Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth

...As if Callahan and Fanny Ellison, the novelist's widow, haven't managed the editing and publishing of Juneteenth with dignity and caution...

...He steals away from Hickman and hits the road, first as an itinerant preacher, then as a grifter and movie maker, and finally as a senator who is a wizard of demagogery...

...Most critics want to roll it right back down...

...Considering the Senator's politics and the fact that Hickman is black, the preacher's concern is a surprise...

...Ellison describes the churchfolk as "resigned, like people embarked on a difficult journey who were already far beyond the point of no return...

...Hickman raises Bliss as someone destined to liberate his people...

...Bliss also refuses to acknowledge a principle that Hickman, and Ellison, thought no less vital than Emancipation itself: that black culture and American culture are inextricably bound up with each other,that the hyphen in AfricanAmerican is a link forged as much from fusion as frisson...

...There are simply too many snares and delusions, too many masks, too many forked tongues...

...When Severen fires his pistol, one of his shots goes astray and shatters a chandelier hanging above the Senate well...

...As if Callahan, who has edited well-received collections of Ellison's short stories and essays, and is working on an edition of the novelist's letters, doesn't know the first thing about textual editing, let alone the proportions of Ellison's art...

...But time turns, Bliss, and remembering helps us to save ourselves...

...To critics like Irving Howe, who chastised the author of Invisible Man for not writing protest novels like Richard Wright's, Ellison replied with quiet pride that he had schooled himself in Thomas Stearns Eliot as much James Weldon Johnson, in Ernest Hemingway as much as Langston Hughes...

...Hickman's hopes again go unfulfilled...

...it was just not the kind that Wright embodied and Howe championed...

...Although the antiphonal structure of the novel unites Hickman and Sunraider in the embrace of speech and memory, their recollections of the past never come into alignment...

...Of course, there's plenty of aesthetic mixing and mashing in Juneteenth: AfricanAmerican folklore crossed with Christian mythology, the dozens filtered through Joycean stream of consciousness...

...Sunraider's self-betrayal is no less absolute than his betrayal of Hickman...

...Merely reading this Juneteenth...

...By undertaking a journey of self-discovery that discards various archetypes of black life, Bliss follows in the footsteps of Ellison's invisible man...

...Even his name's not his own name...

...Lord, what a country this is...

...He becomes a tireless moviegoer who sees his mother in the white heroines of the silver screen...

...Sunraider makes no claims on the past...

...WHY HAST THOU...

...Ellison had plenty of clenched militancy...

...Suffice it to say, all claims that the version of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth cobbled together by literary executor John Callahan is Ellison's last novel or even an Ellison novel at all, are monstrously fraudulent...

...JOHN PALATrELLA's essays and reviews have appeared in Dissent, Lingua Franca, and other publications...

...More than a sham, the posthumous Juneteenth is a mockery of the sacred and once considered inviolable bond between the artist and his work...

...He never tired of defending his variegated literary roots...

...Too much grit in the spiritual greens...

...that much I've learned underground...

...Why, one can imagine him telling Hickman, should I alone shoulder the burden of your dreams of racial uplift...

...Sunraider glides through the nation's corridors of power but only after taking revenge on his own racially and culturally hybrid past...

...But Ellison also endorses the ritual's vitality by casting Hickman's sermons in a lyrical prose that mixes incantatory rhythms and idiomatic expressions...

...As in Invisible Man, Ellison's obsession in Juneteenth is American identity—a rich, bewildering metaphysic of individuality and tradition wherein self-invention can morph into self-deception and race can just as easily confound as enrich a sense of self...

...Unfortunately, one of the novel's loose ends is Sunraider's rise to power, which is not chronicled at all...

...In the opening pages of Juneteenth a contingent from Hickman's congregation accompanies him to Sunraider's office...

...Hickman wants to embody for Sunraider what Mary Rambo, the transplanted Southerner who operates a boardinghouse in Harlem, embodies for the narrator of Invisible Man: a stable, familiar force from the past...

...Still, the novel stands as a check on Ellison's celebrated optimism...

...The vernacular of the revival circuit breaks through...

...It was a question of discerning sequence, sorting out the occasional differences between his pagination and his notes of intention...

...To Sunraider's great distress, the culture he absorbed at Hickman's side and subsequently estranges himself from proves irrepressible...

...others are jagged gems, and still others shards...

...But my world has become one of infinite possibilities...

...But soon we learn that Sunraider was once an orphan named Bliss, and that Bliss was raised by Hickman...

...All of Hickman's homespun art, however, can't keep Bliss from betraying the preacher's hopes...

...And yes, the novel does contain those loose ends...

...Ellison never reveals to the reader Bliss's true racial makeup, and Hickman never reveals to Bliss the circumstances of his birth...

...He lives in a cultural void created by his unbridled optimism—a nostalgia for the future that liquidates the past...

...he is his own man—and is gunned down for what he has become...

...Juneteenth invokes a day of liberation, but the relationship between Bliss and Hickman leads one to wonder if Ellison ever believed wholeheartedly that emancipation could be achieved or that the integration of the imagination he had achieved and defiantly defended would ever be matched by that most infinite of possibilities—the integration of American society...

...makes one feel complicit in a literary crime, each turn of the page an aiding and abetting of Callahan's callow butchery...

...I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now, after being Tor' society and then `against' it, I assign myself no rank or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the times...

...When he is shot he cries out, "Lord, LAWD...

...Juneteenth, which breaks the past lives of Hickman and Bliss into fragments, resembles the pieces of glass that shower down on Sunraider...

...Thus on the moral level I propose that we view the whole of American life as a drama acted out upon the body of a Negro giant, who, lying trussed up like Gulliver, forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which the action unfolds," Ellison declared...

...This is unnerving because Juneteenth is also about betrayals and counterfeit resurrections, and they are more absorbing than those supposedly pertaining to the novel's release...

...Rather, it is the delusion and self-hatred that racism breeds in the novel's protagonist...

...Callahan spent three years quarrying a coherent, 350-page narrative from a 1,500-page manuscript that Ellison started in 1952 and left unfinished when he died in 1994...

...What shapes the pieces into a pattern is a series of conversations between Hickman and Bliss, who trade remarks in the hospital just as they did at Baptist revival meetings a half-century before, when their call-and-response exchanges sent listeners into a frenzy...

...Shame on Callahan, in other words...

...Callahan has rolled a big boulder up a steep hill...

...At a prearranged moment in Hickman's sermon, the coffin would open and Bliss would rise up, his counterfeit resurrection sending the assembled worshippers into ecstasy...

...Bliss's transformation into a prodigal son begins at a revival meeting commemoratDISSENT / Fall 1999 113 ing Juneteenth, that day in 1865 when, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation, Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, and informed the gathered slaves that they were free...

...One of the many surprises of Juneteenth is that the trapped figure is a race-baiting Northern senator, Adam Sunraider, who has disguised the fact that he was raised as a lightskinned black...

...By the end of Juneteenth, it's hard not to conclude that Ellison was among that tragically minded group...

...Hickman hopes the senator's resurrection of his long-buried childhood will somehow return him to the fold and prompt him to embrace the role of liberator for which Hickman prepared him...

...What posthumous work doesn't...

...BY SPURNING Hickman's expectations, Bliss gains a certain degree of freedom...

...it culminates in a hallucination of three vengeful blacks driving a hot rod and trying to run him down...

...Living with this ambiguity agonizes Bliss (though it shouldn't agonize readers), and he eventually lights out for white America—or at least what he thinks it to be...

...These stem-winders are among the most moving passages in the book...

...The assumption he wanted novelists to battle is the one pinning his Gulliver down—that the archetypal American, with all his or her aspirations to equality, liberty, and individuality, is white...

...And even when in the hospital the two men stir up memories about their shared past, their collaboration springs mostly from antagonism...

...Both cast off borrowed clothes...

...The route back to Hickman's and Bliss's past is hardly direct and true...

...And it came to the Senator that he was watching no ordinary automobile...

...Some pieces of the book are as intricate as flakes of fallen snow...

...An improvisation, a bastard creation of black bastards...

...In the novel's closing pages, Sunraider falls into a fever dream of approaching death...

...He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y...

...There are too many of Ellison's trademark double-edged plots and ironic reversals in Juneteenth, and too much of his vivid delirious prose for the book to be the ersatz Ellison novel condemned by Tate and others...

...Hickman is right...

...Soon he embarks on a pilgrimage to whiteness...

...Set in the mid-1950s, Juneteenth spirals out from a single event: a hospital vigil following the attempted assassination of Sunraider by a black man named Severen...

...Hickman thinks of Negroes as the embodiment of American democratic promises, as the last who are fated to become first, the downtrodden who shall be exalted...

...Hickman believes in racial equality but his optimism is yoked to his sense of humanity's innate fallibility: "Faith in the Lord and Master is easy compared to having faith in the goodness of man," he admits...

...Hickman tries to console the Senator by encouraging him to delve into the past they shared, but this only deepens Sunraider's wounds, since his memories return him to an adolescence wracked by doubts about his origins...

...Yes, Random House does deserve some jabs for dubbing Juneteenth Ralph Ellison's "triumphant second novel...

...Still, as critics have saddled up their white stallions and charged forward to protect Ellison's laurels, they have treated the meaning of Juneteenth as something of an afterthought...

...The woman, who is not Bliss's mother, has caused untold damage nonetheless, having lodged in his mind doubts about his birthright...

...Which shouldn't deter anyone from reading the book...

...But Bliss's search for freedom endorses the very belief—that to be American one must be white—that keeps the eponymous narrator of Invisible Man in chains...

...Callahan has culled from it the portion that, to his mind, best cohered into a novel...

...There are some loose ends in the book...

...And where Ellison didn't work it out, I thought it was better to let it be suggested...

...A white woman disrupts Hickman's religious vaudeville during the resurrection scene and, clawing at the still-interred Bliss, screams, "He's mine, MINE...

...IN INVISIBLE MAN the trapped figure is the narrator: racism makes him invisible to others while his indecision about the direction of his life makes him invisible to himself...

...There is a catastrophe regarding Juneteenth, but it's not the book's publication...

...What a phrase—still it's a good phrase and a good view of life, and a man shouldn't accept any other...

...This was no Cadillac, no Lincoln, Oldsmobile or Buick— nor any other known make of machine....It was a junkyard sculpture mechanized...

...He schools him in Gospel truths about humility, perseverance, and redemption, and he wastes no effort making the boy a symbol of new life...

...Made himself from the ground up, you might say," Hickman admits to himself about the Senator...

...Several deaconesses wrestle the woman to the ground and a few others whisk Bliss away to safety...

...I came to believe and discern this narrative, Juneteenth, was the part [Ellison] returned to most often and came back to with the greatest care," Callahan told the Washington Post in June...

...Ellison pokes fun at this ritual, emphasizing Bliss's very human feeling of claustrophobia in the coffin and the vaudeville tricks that prop up Hickman's religious allegory...

...This episode circles back to a moment early in the novel when the senator, shortly before he is shot, makes a reference in his speech to what he brands the "Coon Cage Eight," thereby mocking African-Americans' supposed love of fancy cars...

...Greg Tate, writing in the Village Voice in July, is typical of the novel's many detractors...

...You gypsy niggers stole him, my baby...

...When Ellison protested, it was usually against the notion that literary and cultural influences flow along tidy racial and ethnic lines...

...112 DISSENT / Fall 1999 In "Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity," published a year after Invisible Man, Ellison upbraided a handful of modernist novelists for ignoring what he considered the central tragedy of the nation, one confronted honestly by Twain and Melville in the previous century: how the citizens of a democracy could blind themselves to the enslavement of blacks...

...Although Ellison chided interviewers who asked him if Invisible Man was an autobiographical novel, he never shied away from explaining how his life was proof that such infinite possibilities could be realized...

...Whereas the invisible man refuses to be a black power militant and a communist flunky, Bliss rejects Hickman's anointing of him as the savior of the race...

...RALPH ELLISON' S posthumous novel, Juneteenth, has become a book mired in charges of betrayal, and its editor, John Callahan, has been hounded for overseeing the desecration and counterfeit resurrection of a literary corpse...

...As part of the revival-meeting routine, Hickman would dress Bliss in a suit of white satin and enclose him in a coffin outfitted with a concealed breathing tube...

...But never mind...

...Sunraider has summoned to his bedside a preacher, Reverend Alonzo Hickman, who was on Capitol Hill with his flock, having led a march on Washington from Georgia in a failed attempt to warn Sunraider that his life was in jeopardy...

...Despite Hickman's counsel the delirious Sunraider remains unrepentant, and a stereotype he exploited repeatedly wings him away to hell...

...For, like most everyone in our country, I 114 DISSENT / Fall 1999 started out with my share of optimism," muses the narrator of Invisible Man, deep in his coal chute redoubt...

...Somewhere through all the falseness and the forgetting there is something solid and good," he explains in the early hours of his bedside vigil...

...Ellison never finished his second novel...

...DISSENT / Fall 1999 115...

...In his working notes for the novel, Ellison wrote that "Bliss symbolizes for Hickman an American solution as well as a religious possibility...