Inside Agitators: Civil Writes in Mississippi: Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ

I want to begin by noting how curious it is that I can find no novels by white southerners that engage the Civil Rights Movement directly—that is, which try to record the awfulness of the period, for example, by creating characters deep enough within the Klan to explore its inner mechanics and complexities or perhaps one associated with Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, somebody at least in a position to have been eyewitness to major events of The Movement; John Grisham’s The Chamber (1994) comes closest to what I’ve been looking for and Minrose Gwin’s The Queen of Palmyra (2009) explores the complicated impact on a family of a father who does the Klan’s “work.” To be sure, a lot depends on how you want to define “The Movement.” If you want to include novels with civil rights—i.e. racial—issues, dozens might qualify, e.g., Elliott Chaze’s Tiger in the Honeysuckle (1965), Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman (1966), Paige Mitchell’s The Covenant (1973), Barry Hannah’s Geronimo Rex (1972), James Whitehead’s Joiner (1972), Lewis Nordan’s Wolf Whistle (1993), and, more recently, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help (2009). The new stories in Barry Hannah’s posthumous Long, Last, Happy (2010) feature as a central character the son of the French photographer who was killed during the Ole Miss riot on September 30, 1962, who has come to Oxford some decades later seeking revenge. These four quite wonderful stories promise a kind of exploration of the entire era that might have engaged The Movement more directly had he lived to write them. Depending on how far you want to go back, a list might include some Faulkner and Hodding Carter’s The Winds of Fear (1944), but that’s stretching it some. Elizabeth Spencer’s The Voice at the Back Door, a visionary novel of 1956 engages all of the issues of The Movement without needing The Movement itself. The novel and its title have formed a sort of ground bass for my meditations on this topic for many years now: the voice that was always there if only white southerners had been listening.

Perhaps such monumental history was, perhaps still is, too monumental; and since the issues are so clearly defined almost nobody will argue against the morality of The Movement or the immorality of racism, it may have seemed difficult to find a theme besides outrage, which seems always a function of clarity rather than of complexity. And though The Movement proper may rightly count voter registration and the desegregation of education and other public facilities among its grand achievements, the lingering effects of racism itself, still potent, renders The Movement, finally, inconclusive, perhaps inconcludable. The freedom riders brought into Mississippi not just their outside agitations but also a quality that white Mississippians of my generation often heard of and even discussed at length in church but which so many of us didn’t really have: a conscience. They brought with them a history different from the one the ancien régime had given us, positing, as the narrator of Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ says, “unknown territory, morally speaking. Defending the black—there were no precedents. No trails” (90). A breakthrough moment occurs during one of the main character’s arguments with his stepfather, which occurs after he has gotten to know well a black family and other black denizens of his laundromat studio and home: “For the first time, when he heard nigger, jigaboo, junglebunny, he saw in his mind not some abstract menacing black man, but people he knew. . . . And he began to rehabilitate his soul” (89). But rehabilitation for that generation was a long process of coming to terms with contradictory histories—moral hearts and heads said one thing, the right thing, while legal and over-trained defensive instincts said quite another—and with the whirlwind to follow. To a certain extent, then, perhaps it’s their rehabilitation that’s inconclusive and inconcludable. Rehabilitation is a very complex creature, and the ersatz hero of Jujitsu for...