Juneteenth (52 page)

Sunraider knows that the question of his having Negro blood isn’t important, it is the fact that
he
himself can’t be sure whether he has or not.
Because he knows that many who think they don’t, do. It is a matter flowing from the way society has been arranged, the power that flows from that arrangement. There is danger to his position because his own power depends upon his manipulation of race. As does the power of all politicians of any importance. That was the joke of it. The power was not biological or genetic, but man-made and political, economic … and immoral as far as the American ideal has a religious component.

Hickman asks Bliss, “Boy, why didn’t you stick to religion? You could have hustled people in the name of the Lord who has always been looking at you? But instead
you
go into politics—where people don’t ever know who you
are!
They don’t even
care
, as long as you tell them the lies they want to dream by. So you went into politics! You dared to trick the people in the one area that is where they
really
want to believe.”

Bliss, since you
had
to go the way you did, why didn’t you pattern after Abraham Lincoln?

That time is dead, he’s dead and they whipped him in the end.

But they had to kill him in order to stop him, Bliss. He had heart, boy.
That
was the man for you to follow. He was a big man, who had the mud between his toes. He knew pain and how to hold it and ride it out. He wasn’t simple, Bliss. He was one of the most complicated of all the great men. He had been baptized in many streams.

The Running of the Sun.… A summer day’s dying. Not long enough. The running of Sunraider is something else.

Hickman is “Jim” and Bliss is “Huck” who cut out for the Territory.

The Mississippi is not a “white” river, nor is it a Lady as Mark Twain knew, it is a muddy masculine son-of-a-bitch and marvelous.

C.L.R. James makes the point that it was slavery which helped release the eloquence of Abe Lincoln, which is true. It also released the eloquence of many who believed in the institution—but best of all, it was the source of Negro American art. This is not as paradoxical as it might first appear. Slavery has
always
been an institution which brought out the best as well as the worst in the human. It also produces some of that which was noblest in Northerners.

Nota Bene! This is not what I intended to write when I started. Therefore, there is something else to explore, to remember.

Albert and Anatole’s objections to proliferation of dreams misses their function of revelations of psychic states, just as they miss the nature of my characters. Incompletion of form allows the reader to impose his own imagination upon the material with too little control from the author. Thus I don’t like to show my work until it is near completion.

AFTERWORD: A NOTE TO SCHOLARS

At his death in 1994 Ralph Ellison left behind notes, typescripts, and computer printouts and disks: most likely, with one exception, everything he had done on the book, however fragmentary, over a forty-year period. That exception is what he called in a December 9, 1967, letter “a section of my work-in-progress” destroyed in the Plainfield, Massachusetts, fire that burned down the Ellisons’ summer home ten days earlier. As I tried to discern one coherent, inclusive sequence, I realized slowly, somewhat against my will, that although Ellison had hoped to write one big book, his saga, like William Faulkner’s, could not be contained within the pages of a single novel. Aiming, as Ellison had, at one complete volume, I proceeded to arrange his oft-revised, sometimes reconceived scenes and episodes according to their most probable development and progression. While doing so, I felt uneasily procrustean: Here and there limbs of the manuscript needed to be stretched, and elsewhere a protruding foot might be lopped off, if all the episodes were to be edited into a single, coherent, continuous work.

Now, the editor of a posthumously published novel should not use his own words to finish what the author left unfinished or unsaid. The state of the manuscript (or manuscripts) should determine editorial decisions, and, if all things are equal, the latest version of an author’s manuscript should carry special authority. Appropriately, the problem of an authentic reader’s edition was solved by the latest manuscripts of what Ellison had labeled Book II as early as 1958 or 1959. In it he had written a fiction whose action, characters, and prose show him in the prime of his imaginative, novelistic powers. Of the potential “three volumes” Ellison had referred to in 1970 but not yet finished, Book II had come to constitute an all but complete novel. Except for a very few, very brief passages written in the early 1990s, the novel is not Ellison’s most recent effort, but it is the most ambitious and latest, freestanding, compelling, extended fiction in the saga. Moreover, it contains the story and relationship of the two principal characters at the heart of the work Ellison had set his sights on and described over the years.

From this manuscript (and the Prologue to Book I), in 1959 Ellison culled, stitched together, revised, and carefully edited the first published piece from the novel-in-progress, which appeared in Saul Bellow’s
The Noble Savage
(1960) under the title “And Hickman Arrives.”
Juneteenth
, then, consists of the following: “And Hickman Arrives”; Book II, whose latest manuscript, according to Mrs. Ellison’s note, was retyped in 1972 and contains subsequent revisions and corrections made in Ellison’s hand up until at least 1986; a thirty-eight-page manuscript referred to as “Bliss’s Birth,” now
Chapter 15
; one paragraph from “Cadillac Flambé” (
American Review
, 1973), inserted to give the Senator’s speech in
Chapter 2
greater continuity with the novel’s final scene; and several words and brief passages from later versions of the Lincoln Memorial scene in
Chapter 14
inserted to clarify and intensify the action. I should note that in addition
to “And Hickman Arrives,” Ellison published three other excerpts from Book II—“The Roof, the Steeple, and the People,” “Juneteenth,” and “Night-Talk.” All appeared in the
Quarterly Review of Literature
in 1960, 1965, and 1969, respectively, and now reappear in their appropriate places in this volume. Unlike “And Hickman Arrives,” each is a continuous part of Book II, and Ellison’s photocopies of these three published excerpts contain a few small corrections or additions in his hand. In cases of variation between the previously published version of an episode and the manuscript, I have opted for the former except in those instances when Ellison has clearly revised
after
publication or when restoration of passages deleted from the published version serves to heighten the meaning and continuity of the narrative as a whole.