CAJUN CHAMELEON

In Martinez’s (Rigged, 2012) historical novel, a young white man of Cajun heritage experiences a moral transformation in the segregated South.

New Orleans resident Jax Badeaux is 15 years old in 1959—a time when racial segregation was still legal in Louisiana. Jax’s family is proud of its forebears’ participation in the Civil War on the side of the South, and his favorite hat even sports a Confederate flag. His own racism is like a reflex—a set of views that he inherited from his family members without ever thinking about them. Lately, he’s repeatedly faced predicaments that have challenge his prejudices. His cousin, Jay, who’s part Native American, is contemptuously rejected by the white family into which he’s about to marry—vile behavior that confuses and moves young Jax. Later, he discovers, to his astonishment, that his best friend, Mike, is African-American and has been passing himself off as white, and this forces Jax to reconsider the laws and cultural mores that led to segregation. However, Jax still can’t, as yet, find the moral mettle to defend Mike against the racist attacks of a young woman with whom he’s romantically involved: “I was a coward, and not strong enough to carry Mike’s cross. I had two weak hands, a weak brain, and a weakness for girls, especially Stacie.” The author presents Jax’s moral journey as a kind of American bildungsroman, and he intelligently charts his protagonist’s intellectual growth through high school and college, as well as his postgraduate experience as a police officer in New Orleans during remarkably turbulent times. Martinez astutely tells a familiar story of racial tension in the South in the 1960s and ’70s, and how its disputes dovetailed with those regarding the Vietnam War. As such, this is as much a work of social commentary as it is a novel, and the author uses his tale of Jax’s moral evolution to sensitively combine these two aspects together. Also, he depicts, with both candor and nuance, complex lines of social division, including within the African-American community, which confronted its own internal schisms. However, the author also provides readers with a gripping story, and not merely a vehicle for didactic homilies. Jax has a considerable amount of romantic misadventures, and under the tutelage of his frightening but benevolent criminal uncle, he gets involved with the Cajun mob. However, the prose is flat and bland, as a rule, and it can be repetitive at times; Martinez also occasionally indulges in shopworn banalities: “Differences are good and make life interesting. If we were all alike, it would be like all the flowers in the world were one kind, one color, and smelled identical. How boring would that be? Our differences should be celebrated and not divide us.” These rote recitations of moral enlightenment are mercifully rare, though, and they don’t ultimately undermine this lucid chronicle of Jax’s internal conflict—and of the nation’s, writ large.

An often thoughtful and provocative tale of slowly developing moral courage, despite some awkward prose.