Juneteenth (2 page)

Unraveling the mystery of Bliss’s odyssey from child preacher to con-man to racist politician, and of his own failure, becomes Reverend Hickman’s obsession as he keeps a vigil by mortally wounded Sunraider’s deathbed. Unlike Ellison’s masterpiece,
Invisible Man
, a barn-burning
bildungsroman
that explodes forward from one chapter to the next,
Juneteenth
spirals downward ever deeper through layers of memory, history, philosophical reflection, and culture—and in doing so it delivers the most dazzling, breathtakingly seductive writing we have witnessed since Ellison’s first novel in 1952.

Here, in dozens of fully imagined, deeply felt passages refined and polished to the level of poetry, readers will find—as in
Invisible Man
—an exuberant, democratic fusion of fictional styles and American voices and vernaculars; symphonically rendered scenes of Southern revivals that celebrate “Juneteenth,” the day (June 19, 1865) that Union troops entered Texas; an astonishingly beautiful tribute to Abraham Lincoln, offered with the acuity that only a member of the Vanished Tribe could write because it reveals our fourteenth president to be “one of us, not only because he freed us to the extent that he did, but because he freed himself of that awful inherited pride they deny us”; and Ellison’s characteristic humor and irony, his delicious wordplay and punning, as he broods deeply on philosophical questions such as reality vs. illusion, blindness vs. true seeing, and the fact that our lives are
already
more integrated than we usually dare to acknowledge (“There’s always the mystery,” he writes, “of the one in the many and many in the one, the you in them and the them in you—ha!”).

In a word,
Juneteenth
is the long-awaited work we have needed for decades to refine our discourse on race, just as for nearly half a century we needed the singular voice and humanistic vision of Ralph Waldo Ellison to remind us, as he does in this capacious, second novel, that “Man at his best, when he’s set in all the muck and confusion of life and continues to struggle for his ideals, is near sublime …”

Charles Johnson
December 1999

INTRODUCTION

In his later years, after hours, if he had put in a good day at his desk, Ralph Ellison was known to chuckle at the parallel between the “crazy country” he loved and contended with and what in 1969 he called his “novel-in-progress (
very
long in progress).” Ellison’s projected second novel was a glint in his eye as early as June of 1951, when he wrote Albert Murray that he was “trying to get going on my next book before this one [
Invisible Man
] is finished …” In April 1953 he told Murray of his “plan to scout the Southwest. I’ve got to get real mad again, and talk with the old folks a bit. I’ve got
one
Okla. book in me I do believe.” By 1954 Ellison had begun to put pen to paper, and in April of 1955 he sent Murray a “working draft” of an episode. From then on, even as he wrote numerous essays, taught at half a dozen colleges, held the Albert Schweitzer Professorship in the Humanities at New York University, and, in the name of citizenship, did more than his duty on national boards and commissions, the second novel remained Ellison’s hound of heaven (and hell) pursuing him “down the arches of the years,” pursuing him “down the labyrinthine ways / Of [his] own mind” until the end of his life in 1994.

From 1955 to 1957 Ellison was at work on the second novel as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. “It was in Rome during 1956,” he told John Hersey, that he “conceived the basic situation, which had to do with a political assassination.” Not too long afterward, in June of 1959, Ellison wrote Murray that “Bellow [with whom Ellison was sharing a house in Tivoli, New York, close to Bard College, where both men taught] has read book two and is to publish about fifty pages in a new mag which he is editing—THE NOBLE SAVAGE—of all things.” Telling David Remnick of
The New Yorker
in 1994 that Ellison had “let me read a considerable portion of it—a couple of hundred pages, at least,” Bellow remembered vividly that “all of it was marvelous stuff, easily on a level with
Invisible Man.”
In a later reminiscence Bellow wrote, “In what he did, Ralph had no rivals. What he did no one else could do—a glorious piece of good fortune for a writer.”

During the next five or six years Ellison published three more excerpts in literary quarterlies. Meanwhile, the contract for the book, dated August 17, 1965, stipulated delivery on September 1, 1967. In his own mind Ellison was moving toward completion in the summer and fall of 1967 as he revised the novel at his summer home outside Plainfield, a village in the Berkshires. Then, in the late afternoon of November 29, 1967, Ellison and his wife, Fanny, returned from shopping to find the house in flames. With regret in her voice, Mrs. Ellison recalled being restrained from approaching the burning house by volunteer firemen who had arrived too late. “I wish I’d been able to break the window and pull out Ralph’s manuscript,” she told me years later. “I knew right where it was.”

The Plainfield fire has taken on the proportions of myth to such an extent that it is useful to revisit what Ellison had to say about it over the years. Ten days after the event, he wrote Charles Valentine that “the loss was particularly severe for me, as a section of my work-in-progress was destroyed with it.” Later in the same letter Ellison outlined the task he saw before him: “Fortunately, much of my summer’s work on the new novel is still in my mind and if my imagination can feed it I’ll be all right, but I must work quickly.” According to James Alan McPherson, Ellison told him in 1969 that the fire “destroyed a year’s worth of revisions,” but that “he is presently in the process of revising it again.” In 1980 Ellison told a reporter from the
Daily Hampshire Gazette
, “I guess I’ve been able to put most of it back together.” To David Remnick, just before his eightieth birthday in 1994, Ellison made perhaps his fullest public comment on the fire: “There was, of course, a traumatic event involved with the book. We lost a summer house and, with it, a good part of the novel. It wasn’t the entire manuscript, but it was over three hundred and sixty pages. There was no copy.”

By the time of McPherson’s account, done with Ellison’s blessing and collaboration in 1970, the second novel had begun to loom larger than a novel or a work-in-progress. “He has enough typed manuscripts to publish three novels,” McPherson wrote, “but is worried over how the work will hold up as a total structure. He does not want to publish three separate books, but then he does not want to compromise on anything essential. ‘If I find that it is better to make it a three-section book, to issue it in three volumes, I would do that as long as I thought that each volume had a compelling interest in itself,’ ” Ellison told McPherson. On and off for the rest of his life, Ellison continued to work on his mythic saga of race and identity, language and kinship in the American experience. Sometimes revising, sometimes reconceiving, sometimes writing entirely new passages into an oft-reworked scene, he accumulated some two thousand pages of typescripts and printouts by the time of his death. His last published excerpt from the novel, an offshoot from the main text titled “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator,” appeared in 1977. Although he continued to write and revise until a fatal illness struck him at the end of March 1994, just four weeks after his eightieth birthday, Ralph Ellison did not live to finish his forty-year work-in-progress.

Ellison left no instructions about his work except the wish, expressed to Mrs. Ellison and to me, that his books and papers be housed at the national library, the Library of Congress. A few days after his death, Mrs. Ellison walked me into his study, a room adjoining the living room still wreathed in a slight haze of cigar and pipe smoke. As if to protest his absence, the teeming bookshelves had erupted in chaos over his desk, chair, computer table, and copying machine, finally covering the floor like a blizzard of ash. Anyone else might have given up, but Fanny Ellison persevered in her effort to do the right thing by what her husband had left behind. She whetted my appetite by showing me stacks of printouts, scraps of notes, jottings on old newspapers and magazine subscription cards, and several neat boxes of computer disks. At her direction I removed several thick black binders of typescript going back to the early 1970s from the first of two long, rectangular black steel filing cabinets next to his desk. The other cabinet, I was to discover, contained folder after folder of earlier drafts painstakingly labeled according to character or episode.

“Beginning, middle, and end,” Mrs. Ellison mused. “Does it have a beginning, middle, and end?”

The question can’t be put any better than that, I thought. Many times I followed the twists and turns of Ellison’s plot, and his characters’ movements through space and time; traced and retraced their steps as they moved from Washington, D.C., south to Georgia and Alabama, southwest to Oklahoma, back again to the nation’s capital, and reached back with them from the novel’s present moment of the mid-fifties to spots of time in the twenties and thirties and even farther to the first decade of the new century when the Oklahoma Territory emerged as a state. And always, Mrs. Ellison’s question pursued me and brought me back to the task at hand, for it was always clear that at the center of Ellison’s saga was the story of Reverend Hickman and Senator Sunraider, from the Senator’s birth as Bliss to his death. To use an architectural metaphor, this was the true center of Ellison’s great, unfinished house of fiction. And although he did not complete the wings of the edifice, their absence does not significantly mar the organic unity of the book we do have,
Juneteenth
.

Of all that Ellison wrote on his saga of an unfinished novel,
Juneteenth
is the narrative that best stands alone as a single, self-contained volume. Like a great river, perhaps the Mississippi, for Ellison “the great highway around which the integration of values and styles was taking place,”
Juneteenth
draws from many uniquely African American (and American) tributaries: sermons, folktales, the blues, the dozens, the swing and velocity of jazz. Its form borrows from the antiphonal call-and-response pattern of the black church and the riffs and bass lines of jazz. Through its pages flow the influences of literary antecedents and ancestors, among them Twain and Faulkner, who, like Ellison, were men of the territory. Above all, perhaps, in this work Ellison converses with Faulkner.
Juneteenth
realizes Ellison’s dream, articulated in “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” his acceptance speech when he received the National Book Award for
Invisible Man
in 1953, of putting into a novel “the rich babel of idiomatic expression around me, a language full of imagery and rhetorical canniness.”

Perhaps picking up where he left off in
Invisible Man
, Ellison is deliberately, provocatively approximate about historical time in
Juneteenth
. In both novels his strategy is one of connotation and infiltration as he seeks to open up associations and create symbolic significance for events in the narrative. Even as his writerly time extended far beyond the fifties, Ellison continued to locate the story “circa 1955.” From the “time present” of the immediate action, he said, “the story goes back into earlier experiences too, even to some of the childhood experiences of Hickman, who is an elderly man in time present.” From beginning to end,
Juneteenth
, like
Invisible Man
, tests Ellison’s conviction that time’s burden—its blessing and curse—is “a matter of the past being active in the present—or of the characters becoming aware of the manner in which the past acts on their present lives.”

In the wake of
Invisible Man
, Ellison also dreamed of a fiction whose theme was the indivisibility of American experience and the American language as tested by two equal protagonists. In
Juneteenth
the two principals are the Reverend Alonzo Hickman, jazzman turned black Baptist minister, and Senator Adam Sunraider, a self-named, race-baiting politician, formerly Bliss, in Ellison’s words, “a little boy of indefinite race who looks white and who, through a series of circumstances, comes to be reared by the Negro minister.” In different ways expressive of radically different values and purposes, each possesses an “intellectual depth,” complexity and eloquence
visible
from the inside out, and, therefore, heard on the lower frequencies Ellison had identified with democratic equality in
Invisible Man
. With a level of fidelity that is stunning, Ellison conveys the intricate inner rhythms of consciousness felt by Hickman and Bliss, alone and in profound relation to each other. “Sometimes,” he explained in an introductory note to “Night-Talk,” an excerpt published in 1969, the two men “actually converse, sometimes the dialogue is illusory and occurs in the isolation of their individual minds, but through it all it is antiphonal in form and an anguished attempt to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.”

The relationship between Hickman and Bliss revolves around mysteries of kinship and race. As a boy seeking his lost mother and unknown patrimony, Bliss runs away from Hickman and his black Baptist congregation, later reinvents himself in the guise of moviemaker and flimflam man, and ends up a race-baiting senator from a New England state. After decades of separation during which he keeps track of Bliss through a Negro American network of “chauffeurs and pullman porters and waiters, anybody who traveled in their work,” Hickman hears ominous tidings of danger. He arrives in Washington with members of his congregation to warn his prodigal son but is allowed nowhere near the Senator; the closest he and his followers get are seats in the Senate gallery for one of Senator Sunraider’s speeches. There, suddenly, Hickman’s worst fear comes true: a young black man rises up in the gallery and shoots the Senator. Reeling from the impact of several bullets, Senator Sunraider loses control. “ ‘Lord,’ he heard,” his standard idiom giving way to African American vernacular, “ ‘LAWD, WHY HAST THOU …’ ” To his astonishment, the Senator recognizes Hickman’s voice responding from above him:
“For Thou hast forsaken … me.”
At the hospital he calls for Hickman, and only Hickman, to be brought to his bedside.