Juneteenth (3 page)

Throughout the unexpectedly resumed relationship between the two men, in Ellison’s words, “time, conflicts of value, the desire of one to remember nothing and the tendency of the other to remember too much, have rendered communication between them difficult.” But as the narrative progresses, Hickman’s will to remember and the Senator’s will to forget engender paradoxical shared and solitary acts of imagination. Hickman’s fatherly preacher’s presence and the blues tones of his voice stir the embers of the dying Senator’s soul. Ellison enlists the reader as witness to unspoken and spoken acts of memory that revive Bliss’s childhood as the little boy who looks white, talks black, and is accepted and loved by Hickman and the others in his black Baptist congregation and community. In his delirium the Senator becomes Bliss once again and remembers Hickman initiating him, the precocious little boy, into a preacher’s ritual of death and resurrection in his traveling ministry. Hickman, too, Ellison reminds us, is a trickster; in his calling as preacher he sometimes sees himself as “God’s own straight man.” A master of religious performance, he is willing to let congregations of believers and potential believers think that Bliss, a white-skinned young apprentice preacher, rises from the dead in a closed coffin covered in white satin outfitted with a concealed breathing tube.

Memories of childhood alternate with the Senator’s feverish, impressionistic recollections of life after his flight from Hickman—from
bliss
, he puts it in one of his reveries, with a mix of irony and remorse. Raised as something of a confidence man in the service of the Lord by Hickman, years later he puts the tricks of the trade to good use in his travels through the small towns of the Southwest, hoodwinking people by posing as a professional filmmaker. In the present moment of silent recollection with Hickman at his bedside, the Senator relives a brief, intense, love affair twenty-five or thirty years past with a lovely black and white and red young woman in an Oklahoma town. Their passionate interlude has mysterious, fateful, doubly fatal consequences that Bliss is only partially aware of, Hickman tries to puzzle out, and Ellison coaxes the reader to piece together.

At the climax of their interior journey, Hickman compels Bliss to confront more fully and honestly than he desires the long-buried memory of the Juneteenth night that sent him wandering the ends of the earth like a biblical outcast. Under Hickman’s prodding, he comes to realize, with a psychic pain as searing as the physical pain of his wounds, that he is tragically outcast from his true American self, which, whatever the unrevealed particulars of his genetic heritage, is “somehow black.” In the end, as he sinks into delirium and the fever dream of approaching death, the Senator hallucinates a succession of frightening, unforgiving, and vengeful black American figures, and reaches feebly for the consolation now offered only by Hickman, the spokesman and elder of “that vanished tribe,” the “American Negroes” to whom Ellison dedicates his book.

And Hickman, whom Ellison, as early as 1959, admitted was taking over the book, may be his finest creation. Hickman is a provincial, but he is anything but a hick. He clings, as the Senator does in occasional moments of lyrical lucidity that part the stormy waters of his cynicism, to that selfsame American faith—the democratic vernacular creed of experience and experiment, diversity and tolerance, compassion and resilience. It is a complex faith founded on the contradictory and compromised optimism of the founders, founded on the experimental attitude of Ellison’s namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, found in the tragicomic lyricism of the blues, and in American geography founded on what Huck Finn called “the territory.” Of “the territory” in
Huck Finn
, Ellison told Jervis Anderson two centuries after the Declaration of Independence: “Well, it is Oklahoma he is talking about. Oklahoma was a dream world. And after Reconstruction had been betrayed, people—black and white—came to the territory. Out of the territory came the state of Oklahoma.” For Ellison the geography, history, and human diversity of Oklahoma embodied the actual and potential if oft-denied richness of the country. From tragedy—the Trail of Tears in the 1830s for the Five Indian Nations and the betrayal of Reconstruction for African Americans in the 1880s—followed migration to a territory open to complex possibilities. Ellison’s story of the territory is the story of ancestors who populated the small black towns of Oklahoma like that in Toni Morrison’s
Paradise
, as well as ancestors like his parents, whose presence in at once segregated and integrated places like Oklahoma City gave the culture an original flavor of speech and music before, during, and after World War I.

Confirming Ellison’s passion for history, Saul Bellow recalled Ellison emerging from the ballroom where he wrote in their shared, shabby mansion to mix “very strong martinis” in the kitchen and talk. “Ralph was much better at history than I could ever be, but it gradually became apparent that he was not merely talking about history but telling the story of his life, and tying it into American history.” Bellow conveys the feel of Ellison satisfying personal and artistic urges as he paced off the familiar ground of his life: “He took pleasure in returning again and again to the story of his development not in order to revise or to gild it but to recover old feelings and also to consider and reconsider how he might find a way to write his story.”

So it is with Ellison’s novelistic chronicle,
Juneteenth
. In telling Hickman’s story of the early days in Oklahoma, and Bliss’s (a.k.a. Mister Movie-Man) sojourn there in the twenties, Ellison, as Bellow sensed, is imagining and telling his own story. In their different ways, Hickman and the Senator recapitulate the world Ellison grew up in and heard the old folks in Oklahoma tell about. As he remembers his former life as the young prodigy of Reverend “Daddy” Hickman, Bliss, now Senator Sunraider but still Bliss on the “lower frequencies,” comes to grips with the fact that he is “also somehow black,” as Ellison believed was the case for every single “true American.” With Hickman at his bedside, Sunraider silently confesses: “Ah yes, yes; I loved him. Everyone did, deep down. Like a great, kindly, daddy bear along the streets, my hand lost in his huge paw.” Here Ellison’s recurring theme of “our orphan’s loneliness” and “the evasion of identity” is felt and told on the deepest frequencies of consciousness—its autobiographical impulse transmuted into art by bold acts of imagination.

In conception and execution,
Juneteenth
is multifarious, multifaceted, multifocused, multivoiced, multitoned. After hearing Ellison read from the novel in the summer of 1969, James Allan McPherson brooded for many years about what he had heard and slowly came to the conclusion that “in his novel Ellison was trying to solve the central problem of American literature. He was trying to find forms invested with enough familiarity to reinvent a much broader and much more diverse world for those who take their provisional identities from groups.” Finally, McPherson added what might serve as a benediction for
Juneteenth:
“I think he was trying to
Negro-Americanize
the novel form, at the same time he was attempting to move beyond it.”

So he was. In a long letter written in August 1959 Ellison tells Albert Murray of finding “interesting things in Hemingway and Fitzgerald”; in their work and in Stephen Crane’s and Henry James’s he discovered the Civil War looming like some partially acknowledged, terrifying family secret. Then and for the rest of his working life, Ellison found his imaginative, critical deep well of inspiration and interpretation in the Civil War, the end of slavery, and the subsequent tortuous, zigzag path toward liberation: “When you start lifting up that enormous stone, the Civil War, that’s kept so much of the meaning of life in the North hidden, you begin to see that Mose is in the center of a junk pile as well as in the center of the cotton boll. All the boys who try to escape this are simply running from the problem of value—Which is why those old Negroes whom I’m trying to make Hickman represent are so confounding, they never left the old original briar patch. You can’t understand Lincoln or Jefferson without confronting them.” And in one of
Juneteenth
’s most moving and powerful scenes, the old minister, denied access to the Senator, leads his flock to the Lincoln Memorial for the purpose of moral and spiritual renewal. There, he strikes through the mask of Lincoln as national icon to the man and the president attempting to forge his own moral union as well as the nation’s. In Hickman’s vision Lincoln waged a civil war fought in the provinces of his mind and imagination as well as on what F. Scott Fitzgerald called “the dark fields of the republic”; his humanity lay in his flaws as well as his virtues.

“ ‘Ain’t that him, Revern? Ain’t that Father Abraham?’ ” one of the sisters asks from the steps of the monument, and “too full to speak,” Hickman answers in a reverie that owes a double tithe—to James Joyce and to the sermons of the black church.
Yes
, he repeats over and over to himself as he imagines Lincoln just “resting awhile before pulling yourself together again to go and try to bind up all these wounds that have festered and run and stunk in this land ever since they turned you back into stone.” Hickman’s reverie occurs within a reverie, for he is actually at the bedside of the sleeping Senator, startled into renewed awareness of the dying man’s fall from grace. In a single thought the old minister’s identities as preacher, historian, citizen, and father become one: “
And to think
, Hickman thought, stirring suddenly in his chair.
We had hoped to raise ourselves that kind of man
 …” Hickman’s remembrance is his enactment of lines from T. S. Eliot that Ellison chose as epigraph:

This is the use of memory:
For liberation—not less of love but expanding
Of love beyond desire, and so liberation
From the future as well as the past
.

On many levels
Juneteenth
is a narrative of liberation, literally a celebration of June 19, 1865, the day two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation was decreed when Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, and their commanding officer told the weeping, cheering slaves that they were free. The delay, of course, is symbolic acknowledgment that liberation is the never-ending task of self, group, and nation and that, to endure, liberation must be self-achieved and self-achieving. In his narrative Ellison, who took part in more than one “Juneteenth ramble” as a boy in Oklahoma, speaks of false as well as true liberation and of the courage required to tell the difference. Even in the face of deepest betrayal, Hickman keeps his word to stand by Bliss, although the little boy is now contained within the frame of a man whose public words and deeds repudiate Hickman’s acts of kinship and fatherhood. Yet in the end perhaps Hickman’s democratic faith is vindicated by the Senator’s belated, never-to-be-consummated deathbed strivings toward the “way home”—the name Ellison gave in “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion” to “that condition of man’s being at home in the world which is called love and which we term democracy.” Dismissive at first of Juneteenth as
“the celebration of a gaudy illusion,”
the Senator realizes too late that his liberation is bound up with the Negro American communion expressed by and on Juneteenth Day. But, Ellison hints in his epigraph, it is not too late for those surviving “[t]o become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern,” the pattern of art. Always in progress, Ellison’s work may now find pause, not cessation but pause, in the gift of
Juneteenth
to his readers.

John F. Callahan
February 1999

CHAPTER 1

Two days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator. They were all quite elderly: old ladies dressed in little white caps and white uniforms made of surplus nylon parachute material, and men dressed in neat but old-fashioned black suits, wearing wide-brimmed, deep-crowned panama hats which, in the Senator’s walnut-paneled reception room now, they held with a grave ceremonial air. Solemn, uncommunicative and quietly insistent, they were led by a huge, distinguished-looking old fellow who on the day of the chaotic event was to prove himself, his age notwithstanding, an extraordinarily powerful man. Tall and broad and of an easy dignity, this was the Reverend A. Z. Hickman—better known, as one of the old ladies proudly informed the Senator’s secretary, as “God’s Trombone.”

This, however, was about all they were willing to explain. Forty-four in number, the women with their fans and satchels and picnic
baskets, and the men carrying new blue airline take-on bags, they listened intently while Reverend Hickman did their talking.

“Ma’am,” Hickman said, his voice deep and resonant as he nodded toward the door of the Senator’s private office, “you just tell the Senator that Hickman has arrived. When he hears who’s out here he’ll know that it’s important and want to see us.”