“Whole state of Missippi ain’t eem there. Ain’t no such of a place. Cross over the Alabama line in the middle of the night, road don’t change, woods don’t change, dirt don’t change, night don’t change. Ain’t no such of a thing, Missippi. It’s all just in yo imagination.”—Wise Man, in Jujitsu for Christ
And so we begin the inaugural virtual meeting of the PrettyFakes book club, first announced back in January, on Jack Butler’s underrated 1986 tour-de-force, Jujitsu for Christ.
The structure of this discussion will be of necessity pretty loose; I’ll post some opening remarks here, and then you guys are free to have at it in the comments. Or, if you have a blog of your own, you can of course feel free to post your thoughts there, and provide a link for us in the comments section (or e-mail me and I’ll append it to the bottom of this post). It’s my hope that our discussion will span several days, with people contributing more than just once as we debate and discuss the book’s merits (or flaws, as some may want to argue).
I’ve written about Butler a couple of times before, and so my affection for his work is no secret. I first heard about Jujitsu at a meeting of the Mississippi Philological Association back in the late 1990s. A friend of mine was giving a very fine paper about Walker Percy, and I’d gone to her panel, which she shared with a scholar from Arkansas who was speaking on this writer who wrote insane, funny postmodern Southern novels about comic books and race and religion and Mississippi history and who also wrote S/F novels about vampires on Mars, and who seemed to be deliberately blurring the lines between those allegedly disparate genres. I couldn’t believe I’d never heard of this writer whose work seemed so perfectly attuned to my interests before, and so set about trying to track down his novels, which were, mysteriously, out of print. They still are, and this is a crime.
It’s impossible to talk about the book in any sensible way without giving away the ending, so if you haven’t finished it yet but you plan to, maybe now’s a good time to stop reading. I had a professor once who told me that reading for enjoyment of the plot was a waste of time. I didn’t agree with him, and I take a certain comfort in the fact that he found another job that suited his disposition and prejudices better than teaching novels to people. Not that plot is the only thing. But it’s something.
But I digress. The twist ending, of course, is that the narrator of the novel is Marcus Gandy, a.k.a Bluejay, the adult version of the young, light-skinned, comic-book obsessed African American boy who, along with the rest of his family, befriends Roger. The book, then, really takes at least two readings, or at least a reading and an additional, selective perusal, to really get a lot of what’s going on, to explain the way in which the narrative switches at moments of crisis from a melodic, third-person omniscient narration to a first-person, slangy black vernacular. And of course, our knowledge of Marcus’s role as narrator means that what we’ve been reading, simply, as Roger Wing’s story also becomes a story about Marcus’s attempt to understand his white “father,” his history and culture and biography, those things that made him who he was and how they helped make Marcus who he is.
As he tells us at the end, he wanted to tell his “own story,” but what this novel reveals is the impossibility of isolating your own narrative, of telling a story that’s purely your own, for every story is made up of other stories, and of all kinds of other stories: not just the stories of other people’s lives, but history (histories, more like it), comic books, science-fiction, the Bible, and so on. Says Marcus at novel’s end, “Sounds in yo head run from Shakespeare to shit, the voice in which you cast your narrative must run the self-same scale, or fail to live.” One of the most important ideas Butler is getting at here, I think, is that all these different stories are in a sense equivalent, at least when it comes to constructing a self for yourself—that knowing who you are, or maybe creating who you are, is as much a matter of Batman and Robin as it is Bible and Religion or Barnett-comma-Ross and Race. All those voices, all those stories, are important, they all must be synthesized together somehow in order to imagine another way to live. It doesn’t matter that Batman and the Martian Manhunter and The Twilight Zone aren’t “Southern,” either, in the way that certain kinds of religion or race relations are typicaly considered “Southern.” Butler’s novel demolishes the idea that a Southern self is somehow strictly made up of elements from a group of internally diverse and arbitrarily selected states that are mystically closed off from the rest of the nation, from the rest of the world, from global capitalism and consumer culture. As Wise Man wisely notes, geographical boundaries are meaningless—Mississippi is a state of mind, and Marcus’ tale is in some ways an attempt to find a way to make Mississippi mean something other than it has, if that’s possible. It may not be.
And it’s clear that this is what Marcus is after: some new terms by which he can know himself and his life, a new vocabulary full of words that have been thoroughly redacted in the only dictionaries available in 1960s-era Mississippi, “A home for a way of loving, a territory for a way of seeing.” This is what Marcus dreams of when he narrates his vision of a Mississippi summer so hot that it burns away the illusions that blind white and black Mississippians to their common humanity. Thus the frequent digressions, the snatches of song that burst through the surface of the story, the unwillingness to move forward at times, become a formal reflection of one of the novel’s central themes, the longing to get out of the narrative you’re trapped in and into another one—but what will that new narrative look like? Mr. Blake understands heaven, but he can’t find a way to talk about that new understanding in a way that will mean anything to anyone (32-35). Eleanor Roosevelt Gandy imbibes too much of the old rhetoric and goes from looking like a real girl to looking like “a child’s old pickaninny doll, abused and balding and indestructibly round-cheeked”—she has made herself into the stereotype that Mississippi already sees her as being anyway. Or to quote Wise Man again, “I never seen a white man had mo than two opinions, and he a try to make em do for everything.”
One of the things that I love about this novel is how it lays bare the processes by which certain ideologies of “Southernness” are created and disseminated. We see them in a state of flux, being debated and bandied about, assumed and then shed, by various characters—the club’s discussion of “the glory of the Southern woman,” racist pundits who re-make the news to suit their own ideal of themselves as a persecuted minority and who decry anyone who would speak up for racial equality as a “communist” and therefore un-American, Marcus’s attempt to split “Mississippian” into “Whippissippian” and “Blappissippian,” and so on. In his close examination of the mutations and transformations of this rhetoric, Butler makes clear that what many would take to be a natural or essential aspect of something like “the mind of the South” is not just a construction but a construction with a particular political ideology behind it. As Marcus notes in the “Summertime” passage, “Something has made your world and not particularly with you in mind.”
Well, look, I could go on about this for days. You might feel like I have already, and I haven’t even gotten to Roger’s unforgivable encounter with Eleanor Roosevelt, or the bizarrely homoerotic Klan rally. Gorjus and Wah and I are planning at some point in the near-flung future to do complete annotations for the book—popular culture, MS history, and Jackson landmarks. And really, I could spend the whole day just going through the book and picking out my favorite lines. Or maybe it would be easier to pick out the lines that I don’t like, because there aren’t many. But I want to hear about what you folks have to say. So—go!
“This is a job for Captain Mississippi, he thought, slipping the jacket on. ‘Shit on you, Captain Mississippi,’ he said aloud, answering himself.”
Don’t forget to read Gorjus on Leon and the Blackhawks, plus our final summing up.
Woo!! The day is here! I have so, so many thoughts about the book, which is such a dense work (but still readable). The first one I wanted to get to was a dialogue me & Prof. had via e-mail about [SPOILERS] the Destruction of Eleanor.
Gorjus: Prof., I find it terrifying how—in the rush to transform herself to something acceptable, something white—Eleanor actually destroys the pretty little girl that she is. In her (failed) attempt to destroy her blackness/become white, she actually destroys herself physically and mentally. How does this, then, foreshadow Marcus’ later transformation to “white,” when we learn he can “pass” as Roger’s son?
Prof.: I think that’s just right—the movie star magazines Eleanor obsesses over, the newspaper column she keeps in the bottom of her drawer, all that stuff is evidence that her idea of what it is to be “beautiful” equals “white.” The only real beauty acknowledged in the culture is that of white women.
“When it grow back, it a be pink,” she says after rubbing herself raw with Drano. And yeah, in doing it she robs herself of her identity, her will, her agency, her self.
As to Marcus, it seems that he has been trying to live on one side of the race line or another—he “is” black, but then he “accidentally” becomes white, and then he switches back and forth—and perhaps what he’s after is some way of being both at once, or of being something new entirely.
Eleanor Roosevelt’s tragedy is caused because she knows no way out of that either/or binary. So yeah, I think it’s very much connected to Marcus’ later confusions.
Gorjus: Also—her name seems illustrative. Eleanor Roosevelt famously resigned from the Daughters of the American Revolution when that group wouldn’t allow the legendary singer Marian Anderson to perform at a theatre it owned (as discussed more fully in the comments here). President Roosevelt was of course one of the principal movers and shakers into creating a modern day society—a New Deal—that the Great Society of (roughly) Marcus & Eleanor’s time would struggle with.
Yet that hopefulness is destroyed by a culture fixated on white beauty and prominence. Our Eleanor is left as little more than wreckage, a unforeseen (and uncounted) casualty in the Civil [Rights] War.
Does her name also prefigure later events? She’s named for a white woman known not for her physical beauty, but for her intelligence, compassion, and integrity. The physical, then, is shown to be a red herring. Does that quiet guide towards spirituality also echo Roger’s transformations towards racial equality because of his religious beliefs? Echo the dominant Christian forces in many Civil Rights groups like the SCLC and CORE?
Very interesting stuff, Gorj. I love the connection between ER Gandy and the original ER, and I think that’s a really good point about ER being an icon of …femininity, maybe?...who’s known for attributes other than the physical. I don’t want to divert the conversation away from Eleanor Roosevelt too quickly, but I wanted to address what you describe as “Roger’s transformations towards racial equality because of his religious beliefs” (Which was totally not what the substance of your comment was about, and so this is just an amplification of what you said, not a critique). The thing is, I think Butler (or Marcus—authorial agency here is tricky) is interested in the ways that religious belief, no matter how firmly held, isn’t enough to produce the kind of compassion that Roger grows into by the end of the novel.
After all, Jimmy McMorris is so good a Christian that he becomes a preacher, and yet The Mississippi Trap, to paraphrase Grant Morrison, has him held firm, keeps him from seeing African Americans as human beings. For Roger, it’s those up-close-and-personal experiences with the physicality of black people that lays the groundwork for his later transformation, or that works in tandem with his religion to effect it, or something—I’m not sure. Anyway, I’m talking about all those scenes where Roger reflects on Mr. Gandy’s smell or on the sense-memories of being with them. It’s that knowing them on a specifically physical level that keeps the rhetoric from taking hold of him, that keeps him from being caught in the whirlpool (pg 89, I’m thinking of). Note how physical the melted-Mississippi of the “Summertime” chapter is—how it’s all about sweat and spit and various other bodily fluids. Without that sort of knowledge, the language of religion doesn’t have anything to grab hold of—love your neighbor, sure, but first you have to see them as a neighbor.
All this, of course, makes that scene between Roger and Eleanor all the more painful.
Ok. So you knew I wouldn’t just listen in.
There are so many different things to talk about. Here are some I want you to comment on: Passing (“You can’t know how in this pale life of mine I am all the time seeing the bright pictures of that other that I once thought I was glad to be free of.” Larsen), Masturbation (Is it a picture of the internal southern struggle between moving forward as a culture and looking backward.) Finding identity (“I was righteous, I was angry, I was guilty, I was just beginning to realize what I had done to my past, myself” p 205), All the names, Can we ever leave home?, Authentic Faith (e.g., Mr. Blake)
The first quote you included reminds me of a quote from a sermon by Ralph Abernathy during the 1966 era Selma voter rights project. He was telling the story of a sharecropper and plantation owner. The sharecropper had met the Freedom marchers. The sharecropper had called the owner by his first name, John. “They have told us, John, that I am just as good as you and that you are just as good as I am. And I want you to tell Ann that from now on it isn’t going to be any Mr. John or Miss Ann. In fact it’s not going to be Miss anything. It’s not even going to be Mississippi. It’s going to be plain old ‘sissippi.” Abernathy went on to say, “Negroes are not afraid.”
The idea or ideal of the South, the Old South, the southern woman, the state of mind, (Have you ever read Cash’s “The Mind of the South?”). Is there any substance or value here, or is it a mirage? Does wise man say that this is something you carry around in your mind and that it is you, or is he saying, wake up there is no South, there is no Mississippi. That’s something that is not real. It never was real. This is the difference I see between the writings of Toni Morrison and the writings of Eudora Welty.
Morrison says, “The Old South was so bad that I’d rather kill my own child than send her back there.” Welty say, “Ah.h.h wa-a-as-sn’t that nice.” I realize that this is a strong statement, but I have been coming to it over the course of all this reading I’ve been doing.
I’m not closed minded here, I’m listening. What does Butler say? Roger left for California.
For more modern (dare I say pomo) constructions of Southerness try
Smith and Cohn, Look Away!
Jones and Monteith, South to a New Place
And, of course, to balance out Cash, you should check out C Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History
I read this book awhile ago (thanks for the loan, Prof), so my memories of specific details aren’t too clear—although they’re coming back to me as I read these posts. I have two thoughts based on Gorjus’s and BRD’s comments:
1. Gorjus, you ask a really important question about the differences in Eleanor Roosevelt Gandy’s and Marcus Gandy’s “transformations” into whiteness, which differences are, of course, striking. So at first, I thought, maybe the difference is in the way that ERG tried to induce whiteness in a completely, painfully, immediately external manner. MG, on the other hand, went through a process as long as his childhood, a primarily internal process, to develop the particular racial identifications he has at the end of the book.
But then I thought, well, no, it can’t be that simple, because MG was born with certain attributes that perhaps ensured that his racialized self would be different from his sister’s—his light skin, primarily.
And then I realized, ah no, here’s the thing: gender. Which doesn’t erase the other contributing factors, but maybe frames them. ERG, as a girl, lives a primarily home-bound existence, while Marcus is free-er (freer? That just looks wrong) to explore and find a broader variety of experiences. Perhaps as a result (although i don’t want to make this into a simple, linear argument), Marcus has actual, complex, three-dimensional models of white men. ERG has only the one-dimensional, mute, idealized female models (literally) in the magazines. So really, how could she possibly know that there’s anything more to whiteness than lighter skin and straighter hair?
2. BRG, I love the Ralph Abernathy anecdote. It made me think of the Last Poets’ piece, “Niggers Are Scared of Revolution.” Put those two texts side by side, and you have perhaps a neat summary of either a) the trajectory of the Civil Rights/post-Civil Rights era, or b) the contrast between southern (which, it has been posited, doesn’t really exist, although i need a whole lot of time to chew on that one) and northern African American radicalism (were King, Abernathy, et al radical? I think so. Radicalism doesn’t require violence,right? Maybe I should check my dictionary).
Excellent comments, all. Sue, I must wholeheartedly disagree that there was no Southern radicalism. Rosa Parks’ actions in 1955 were hundreds of times more dangerous then marching in the streets en masse ten and twenty years later. In Mississippi, trying to vote got you killed, and trying to register to go to USM got Clyde Kennard a sentence to Parchman for a staged crime. Even simple, everyday acts in the South were explosive and courageous stances against racism and prejudice (as in Rev. Abernathy’s anecdote about the refusal to use honorary titles in everyday life). And no, radicalism does not require violence. In fact, Dr. King expressly taught that it must not; passive resistance, as informed by Mr. Gahndi, rejected violence in all its forms in order to achieve a higher truth. Note part of this pledge signed by volunteers for sit-in demonstrations to protest segregated eating facilities in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963: “Refrain from the violence of fist, tongue, or heart.”
Sue, you also pull out a fantastic angle regarding gender and identity. You’re right: Marcus at least had a superhero/ideal he could transform into. Eleanor had no such thing; the four most prominent women superheroes of her time either turned invisible, wore fishnet stockings and had a voice so shrill it could deafen you, could shrink out of sight and annoy you, or actually wore bracelets that were symbols and relics of her earlier bondage to abusive men (although some might argue that is, in itself, a reclamation of power) (Invisible Girl, Black Canary, the Wasp, and Wonder Woman, respectively—all white).
In making a incredibly strong point—that even minorities have those they oppress. John Lennon wrote and recorded “Woman is the N——- of the World” which strongly made this point (“We insult her everyday on TV/And wonder why she has no guts or confidence . . . Woman is the slaves of the slaves . . . We make her paint her face and dance”). This dovetails strongly with your points.
(you’ll see later today how much I rely upon the mythos of popular comics of the day to examine the ideals of the kids in J4C).
Woo! Good stuff. First, BRD, to defend Welty from your scurrilous slander (kidding. Sort of). You compare Morrison’s take on the “Old South” to Welty’s. But Welty rarely wrote about the “Old South.” In “The Burning,” a few other stories. And when she wrote about a modern planter family trying to keep the OS alive, as in Delta Wedding, they come in for what seems to be to be a pretty harsh critique for their narcissism, their insularity, for the hypocrisy and violence with which they treat their black laborers. It’s a subtle critique, maybe, and of course made all the tricker by the fact that Welty does love the Fairchilds, as she loves all her characters. So I think Welty’s treatment of Southern history, of race, etc, is a lot more complex than you suggest here (though plenty of people lobbed the same complaints at her—Diana Trilling reviewed DW and said Welty was living in “cloud-cuckoo land.” And a recent critic has said that we should consider Welty one of the “great bigoted modernists,” along with Faulkner/Hemingway et al. I don’t buy that idea, necessarily, but even that indicates a more nuanced engagement with the ideas of race/identity/etc that you mention. And of course, Morrison on Welty: “Eudora Welty writes about black people in a way that few white men have ever been able to write. It’s not patronizing, not romanticizing—it’s the way they should be written about.”
To tie your question about the “mind” of the South in w/ Sue’s question about whether “the South” exists—just because “the South” is a construction, that doesn’t mean it’s not real, that it doesn’t exist. Race is a fiction. But race exists. Cash wrote The Mind of the South, but as various folks have pointed out, what he was describing was the mind of the white North Carolinian South—that he’s overextrapolating from his local sample. There are a lot of different “Souths,” and people have had a tendency in the past to treat only one South as the “real” South, and the other things as not Southern at all. Anyway, so just because “Mississippi” is in Roger’s or Marcus’s imagination, that doesn’t mean it’s not real to them, that it doesn’t affect their lives in real, material ways.
Sue, your ideas about the role of gender in the way that Marcus and ERG experience race is really persuasive. One of the only times that she does venture out of her domestic sphere, she walks in on an intimate moment with Roger and June—June, whom, the novel tells us, is the very embodiment of standard-issue pretty white 1960s-era Mississippi girl: “True, she was a freckle-faced girl with a pug nose, but …. if you were white and lived in Mississippi and didn’t want to marry a freckle-faced pug-nosed girl, you were in trouble” (64).
I also have to tag in on whether Mississippi was “real” or not. I appreciate the philosophical evaluation, but I often look at things from a legal aspect. Actions which in other states—even in the South—would have been common or everyday could get you killed in Mississippi or Alabama. The Freedom Rides illustrate this point, among many, many other terrible events. Mississippi and Alabama (among several other states to varying degrees) were separate societies where the laws and beliefs of the rest of the country did not apply.
Even our newspapers were infamously biased; as is tacitly noted in the book, there was nowhere to turn for truth of any kind. In response to this media “whiteout,” Medgar Evers and others started the Mississippi Free Press in the 1960’s. At one point, a judge actually held Mr. Evers in contempt for criticizing (in print)the jailing of Clyde Kennard (discussed above). Can you imagine that hapenning today? The case had to be litigated to the state supreme court. Mississippi wasn’t just real, it was . . . too real.
Yeah, but how do I know that what’s blue to me is blue to you? Maybe what I think is blue you think is green. Kidding. That’s a really good point on the legal aspect of things—the concept of “Mississippi” as various characters in this novel see it may be imaginary, may have nothing to do with the real lives of people who live in the social/political/geographical space called “Mississippi.” But that space is abso-darn-lutely real in very physical, material ways. (Ditto for race—yes, it’s a social construction, but that’s not something you can explain to the man at the poll tax station). And of course, in some ways, that legal system has not only “real” effects on people, but also serves to perpetuate particular ideals of who is a real “Mississippian”, etc.
Gorjus, just to clarify, I referred to both southern and northern radicalisms. I think my syntax in my way may there have gotten.
Prof, you’re totally blowing my mind on the whole blue/green thing.
Loved Sue’s thoughts. Need to think about all more than I can do in workaday world. bell hook, my new favorite person, says that feminism and the fight against racism are inextricable. The interweaving though is pretty complicated as was played out in the leadership battles of SNCC and SCLC. For the black “Daughters of Freedom”, the hierarchy of priorities in that struggle for freedoms were clear. . . i.e. they couldn’t begin the feminist struggle until race issues were settled a bit. (Now, though,—digression—the priorities are interestingly different, with, I think, black females having an advantage in the workplace over their male counterparts.)
I will have to think about the Scared of Revolution reference.
Re: non-violence, I think that it is in fact the only radical position, the rest being pretty standard issue.
Fury, for clarification about the real or not real south, I guess I’m saying that it is home that is real. Everyone has home. Some homes are similar but none identical. It is illusion to try and establish categories based on “red clay”. The categories don’t bring us together, but drive us apart.
For those interested in Butler’s take on the reality and persistence of “the South,” I’ve uploaded a pdf of his essay “Still Southern After All These Years,” from The Future of Southern letters, to yousendit—click here to download it.
Thanks for the PDF of that article.
[...] Club Selection: Jack Butler’s Jujitsu for Christ. [UPDATE: Our discussion has begun! Click here to join in.] Now, what do you need to know about Jack Butler before you read this book? Maybe nothing. [...]
[...] o a cross between “Thomas Pynchon and Lewis Nordan” –Prof. Fury looks at Marcus’ quest –Gorjus talks about Leon’s quest to form a superhero team like the Blackhawks [...]
In case anyone’s still interested, Jujitsu for Christ is supposed to be reprinted this year, 2007. Keep an eye out.