1.   Why does Gideon Roth refuse to be comforted after Kareem Jackson is executed? Why does he disconnect himself from all who love him?

2.   After Kareem is executed and Gideon’s career and marriage collapse, his thoughts turn to Cecil Price and the other murderers. Are these developments sufficient to explain Gideon’s turn to violence? Why does Gideon go back to the injustices of 30 years earlier, rather than some more recent social wrong?

3.   In the flashbacks set in the 1940s and 1960s, the black characters endure or recount various experiences of discrimination and oppression. How well does the term “segregation” describe or evoke these different practices or activities?

Consider these terms:  discrimination, racism, profiling, stereotyping, segregation, white supremacy, terrorism. What are the differences among them, and why do we use some of these terms and not others? Does it matter how we characterize the problem of racial hierarchy in America?

4.   After his return from the war in 1946, Joshua Jackson sought equal employment opportunities, the right to vote, equal schooling for black children and dignity for black adults. His fate was a gruesome death. 

Such initiatives by veterans and others in fact took place in post-World-War-II Mississippi, and were more or less crushed by the white supremacist society and state. But efforts to create a freedom movement were more successful in the 1960s. What differences in the two periods and other factors might account for the different outcome two decades later?

5.   In their discussions with Gideon, Susan and Auntie Lillian both condemn his desire for vengeance, as, implicitly, does the deacon Ezekiel Samson. How far did each of them affect Gideon’s thinking? Who was more effective in reaching Gideon and why?

6.   In explaining what the accomplishments of the civil rights movement meant to her, Auntie Lillie tells Gideon, “We ain’t afraid no more. I can walk down a street now and not worry a white man might humiliate me.” However, as the Black Lives Matter movement has observed, police officers can still kill unarmed black men with impunity (black children, too, if they play with toy guns); the police need only claim they feared for their lives. And African Americans are confronted with police intervention for driving while black, shopping for prom clothes while black, barbecuing in a public park while black, swimming while black, golfing while black, napping in their own college common room while black, placing a phone call in their hotel lobby while black, and babysitting while black.

Was Auntie Lillie wrong? Has nothing really changed?

7.   In the end, Gideon makes a decision about whether to pull the trigger. Why does he decide the way he did? Does part of you wish he’d decided differently? Should he have? How should we deal with the injustices of the not-so-distant past whose perpetrators are still among us?

8.   Kareem eventually recognizes the wrong he did and comes to understand what shaped him. Is this enough for forgiveness? What does it mean for someone who has committed a terrible crime to seek redemption?

9.   Auntie Lillie and Kareem himself see his self-realization as a reclamation of his humanity. What does this mean?

What about Cecil Price? We don’t know much about Price, his personal history before the murders or his post-lynching, post-prison life or thoughts. Mississippi Reckoning does not concern itself much with these matters. But nearly all of the statements that Cecil Price makes in this novel, when he and Gideon converse at the place where Price and the others seized Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman in 1964, are actual remarks Price made in an interview with New York Times reporter Joseph Lelyveld in 1977.   Were Price’s remarks an effort at redemption? What more would he have had to do or say? What more would we have to know about Price beyond the interviewer’s perceptions regarding Price’s sincerity?

10.  In Susan’s discussion with Chief Timmie Ray Phelps, she suggests that Mississippi may need a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” along the lines of what South Africa created after the end of apartheid. As Susan explains, in South Africa there were hearings in a courtroom-like setting, “to let the silent victims speak the truth, to tell of what was done to them, and to have the wrongs recognized. And for the perpetrators to testify as well. Not for punishment—just because there had been so many who had been part of the enormous, immoral system. But to help the guilty to accept their responsibility.”

Nothing like this has been attempted regarding America’s history of white supremacy and racist oppression. Why not? Might it help? Is it conceivable?

11.  What will become of Gideon and Susan and Helen after the book ends?

12.  This book is called Mississippi Reckoning. Is there a reckoning? Are reckonings always needed?