Jack Butler soaked Jujitsu for Christ in the modern American myths of superheroes.
Roger and Marcus “patrol” as Captain Mississippi and Bluejay, explicitly patterned after Batman and Robin, but quieter references are made throughout the novel to other superheroic myths, much as in Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay. Chabon’s book can be read and enjoyed without knowing its “secrets,” but comic book fans take a special thrill in recognizing the paralells to comic and escape artist Jim Steranko (and, accordingly, Mister Miracle) in the exploits of the Escapist.
As in Kavalier and Clay, the subtle allusions in Jujitsu for Christ to comic books enrich the book and provide greater insight into the characters. Jack sets up Leon as a possible militant foil for T.J.; Roger trains him, and his ultimate confrontation with Leon is a turning point in the book. Leon’s aspirations of glory are based—like those of Roger, Marcus, and Eleanor—on popular myths and superheroes.
Leon’s idea was The Black Shadow League . . . [it] would be a cadre of elite black warriors, like the Blackhawks, with him as the leader.
At 107. In the comics, the Blackhawks were an elite cadre of fighter pilots who fought the Nazi menace during World War II. The team first appeared in Military Comics #1 in 1941, published by Quality Comics (DC Comics would later license the characters), and was created by Will Eisner and Chuck Cuidera.
The team was notable in its international composition: French, Swedish, Dutch, American, Polish, and Chinese. Despite the name of the team, there were no black members—the Blackhawks were named after their planes, not their color. Leon’s team, however, is steeped in color:
The members of The Black Shadow League were black, and they would wear black. They would be invisible in the shadows, like Lamont Cranston.
At 108. Lamont Cranston was the Shadow, an adventurer who had his most success during the heyday of the pulps and serials. A white man dressed all in black, and sometimes appearing to possess the power to fade into shadows, his mantra insinuated omniscience: “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!”
Leon’s scheme falls apart not long after its genesis, and is put to rest by Roger’s disruption of his attempted robbery of the bank. Captured by the police, Leon reveals his identity: the Black Shadow, “a martyr to the cause,” knower of karate, and one who is privy to the true secrets of the white culture. He also attempts to reveal Roger’s true identity—that of a traitor to the white culture, because he has trained Leon:
Great White Ghost teach karate to the Black Shadow. Yo own reject you.
At 164 (emphasis added). Leon has attempted to seize power through emulation of the prevailing white culture: he takes their totems and myths and attempts to make them his own, becoming a Black Shadow, making the Blackhawks black, and actually learning the ways toward physical power and dominance from a white man.
Leon’s attempt to seize power through appropriation fails utterly. He is dragged away by the police:
Leon’s voice dwindled into the hall. Roger heard him shouting something like ha! ha!, as if he were striking blows, and then as Leon shouted again, he realized that was not right. “Hawk-aaa!” Leon was calling out: “Hawk-aaaaaa!” His voice was cut off by a grunt of pain.
At 164. From an advertisement in Detective Comics #322, 1963:
No one comes when Leon cries out. There are no comrades with him in his time of danger—no leather-clad brothers to fight with him against the “bizarre foe” that has captured him. He is the only Black Hawk, the only one who wants to revolt through physical means. Even his cry for help sounds like an attack.
Even at best, Leon’s warcry only summons other people, and only those black people on his side: there are no heroes, gods, or legends for him to invoke, no Shazam, no Kimota. Leon uses the battlecry of a handful of white militants because it’s the only path to power he knows.
The trick is, the battlecry—while unanswered—is recognized: by Roger Wing, Captain Mississippi, the Great White Ghost. There were no black folks around to hear Leon’s call—no members of The Black Shadow League—other than their mentor. Although Leon was breaking the law, Roger only stops him out of instinct, chucking the gun at his head.
The call might not have been for Roger, but he knew it in an instinctive way, he recognized it from memory, he felt it in his guts. That’s why he feels “giddily weak,” his teeth are “chattering,” and he feels “guilty as hell.” His teammate—one of his own—called for help, and he did nothing.
It is at this point Roger begins to fully comprehend that he is no longer “white.” At the dinner table that night, Mr. Gandy boasts how the African-American community can spurn crime as much as the white society:
“We don’t approve of no criminal no more than nobody else. We have one, we catch him and give him to the police.”“Roger is white,” T.J. said, carefully watching his plate.
Mr. Gandy and Marcus both looked at Roger.
At 164. Roger had become like a black person, a member of the black family. His familiarity and friendship had erased the barbed wire the Jackson society strung between whites and blacks. Marcus wonders about the “White faces” he sees on tv, and how “they said bad things about the black faces,” and he realizes that Roger doesn’t fit that mold.
Mr. Gandy answers T.J.’s statement dismissively and decisively. “Yeah, but he’s from here.”
Blackhawk comic background from a history by Mark Waid published in Secret Origins #45, 1989.
Previous posts discussed the Summer Passage in Jujitsu, the start of the PF book club featuring Jujitsu for Christ, and a kickoff of the discussion.
Aw, this is just brilliant. I’ve never been sure what exactly to make of Leon’s Blackhawk battle-cry, and this just nails it. I never knew that the cry was meant to “summon” the B-hawks “to action”; knowing it now just makes Leon seem that much more lonely and pathetic. And your reading of Roger’s reactions as arising from his belief that he’s failed Leon somehow, has betrayed him, is really interesting. I’m persuaded.
Your discussion of these flawed models of resistance brings to mind an interesting passage: in the newspaper column praising Roger’s bravery in stopping the robbery, the racist pundit write, “I salute you, my captain. Mississippi has need of your like.” captain. Mississippi. Captain Mississippi. What I’m saying is, even a superhero identity that started out as a way of resisting the horror of “Mississippi” gets appropriated into it, becomes just another part of it.
This is great!
Bravo. This is very eloquent. As was the article that Butler wrote defining or musing on Southern writing.
From yesterday, Prof Fury – “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).”
What is authentic faith? Butler captures in “Roger Finds Jesus as His Personal Savior” a vignette of repentence/redemption as Roger turns from being “left out” to relationship. This conversion – that does seem to parallel his conversion to Karate earlier – would generally be seen, evangelically speaking, as the premier salvific moment. (I, too could give my testimony.) And I’m not minimizing the authenticity of these turnings or the moumental nature. These signal moments when we are at Canaan’s edge and have taken up stones from the middle of our Jordan and have set them as a memorial in Gilgal.
But enter Mr. Blake and his salvific moment, a rather Tillich-ian experience of the eternal now, and though a different formulation of the picture of conversion, I see it as authentic and essential philosophically and spiritually.
I wonder now (as I have wondered before), what the heck is the soul? How is it brought into being within us and nurtured. My experience would avow the importance of the initial redemptive assertion, but not apart from the potentiality of making every existential moment a soulish one in which we may convert and add, if not a stone, then a pebble to a monument of authentic faith. Or, to honor Butler’s call for knowledgable reference, if Moses said, Ha’azinu, “listen, God is the Rock” before the crossing of the Jordan, he also said, Shema “hear, the Lord is one.” And that more personal call was for all your heart, all your soulishness, all your days, all your doorposts. That is the itch that the Blake thing is trying to scratch. And, frankly, for me, that is also the “rub.”
I guess this sort of relates to this question of ‘realness’: I keep feeling this novel is in some way a ‘novel of ideas’—a label that nearly carries a perjorative connotation—but one that works well anyway. Part of what it plays with is the way that ideas manifest themselves in material conditions (race is not real, segregation is). Part of what Marcus learns is that his hero, tho’ master of the material, fails to triumph over the ideological. All that he accomplishes personally in overcoming the material threats of violence, the material conditions that result from racism, make very little dent in the ideological conditions which dictate the material. So where Roger failed thru Karate, thru crossing the race lines, thru trying to stop the terrible climax, Marcus’ battlefield is the ideological, giving up on his great physical abilities to write a novel about ideas.
Wow. Excellent point. Might it also be further shown that Leon’s physical struggle fails outright? That perhaps the only “real” or actual way to power is to transform oneself?
That spiritual v. physical contrast then brings in interesting paralells to the Bible—i.e., the Old Testament conception of a messiah as a Mosaic freer of the physical self/slaves, as opposed to the New Testament savior who works to free the spiritual self.
I would agree wholeheartedly except with the ‘oneself’ and the ‘spiritual self’. Personal quests, tied up so often in physical struggles, are limited if not doomed; that’s why Marcus, heroically, fights in the field of commonality/community: the ideological. Christ wasn’t just trying to save alot of individual souls, but to change peoples’ ways of thinking about themselves and more importantly of others. But the idea of working physical vs. spiritual realms, biblically, makes perfect sense.
You guys amaze me. I didn’t realize anyone even read the book any more. Every one of you is right on the money. Hell, you’re teaching me things about my book. Salvation is what the book is about, all right. And knowing salvation, how can one abide a twisted and corrupted society, a society that discriminates?
So happy someone is picking up on the comics references.
Speechless. Thanks.
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