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  • Bending Toward Justice: A Southern Historical Novel
  • Cushing Strout (bio)
Magic Time by Doug Marlette (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 480 pages. $25)

Such historians as Taylor Branch have paid close attention to the great civil rights movement of our time. The late Doug Marlette joins their company by celebrating it in this novel with a keen sense of history. His story is centered on a fictional but credible second trial of an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan for the murder of four people in the firebombing in 1965 of a Baptist church in Shiloh, Mississippi.

Magic Time is a first-class example of a southern historical novel that integrates actual events and times with fictional characters, while respecting the rights of both fiction and history. There are no postmodern tricks with real characters and events in the fashion of E. L. Doctorow and Philip Roth. The action involves Carter Ransom, son of an admired judge, Mitchell Ransom. Carter is a childhood friend of an African American, Elijah Knight, who becomes a dedicated and courageous nonviolent protester in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee ( sncc ).

Carter leaves Troy, his hometown in Mississippi, for New York, where he earns his spurs as a reporter and becomes a widely read columnist. He has no illusions about American “national innocence,” said by pundits in the novel to have been lost when a Pakistani bomb explodes in the the Institute of Modern Art in New York; and he has “a respect for the irony of history.” In both respects it is as if Carter has learned from the distinguished southern historian C. Vann Woodward.

At first Carter is just a reporter of the movement, watching the sit-ins at a restaurant and the march on the local courthouse in Troy. To the dismay of his father Carter is gradually drawn into sympathy with the protesters; but he only commits himself to the cause through his love for Sarah Solomon, a Jewish girl at Barnard College who is an active member of sncc . Carter transcends his detachment to join the historic march from Selma to Montgomery and hears Martin Luther King’s great speech in the shadow of the capitol: “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” The tragic phase of the novel concerns Sarah’s fate in the racial conflict and its traumatic effect on Carter.

Another major narrative line in the novel involves Carter’s efforts to uncover the truth about a klansman’s testimony that Judge Ransom, in the first trial for the firebombing of a church, had concealed evidence to protect a friend, another hit man for the Klan. This mystery plot is connected to the rumor that Carter’s father had an affair with the klansman’s wife. In this respect the novel may seem to suggest a conventional legal thriller with a scandal as its secret; but, instead, when the mystery is revealed, it sheds light on the character and code of the judge and plays a part in reconciling the son with his father.

Judge Ransom (who is reminiscent of the judge in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men) has busts of [End Page xxxviii] Lincoln, Jefferson, and Cicero on his rolltop desk; and at the judge’s memorial service his son reads one of his father’s “sacred texts,” the speech that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., delivered in 1884 to commemorate Memorial Day. The Supreme Court justice, wounded three times as a Union officer, felt that in their youth his generation was fortunate to have had their hearts “touched with fire.”

Marlette portrays a wide spectrum of southern characters, including thuggish rednecks, the leaders and the led of the Klan, black protesters, and members of the local establishment of lawyers and businessmen. The author is a prize-winning satirical cartoonist with a sharp sense of humor. He can be funny (“Ah, Mississippi, where they write more books than they read”), but he does not caricature any of his important characters. In a surprising way he is even able to grant a remnant of pathetic dignity to the hate-mongering Klan leader with...

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