them from the countryside, where she found it almost impossible to make a living, into a small town near the capital, Clinton. Grant had stabled his horses there once, in the chapel of the little Southern Baptist college, Mississippi College. Later, there had been a race riot. This was in September of 1875, and it started during the Republican barbecue. Over a thousand Negroes were involved, and there were casualties on both sides. How it got started was never made clear, but all that fall, General J. Z. George, the Democratic campaign chairman, was carrying out a plan of intimidation against blacks. Rifle clubs drilled near black registration centers, with real rifles and live ammunition. The idea was to win the state back from its Reconstruction government, and it worked. The riot lasted five days, but despite a request from Governor Adelbert Ames, Grant refused to send in any troops, stating that the nation was tired of war. In this he was correct. It was a precedent that later generations of Mississippians were to find very useful: no matter how preposterous your position is, just stay in their face until they get tired of you and go away. Nothing had happened in Clinton since then,although they were still pissed about the horses. Roger and his mother had not lived there six months before she remarried. The man she married had come down from Indiana when his plant relocated. He had three sons by a previous marriage, two of whom were 4 Jujitsu for Christ older than Roger. The oldest had been Rookie of the Year for the Dodgers. He was the toast of his new home town,although he had had only one good season since his rookie year, and that one had not been quite as good. The next eldest graduated and went into local real estate, a thriving business, since Clinton was rapidly becoming a suburb of Jackson.His income was going up twenty percent a year, and so was his weight. The youngest of all was determined to become a major-league shortstop. Roger sometimes thought that his mother had chosen this new husband for the sheer relief of it. His natural father had been bad-tempered, sentimental, cruel and loving, and had died in a pick-up truck. This man, his stepfather, was the floor manager of his plant, he went to church, he took the bass boat out to what would become Barnett Reservoir on Sunday afternoons, he drank a beer now and then, but Roger could not tell which of these activities he preferred, could not tell what the man wanted out of life, or even if he did want anything from it. Roger’s daddy had frightened the wits out of his son, and had kept his wife so angry that she had paid little attention to the boy. In his new family, Roger found himself at once accepted and ignored, like a new rock in a shallow creek. His mother was preoccupied with her new life, which she perceived as a step up the social ladder (carpeting and central air and tv and bermuda grass instead of a screen porch and a window fan and a hound...