Jujitsu for Christ

By Jack Butler and Brannon Costello

Jack Butler's Jujitsu for Christ—originally published in 1986—follows the adventures of Roger Wing, a white, born-again Christian and karate instructor who opens a martial arts studio in downtown Jackson, Mississippi, during the tensest years of the civil rights era. Ambivalent about his religion and his region, he befriends the Gandys, an African American family—parents A. L. and Snower Mae, teenaged son T. J., daughter Eleanor Roosevelt, and youngest son Marcus—who has moved to Jackson from the Delta in hopes of greater opportunity for their children.

As the political heat rises, Roger and the Gandys find their lives intersecting in unexpected ways. Their often-hilarious interactions are told against the backdrop of Mississippi's racial trauma—Governor Ross Barnett's “I Love Mississippi” speech at the 1962 Ole Miss–Kentucky football game in Jackson; the riots at the University of Mississippi over James Meredith's admission; the fieldwork of Medgar Evers, the NAACP, and various activist organizations; and the lingering aura of Emmett Till's lynching.

Drawing not only on William Faulkner's gothic-modernist Yoknapatawpha County but also on Edgar Rice Burroughs's high-adventure Martian pulps, Jujitsu for Christ powerfully illuminates vexed questions of racial identity and American history, revealing complexities and subtleties too often overlooked. It is a remarkable novel about the civil rights era, and how our memories of that era continue to shape our political landscape and to resonate in contemporary conversations about southern identity. But, mostly, it's very funny, in a mode that's experimental, playful, sexy, and disturbing all at once.

Butler offers a new foreword to the novel. Brannon Costello, a scholar of contemporary southern literature and fan of Butler's work, writes an afterword that situates the novel in its historical context and in the southern literary canon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Jan 23, 2013
• ISBN: 9781628469295

Book preview

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

The Way It First Got Published

Fourteen or fifteen years previously, living in southeast Texas, I’d managed sixty pages of manuscript, then stalled. I would peck at the thing from time to time, not really getting anywhere. Now it was 1985. I was an actuarial analyst, had a decent income, was publishing poetry in respectable magazines. August House (my first publisher, which had become a quality regional press) had brought out two collections of poetry and one of short fiction.

I had sent the sixty pages to Norton with a query. They had quite reasonably wanted to see the whole thing before they decided, but I had been looking to jumpstart myself. Then Ted Parkhurst told me that August House (which had primarily published poetry so far and would eventually develop a solid reputation in folklore) would like to try a novel next.

I thought of Jujitsu for Christ (hereafter JJC). I’ve got sixty pages and a synopsis, I said. They offered a thousand up front and a thousand on completion, which seemed like all the money in the world for a piece of writing.

I had severe fits of doubt. I’d called myself getting back into fiction since 1971, having eked out maybe half a dozen short stories in the interim, but the maximum length on those was twenty-five or so hard-won pages.

Now here I had gone and committed myelf to a novel? How the hell did you write a novel when just a few pages cost agonies? How could I possibly come up with a couple of hundred pages or more?

I was forced to throw caution to the winds, as they say. I wrote without the censor, just let it pour. You have no idea how hard it is to do that. The whole time I was deathly afraid I was missing some essential thing, that they would read it and sniff, All very well, Mr. Butler, but it isn’t, well, a novel, you know.

By this time I was working in depreciation at the Arkansas Public Service Commission. We ran depreciation programs on those huge old Star-Trek-type clunkers, but the first personal computers were coming out. Our two-man sub-department had the use of an IBM clone, a Columbia. A whopping 128k. CLI, or Command Line Interface, was all the interface there was. No icons. Must have weighed forty pounds. It was, just barely, portable.

To me it was the light of heaven. No more white-out. No more having to retype a whole chapter because you wanted to move one paragraph.

So I would go in to work at five and write on that Columbia till work started at eight. (Stored the novel on a couple of floppies.) I had a contract, so now I was motivated. My artistic standards apparently take contracts seriously.

I finished in about eight months, which is fast. (The 173 finishing pages of my second novel took twenty desperate days, which I scraped together by combining a Christmas break with vacation. Those are the two fastest spurts I’ve ever had with an extended piece of writing.)

When it came out nobody said anything about it not being, you know, a novel, so I decided novels were long stories you could write however you had to and into which you could inject every thought, quandary, or observation you had, so as long as you could somehow bring it all home.

That notion seems to me to make even more sense now. Who would have the will and patience to finish a novel if he or she couldn’t somehow use it to deal with his or her own actual life?

Which is not to say fiction is necessarily autobiographical. It generally comes from an individual so bears the marks of that individual’s personality, but that isn’t the same thing. All my main characters are invented. I borrow traits, but don’t usually try to capture personalities.

For one thing, real people in fiction are how you saw those people when you were writing. I change my mind too frequently. You run the risk of freezing yourself into outdated or inadequate perceptions. Defending them, even. I’ve occasionally given the names of real people (including myself) to minor characters, but have regretted doing so a number of times. Now I prefer not to use anyone else’s real name in a fiction, and the only human personalities I will take from apparent reality are those of truly despicable beings.

Fiction comes from an individual, but isn’t necessarily the story of that individual. Most people have only one story, their own. We call them normal. If they have two, a public one and a private one, we call them hypocrites. If they have three to twelve, we call them split personalities.

If they have more, we call them story-tellers. But not because something is wrong with them. Actually, fiction is the best way to model experience. You can remember behavior patterns (and thousands of other piquant or worthwhile details) by stitching them into a good story, and then, since you have a way to recognize and recall the patterns, you start noticing them in action.

It’s the feedback essential to true learning.

But I will postpone the discussion of the novel as a portrait of Mississippi in the early sixties. Will just make the point that if stories aren’t honest to start with, when they go wrong, they go disastrously wrong.

The book came out to a blaze of good reviews. I was shocked. Maybe I thought I was really going places now, that it would always be this good. I thought, Now I can get an agent, so I did. He immediately sold my text-and-synopsis for a novel about a vampire on Mars to Atlantic Press for a staggering advance, $8,500. (The novel was the one I finished in twenty days.) He confessed to me only when he quit the agency that it made most of its money charging grandma a reading fee, and only a little from its few famous clients.

JJC was my first exposure to the two-week rule. Either the hoopla pays off within two weeks, or you’re dead in the water. We had printed a run of 5,000. Couldn’t get another one out in time. My moment passed.

Penguin bought the paperback rights though, and a year later brought out a Contemporary American Fiction trade paper that stayed in print till 1994. (Later they did another Contemporary American Fiction trade paper for Living in Little Rock with Miss Little Rock—hereafter LLR.)

John (Groucho) Levy, who at the time thought to become a movie producer, but later went into finance, optioned it a couple of times, $2,500 each time. I wrote six scripts, none of which took. We toured Mississippi looking for locations. In the movies apparently Alligator can’t play Alligator.

The Novel as a Portrait of Mississippi in the Early Sixties

I did a lot of research. I had grown up there, I had lived through the times and in the places described. I put Roger Wing and Patsy Wingo in my school, Clinton High (he would have been a year ahead of me), and they lived in a suburb I was deeply familiar with as its paperboy.

If it’s a murder or riot or demonstration or other historical event and I say it happened, it happened. Ross Barnett really did say those actual words at half-time of the actual Ole Miss/Tennessee game.

No murder in the stands, though, as far as I know.

The subject was the suffering of actual people, so I felt they were owed facts. They were owed respect. To me that didn’t mean writing only sympathetic to black characters. It meant human accuracy. For that, it wasn’t enough to remember the Mississippi of those days. I had to study it too.

I remember feeling peeved that (as I thought of it) I had to write this book. Who wanted to deal with all that pain and furor and confusion, enter the moral lists when one knew oneself as less than perfect? No, I wanted a sane safe world in which I could exercise my talents and be confident of recognition.

Perhaps this strikes you as a selfish attitude for a writer, but think: If a dancer’s career were mangled by political struggle, he or she would resent the crippling no matter where his or her sympathies lay. And you would understand. Why should it be different for writers? We want the same chance to rise to our full potential as any other human. And then it hit me: If I felt that way, how much worse must the feeling be for a black writer?

I decided people were people, the hell with race. Since my subject was racial discrimination and violence, maybe that attitude was ironic.

But it felt like an honorable gamble. My favorite review, a negative one, said that after reading the book, the reviewer knew two things: Jack Butler was black, and he was angry.

The Man in the Green Room is based on Medgar Evers, but I can’t say what Medgar Evers was really like. Which is why I called the character The Man in the Green Room and not Medgar Evers. Some people, like Ross Barnett and Luther Rainey, deserved, I felt, to be called by name.

The happenings at the Klu Klux Klan rally in the woods toward the end of the novel are an invention, but the contents of the hand-out in Eleanor Roosevelt’s bottom dresser drawer are verbatim.

I invented the columnist Bum Festrich, but hoped the name and the contents of his writings would suggest my opinion of an actual person.

At one point late in the novel, the narrator says America is Mississippi now. You don’t believe me. You wrong. Now, nearly fifty years after Ross Barnett grabbed Byron de la Beckwith’s hand in court to congratulate him on his innocent verdict, I hear everywhere the same voices howling the same lies with the same spittle-flecked fervor. For God’s sake, America. Pay attention.

You’ve seen what happens with these creeps.

I played the state’s hyper-religiosity (and hypocrisy) for ridicule. How could I not? After all, comedy’s a more rewarding approach than despair. Since I knew the Southern Baptists up close, they got the full treatment. And they were— and are—the most prevalent denomination in Mississippi. At the 1986 ABA in New Orleans, a couple of guys in suits asked if the book would be a good choice for their Christian Bookstore. I told them probably not—which, you have to admit, was a pretty Christian thing to do.

I have got to get Christian Air up and rolling. For a mere $1,600 a month, we can deliver sanctified tanks to your door, so that, at least in the privacy of your own home, you’ll never have to breathe the air with sinners.

For $32K, we’ll retrofit your house.

I played the sanctimony and the madness for ridicule partly because I’m convinced ridicule is the best way to handle the preposterous and partly because laughter clears the defenses so that the horrors spring real and fresh.

You might call it a kind of jujitsu for Christ approach.

But I swear, I didn’t exaggerate anything.

Connections

JJC was my first novel. I’ve finished five more, and published four. (Roughly the first third of the last one, The Enlightenment of Elijah Lee Roswell, which I call ELR for short, has been scheduled for publication by Levee Press of Jackson, Mississippi, as the first third of a trilogy.)

I had been thought of previously (to the extent I was thought of) as a poet, but now I was a novelist, apparently for the rest of my life. (I continued to write poetry, however, including much of my best. When people do think of my poetry, they usually think only of stuff that is at least twenty-five years old. If it’s not impertinently self-promotional, I’d like to direct interested readers to my new and selected, Broken Hallelujah, forthcoming from Texas Review Press).

I have a scheme for all my writings, poetry and short fiction and essays and journals included. I call it my Yoknapatawpha, meaning not to imply a literary comparison to one of my favorite authors—I take my cues more from Twain than Faulkner anyway—but as a similar framing device. My Yoknapatawpha is the multiverse. Some of the characters are ostensibly authors of other of my works. In JJC, the narrator claims he was a science fiction writer blindsided into what he calls lyrachur, declaring that his next novel will be vampires on Mars. (It was only one vampire, but still.) That novel, Nightshade, strongly hints that the narrator of Jujitsu was its actual author. Later works claim Jack Butler is a pen name the actual author uses for his more literary stuff. J. D. Rider, the detective in LLR, is the putative author of a mystery series that has yet to be written, about a zen detective named J. D. Rider.

The vampire from Nightshade reappears in Dreamer, a period 200 years earlier, but Dreamer is not a prequel. Jody Nightwood, the main character in Dreamer, appears as a historical guru in Practicing Zen without a License, as does Loren Wingo, a more minor character. So does Darlene from LLR. ELR revisits the Mississippi of my youth, giving earlier background to the stories of various characters in JJC, including the bootlegger Mr. Lattimore, Wise Man, and the entire Gandy family. Jody is also one of the main characters in a novel I work on from time to time, Dinosaurs from Outer Space. Since that novel is explicitly pop, I treat her with a lighter and more farcical touch.

The multiverse has the advantage of allowing discrepancy. Nobody expects all the connections between various universes to be entirely explicable. Things get changed in the telling, not merely details, but even tone and handling. Things that are funny in one universe are deadly serious in another. I get to suggest stories I’ll never have time to write. I think of that as telling stories by means of interference patterns, making a metaphor from physics. No plot lines, but you can tell what must have happened by what happens in what you do have. Another advantage is I don’t have to work out all the connections. I can just suggest.

It gives me a place to put stuff I can’t connect.

And finally, I can kick off any time, and even the unfinished stuff will fit in. It’ll be the unfinished stuff. Other people can make up their own stories from it if they want to. Even literary critics.

I do not, incidentally, give entire credence to the notion of the multiverse as explained by physicists. Don’t believe in vampires either.

I was worried after JJC about what I might use as, so to speak, moral energy for the next novel. You can’t just go around picking political injustices to write about. This had been one I was born to. The evil was so apparent, so manifest, that it was impossible to ignore. I had to deal with it.

The situations of underprivileged or discriminated-against people are strong themes in my other stories—the Zoomers in Nightshade, women and children in LLR, female scientists and Indians in Dreamer. But I knew better than to push it. I was a writer, not a self-appointed prophet.

But I was now wondering if I would ever again write anything with so much—ah hell, the word is so fakey—gravitas. As it turns out, you keep writing not because you have a subject—or, usually quite a few—but because you write. That’s what you do. And don’t have to judge your own gravitas.

Others are plenty happy to do it for you.

On the subject of the relation of JJC to Southern fiction generally, I don’t know that I have much to say. I’m a Southerner, no way around it. I was born and raised in Mississippi. I’m just as much a Mississippian as anybody else born and raised in the state. No matter what you think of JJC, it is honest testimony, delivered by a Mississippian, about a period in the life of that state.

So my writing is unquestionably Southern, but I have no big theory about what it means to be a Southern writer. For me it involved science fiction and stars and math and protest as much as delta cotton and moccasins and a colorful way of talking. The population of the Earth was half what it is now. We had the free run of woods and fields. Everybody you grew up with knew the Bible, so you had a fund of common reference. Things have changed.

There are still the frothing screamers and the evil morons and the jovial fat white politicians who slander humans and call it praising God. You can still get a good look at the evil. But their days are numbered. There’s a whole new shining generation of artists and writers and just plain good people coming along.

They’re the ones I dedicate this edition to.

Not Mississippi as it was, but Mississippi as it ought to be.

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.

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 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 dog and a rusty Chevy on blocks). She did not notice that Roger was becoming increasingly lonely.

In fact, since he had nothing to compare his loneliness to, and had had no instruction in talking about his feelings, Roger was hardly aware of his own isolation. He kept his own counsel without knowing that he did so, talked to his friends at school about small things, and saved the money he made delivering the Clarion Ledger and mowing lawns. He worked out in the fenced back yard every day, and as karate became more and more important to him, he began to form an image of his future. It was an image of noble deeds, the deeds of a warrior-saint in the cause of justice, an image of his own studio in Jackson, ten miles away.

Roger Receives His Calling

Roger had a first-degree black belt in shodo-kan karate, and a fourth-degree belt in jujitsu. He was adept at yoga and the Tai Chi as well, though he had had neither formal training nor examination in the two latter disciplines. He had found a common center to all these curious practices and had come gradually to think of them all as one. He was small and roundly built. He was not a good sprinter, or a quick interior lineman, but years of practice had bred in him an economy of motion the eye could not follow.

In the sixth grade he had attended a compulsory assembly program in which a Taiwanese gentleman leapt high in the air and split, with the side of his foot, a brick held high overhead by an assistant. Karate was not a well-known activity then, but Roger accepted the display as being hardly different from any other sort of assembly-time magic show. He had stood on that very stage the year before, in the fifth-grade pageant, a mute spaceman in a cardboard-andtinfoil helmet holding a leaky orange plastic water-pistol raygun.

In fact, his mind was not on the present show at all, but on the odd taste of water from waterguns and garden hoses, the must of rubber and its kin. It was, to him, a very comforting flavor, and somehow a very old one. Never mind that the long-chain organic polymers are recent and our own creations. The water from a garden hose leads back, all the way back to the rusty sump of Genesis.

But the next hour in gym class, there had been another demonstration. The nine-, ten-, and eleven-year-olds were lined up along the walls of the gymnasium. Grey mats were unrolled along the floor. The trampoline was shoved into one corner. Dim cathedral light filtered down from the high, dirty, wire-covered windows.

Coach brought out Otis and Tracy and the man who had split the brick, and explained that they were about to see a demonstration of self-defense in a two-on-one situation. The shadow of the window-fan kept sliding around on Coach as he gestured and talked, making a super-hero emblem on his chest one moment and turning him into a hooded executioner the next.

Mr. Lon, the man from Taiwan, was bony and weary-looking. His peculiar clothes had seemed a bright white on the stage earlier but now looked yellowed and dingy.

Coach took a long time with his explanation. He made it funny. He made it clear that he thought the funny-looking Mr. Lon was about to get the holy crap beat out of him.

Otis was blond, large, slow, and powerful. He had been a junior for two years. He was the fullback. Tracy was cruelly thin, with a hooked nose and a hooked grin and brilliant green eyes. He started fights, smoked cigarettes at recess, and talked back to the women teachers.

Coach sent Mr. Lon to one side and Tracy and Otis to the other, and then dropped his arm between them. Otis and Tracy advanced on Mr. Lon, Otis looking good-natured and puzzled, and Tracy bouncing and jabbing. Tracy’s right arm flashed out suddenly at Mr. Lon’s nose.

Mr. Lon’s response was a movement from another world, as if his arm were a length of rope he had pumped into a ripple. Tracy’s arm flew helplessly away from the impact. Otis had jumped at Mr. Lon just as Tracy had punched, and, rolling out of the upward block, Mr. Lon sent another tremendous ripple along his body, this one down his back and into his left leg, his heel exploding just under Otis’s sternum. Otis sat backwards with a thump, gasping for air.

You kicked him, you cheat! Tracy cried, and pulled out his switchblade. Mr. Lon straightened from his kick and seemed to tear at his own chest for a split second, sending the heel of his right fist midway between Tracy’s elbow and wrist. The switchblade spun glittering through the air. Tracy sagged to his knees clutching his left arm.

Coach had run over to Otis and was bending over him. He looked up and glared at Mr. Lon. You lousy Chinaman chink, he said. I’m calling the cops, you nigger son-of-a-bitch.

He had a knife.

Tell it to the cops, you nigger.

By this time Otis had managed to catch his breath. Trace did have a knife, Coach, he said.

The trouble with Otis was he would never lie, and everybody knew it. He had busted open the windows in the hardware store once and taken all the screwdrivers and hammered them into trees all over town with little signs hanging from them saying, Cant find a good screw anywhere. And once they had caught him under the bleachers with Chrissy Mellowlake, who was only thirteen at the time. But he wouldn’t lie. His father had explained it to him. Son, the Bible says there ain’t but one sin can’t be forgiven, and that is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost. And all that is is saying that the workings of the Holy Ghost ain’t the workings of the Holy Ghost. But Jesus and the Holy Ghost are the same thing. And Jesus said he was the Truth. So the Truth is the Holy Ghost, and if you say the Truth ain’t the Truth, you are blaspheming, and all that is is plain simple lying. A man who lies don’t know who he is, and don’t know who he can trust, and he ain’t only going to Hell, he’s already there.

Get out of here, you little yellow nigger, Coach said. You better not expect to get paid for this day’s work, I guaran-damn-tee you.

I came a hundred miles. I need the money. He had a knife.

I tell you what, buddy rough, you just move it on out of here.

Coach, Otis said, I’m all right. He heaved himself up and knee-walked over to Tracy, who was curled around his arm, crying. I think o Trace’s arm is broke, though.

Mr. Lon turned and walked away, and when he did, the kids along the wall broke ranks and flooded around Otis and Tracy and Coach. Roger remained against the wall watching Mr. Lon and, when Mr. Lon had vanished through the door at the far end of the gym, ran swiftly, unnoticed, along the wall after him.

He found Mr. Lon and his assistant in the parking lot stowing canvas bags in the back seat of a 1949 Dodge.

I told you, the little piss-ant had a knife.

"Yeah, and if you were better, it wouldn’t have mattered. You could have done it without breaking his arm. You lost your temper, didn’t you? No kime."

You know so much about it. You should have been there. I’d like to see you take on a knife.

Yeah, yeah. You were perfectly justified. But what are we gonna use for gas money?

The assistant saw Roger and pointed with his eyes. Mr. Lon spun around. The assistant went and got in the car on the driver’s side.

How can you do that with a bone in your arm? Roger asked Mr.

Reviews for Jujitsu for Christ

[dystopos · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This reads as a very deeply-felt, intensely personal memoir of a white boy, innocent of hatred, living in a black neighborhood in 1960s Jackson, MIssissippi. When I say innocent of hatred, I don't mean to say that anything is clear-cut. As the author describes, bad deeds draw everybody down and no one is innocent.But its also a comic tale and the comedy dissociates and dispels the intensity. Everything in the book is all at once completely improbable and absolutely believable (well, almost everything). Its manner of describing the South and its people is almost uncannily true and wide-ranging.I recommend it.

[trav_14 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this book on a recommendation from the Deep South group. And boy am I glad I picked this book up.Weighing in at just over 200 pages it's not a daunting read at all. And the characters and place descriptions grab you from the get go, or gitgo as Jack Butler may have penned it.The story takes place in Missippi back in the race-focused 1960's. It centers around a young white man doing his own thing in a colored part of town. His thing happens to Jujitsu and he starts a club that uses Jujitsu to help one come closer to Jesus.The language throughout the whole book is spot on! Some folks are filled with the "Holy Spurt" and those that aren't may just get called "werfless".There are a few sex scenes that were a bit graphic for me. I see how they were needed for the characters to develop, but some of the descriptions were a bit distracting and could have been handled differently. But I also know this has more to do with personal taste than Butler's ability as a story teller.And that's exactly what this is, southern story telling at its best.There are parts that will have laughing outloud, parts that'll have you so mad you could spit and a part that paints the hottest summer I've ever experienced!This book is highly recommended.