Juneteenth Read online

  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.

  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, ye
ars 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 narra
tive 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.