Sunday Morning! Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison

When Americans talk about their country, they often sound like disappointed parents discussing a beloved, but wayward child who had shown such promise once! The country itself feels like a promise, a work-in-progress that is always about to be abandonned in frustration. Americans are not unique in having mixed-feelings about their homeland, of course, but they seem to see its destiny in religious terms; a national soul that can be collectively saved or damned. I have asked my Virginia mother why she worries so much about the political struggles du jour and she has replied: “If freedom dies here, it’s lost!” As a visiting American once told me, of his frustrations with his nation: “Well, you know how it is- everyone thinks their country is the greatest on earth and they just want to see it live up to its promise.” Luckily, I’m not sure that’s true. There’s something about that idea that could make you crazy.

It’s possible to become obsessed with the promise of a work-in-progress such that you will never be satisfied with the thing made flesh. Ralph Ellison was never happy with his first novel, Invisible Man, which is rather remarkable considering it won the National Book Award in 1953 and is considered one of the truly great American novels, up there with works like Moby Dick and As I Lay Dying. It’s a complex and kaleidoscopic masterpiece, and was a taken as a revelation; James Baldwin found Ellison to be “the first Negro novelist I have ever read to utilize in language, and brilliantly, some of the ambiguity and irony of Negro life.” Nevertheless, Ellison was displeased and set about writing his second novel in 1954. When he died forty years later, it was still a work-in-progress, now spanning over 2,000 pages of prose and notes. The second child had grown wild and unruly.

I think anyone who has made any type of art knows well how difficult it can be to get something born from one’s head into the world without any birth defects. Reality is always imperfect, always a little flawed. The child never grows up to be what you’d dreamed they would be, and at some point, you have to accept what you can’t control and shouldn’t attempt to. Ellison still struggled. Over the years, he published eight excerpts from his work-in-progress, which were increasingly well-recieved. Famously, he lost a long section of pages, either orginal or revisions, in a house fire in 1967. The thing could not be brought in. After Ellison died in 1994, his literary executor John F. Callahan sorted through piles of papers, notes, computer disks, and other material to assemble what seemed the most cohesive part of the writing as Juneteenth: A Novel. Some complained that it was still too unfinished and fractured to be considered a novel. In 2010, Callahan expanded it to an 1,100 page version entitled Three Days Before the Shooting… It remains unfinished.

Appropriately enough, it is a story about a wayward son and flawed father and their struggles to reconcile with one another in the madhouse of America. As the story begins, a race-baiting Senator named Adam Sunraider is gunned down in the US Senate sometime in the early 1950s. A group of Black church folk had attempted to warn the Senator days before of the impending tragedy, but they were turned away from his office. Now, from his hospital bed, dying, he calls for their Reverend Alonzo Hickman to come and attend to him. The two men have a very complicated history together and their attempts to work through that shared history will form the tangled core of the story.

As a child, the Senator was known as Bliss; adopted by the Reverend, he toured the country as a pint-sized preacher, trying to save souls through showmanship. Language is a powerful instrument in the story and it’s easy to see how the boy was seduced by its capacity to move hearts in the political arena. Ellison is also entranced and fascinated by language, from the thundering oratorical to the slangy vernacular; he has an ear for American speech and one of the joys of the prose is its variety of registers. If America is a conversation, a debate, and a sermon, Ellison hears more nuances and inflections than the rest of us who are listening.

It’s not political speeches and religious preaching- Bliss spends time as a filmmaker and avid devotee of movies and circuses. Perhaps it was due to the cloistered nature of the last year, but I was accutely aware while reading how much of the story takes place in a heyday of performances and public events, right before the invention of the television set. People are together and emmeshed in a way that’s almost sexual in this millieu. As Bliss reaches adolescence, new urges emerge from the sexuality of crowds and his power over them. The way Ellison depicts this world has a hallucinogenic vividness. Everything feels sharp and bright- and loud.

And, naturally, the boy tries to find his way. Bliss has always been taken for a “high yellow Negro” by those who assumed the Reverend, who emerged from the blues circuit with an adopted son and a newfound devotion to God, was the father. That is until a crazed white woman shows up at a revival meeting on Juneteenth to snatch back the boy she claims is her stolen child. The church community saves Bliss only to lose him again, and they are haunted for years by the mystery of that loss. Until, that is, a crazed assassin returns Bliss to them. The prodigal’s return also brings home Hickman’s failed aspirations. He had hoped to raise the child in a sort of Christian racelessness as a rebuke to the racism that we learn tainted his birth. He now realizes the danger of this sort of hubris:

But what a feeling can come over a man just from seeing the things he believes in and hopes for symbolized in the concrete form of a man. In something that gives a focus to all the other things he knows to be real. Something that makes unseen things manifest and allows him to come to his hopes and dreams through his outer eye and through the touch and feel of his natural hand. That’s the dangerous shape, the graven image we were warned about, the one that makes it possible for him to hear his inner hopes sound and sing and see them soar up and take wing before his half-believing eyes. Faith in the Lord and Master is easy compared to having faith in the goodness of man. There are simply too many snares and delusions, too many masks, too many forked tongues. Too much grit in the spiritual greens…

And so, both men wrestle to save their souls through the other, the child the father of the man. There is something of the American “race question” here- the two men- one Black and the other taken for white- love and hate and ultimately need one another. There’s no one we despise more than those we need. Their shared history seems irreconcilable. I think this is nonetheless a story of reconciliation and reckoning that realizes there is almost no space between the two. So, naturally, it is an unfinished work. All things living are unfinished.

But what’s there is so tremendous. (Read a bit of the Juneteenth scene here.) I think Publisher’s Weekly was right that Juneteenth is “a visionary tour de force, a lyrical, necessary contribution to America’s perennial racial dialogue, and a novel powerfully reinforcing Ellison’s place in literary history.” There really are not many writers you can compare to Dostoevsky and Faulkner convincingly, even if the work is incomplete. Do I wish Ellison had finished this story? Yes. I wish he had written nineteen other novels! But that was not his process and a writer’s proces is all they have. Besides, raising a child can be torturous.

In the end, we can be frustrated with the difficult and torturous struggle that led to this triumphant, unfinished book. But this lineage too seems appropriate. To be American is to have a complicated history and an unsure parentage and to create oneself from that.

So, what are YOU reading, writing, celebrating, struggling with, or raising this Juneteenth weekend?