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Juneteenth: A Novel

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Juneteenth: A Novel

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Overview

The radiant, posthumous second novel by the visionary author of Invisible Man, featuring an introduction and a new postscript by Ralph Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan, and a preface by National Book Award-winning author Charles Johnson

“Ralph Ellison’s generosity, humor and nimble language are, of course, on display in Juneteenth, but it is his vigorous intellect that rules the novel. . . . A majestic narrative concept.”—Toni Morrison

In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. “Tell me what happened while there’s still time,” demands the dying Sunraider.

Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. Senator Sunraider, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a black community steeped in religion and music (not unlike Ralph Ellison’s own childhood home) and was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in an “anguished attempt,” Ellison once put it, “to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning.” In the end, the two men confront their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator’s confronting how deeply estranged he had become from his true identity.

In Juneteenth, Ralph Ellison evokes the rhythms of jazz and gospel and ordinary speech to tell a powerful tale of a prodigal son in the twentieth century. At the time of his death in 1994, Ellison was still expanding his novel in other directions, envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle. Always, in his mind, the character Hickman and the story of Sunraider’s life from birth to death were the dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of Ellison’s widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan, has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph Ellison’s forty-year work in progress—its author’s abiding testament to the country he so loved and to its many unfinished tasks.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593242100
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/25/2021
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.50(d)

About the Author

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award and one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. He died in New York City in 1994.

John F. Callahan is the Emeritus Professor at Lewis & Clark College. He has been the editor or writer of numerous volumes related to African American and twentieth-century literature. As Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, Callahan edited the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.

Charles Johnson is the National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage and Dreamer.

Date of Birth:

March 1, 1914

Date of Death:

March 16, 1994

Place of Birth:

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

Place of Death:

New York City

Education:

Tuskegee Institute, 1933-36

Read an Excerpt

Introduction

In his later years, after hours, if he had put in a good day at his desk, Ralph Ellison was known to chuckle at the parallel between the “crazy country” he loved and contended with and what in 1969 he called his “novel‐in‐progress (very long in progress).” Ellison’s projected second novel was a glint in his eye as early as June 1951, when he wrote Albert Murray that he was “trying to get going on my next book before this one [Invisible Man] is finished . . .” In April 1953 he told Murray of his “plan to scout the Southwest. I’ve got to get real mad again, and talk with the old folks a bit. I’ve got one Okla. book in me I do believe.” By 1954 Ellison had begun to put pen to paper, and in April 1955 he sent Murray a “working draft” of an episode. From then on, even as he wrote numerous essays, taught at half a dozen colleges, held the Albert Schweitzer Professorship in the Humanities at New York University, and, in the name of citizenship, did more than his duty on national boards and commissions, the second novel remained Ellison’s hound of heaven (and hell) pursuing him “down the arches of the years,” pursuing him “down the labyrinthine ways/Of [his] own mind” until the end of his life in 1994.

From 1955 to 1957 Ellison was at work on the second novel as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. “It was in Rome during 1956,” he told John Hersey, that he “conceived the basic situation, which had to do with a political assassination.” Not too long afterward, in June 1959, Ellison wrote Murray that “Bellow [with whom Ellison was sharing a house in Tivoli, New York, close to Bard College, where both men taught] has read book two and is to publish about fifty pages in a new mag which he is editing—THE NOBLE SAVAGE—of all things.” Telling David Remnick of The New Yorker in 1994 that Ellison had “let me read a considerable portion of it—a couple of hundred pages, at least,” Bellow remembered vividly that “all of it was marvelous stuff, easily on a level with Invisible Man.” In a later reminiscence Bellow wrote, “In what he did, Ralph had no rivals. What he did no one else could do—a glorious piece of good fortune for a writer.”

During the next five or six years Ellison published three more excerpts in literary quarterlies. Meanwhile, the contract for the book, dated August 17, 1965, stipulated delivery on September 1, 1967. In his own mind Ellison was moving toward completion in the summer and fall of 1967 as he revised the novel at his summer home outside Plainfield, a village in the Berkshires. Then, in the late afternoon of November 29, 1967, Ellison and his wife, Fanny, returned from shopping to find the house in flames. With regret in her voice, Mrs. Ellison recalled being restrained from approaching the burning house by volunteer firemen who had arrived too late. “I wish I’d been able to break the window and pull out Ralph’s manuscript,” she told me years later. “I knew right where it was.”

The Plainfield fire has taken on the proportions of myth to such an extent that it is useful to revisit what Ellison had to say about it over the years. Ten days after the event, he wrote Charles Valentine that “the loss was particularly severe for me, as a section of my work‐in‐progress was destroyed with it.” Later in the same letter Ellison outlined the task he saw before him: “Fortunately, much of my summer’s work on the new novel is still in my mind and if my imagination can feed it I’ll be all right, but I must work quickly.” According to James Alan McPherson, Ellison told him in 1969 that the fire “destroyed a year’s worth of revisions,” but that “he is presently in the process of revising it again.” In 1980 Ellison told a reporter from the Daily Hampshire Gazette, “I guess I’ve been able to put most of it back together.” To David Remnick, just before his eightieth birthday in 1994, Ellison made perhaps his fullest public comment on the fire: “There was, of course, a traumatic event involved with the book. We lost a summer house and, with it, a good part of the novel. It wasn’t the entire manuscript, but it was over three hundred and sixty pages. There was no copy.”

By the time of McPherson’s account, done with Ellison’s blessing and collaboration in 1970, the second novel had begun to loom larger than a novel or a work‐in‐progress. “He has enough typed manuscripts to publish three novels,” McPherson wrote, “but is worried over how the work will hold up as a total structure. He does not want to publish three separate books, but then he does not want to compromise on anything essential. ‘If I find that it is better to make it a three‐section book, to issue it in three volumes, I would do that as long as I thought that each volume had a compelling interest in itself,’ ” Ellison told McPherson. On and off for the rest of his life, Ellison continued to work on his mythic saga of race and identity, language and kinship in the American experience. Sometimes revising, sometimes reconceiving, sometimes writing entirely new passages into an oft‐ reworked scene, he accumulated some two thousand pages of typescripts and printouts by the time of his death. His last published excerpt from the novel, an offshoot from the main text titled “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator,” appeared in 1977. Although he continued to write and revise until a fatal illness struck him at the end of March 1994, just four weeks after his eightieth birthday, Ralph Ellison did not live to finish his forty‐year work‐in‐progress.

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.

Reading Group Guide

1. The first chapter, in which Hickman and his followers come to Washington, employs a fairly clear and traditional narrative style. Chapter Two, on the other hand, is experimental, even surreal, in its stream-of-consciousness presentation of events. It places the reader in the midst of things and causes a certain sense of bewilderment which is only laid to rest upon reading through the novel. What is the effect, as you read, of Ellison's presentation of his characters' shifting thoughts, and the movements from past to present in the consciousness of his characters?

2. During his speech in the Senate, we learn that the significance of Adam Sunraider's name is in the beliefs he holds about identity and its fluidity. He says, "Ours is the freedom and obligation to be ever the fearless creators of ourselves, the reconstructors of the world. We were created to be Adamic definers, namers and shapers of yet undiscovered secrets of the universe" [p. 23]! How is this idea particularly American? How are Sunraider's ideas about identity different from those held by Reverend Hickman?

3. What does Sunraider mean by saying that the main substance of American consumption consists of ideals [p. 16]? Can ideals be consumed, or are they supposed to be stable, unshifting? How does the seeming idealism of the senator's speech resound with his abrupt shift to joking about Cadillacs in Harlem [p. 23]? Are the ironies of this speech easier to grasp once the reader knows more about Sunraider's history?

4. What is the significance of Juneteenth, the day in 1865 on which Texas slaves found out—very belatedly—that they were free? Why does what happens on thecommemoration of Juneteenth have such a shattering effect upon Bliss's life? Why does Ellison want to draw a parallel between that date in the history of American slavery, and this fateful day for Hickman and Bliss?

5. Why are the movie industry and Bliss's fascination with movie-making so central to the story? Is there a meaning in the sequence of Bliss's progression from itinerant revival preacher to movie-maker to politician? What is Ellison saying about the role of illusion in American culture and belief? Hickman says, as he prepares to take Bliss to the picture show for the first time, "The preacher's job, his main job, Bliss, is to help folks find themselves and to keep reminding them to remember who they are" [p. 223]. What is the role of illusion, or trickery, in Daddy Hickman's ministry? Is there a contradiction here?

6. Why does Ellison deliberately contrast the hard-won integrity and deep self-knowledge of Hickman with the bewilderment, the desperate grasping at various identities, of Bliss/Sunraider? Is black identity necessarily more clear-cut than white identity?

7. Ellison has written, "Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man's value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black." How does this statement apply to Juneteenth? What, for Ellison, is the role that black culture plays in the lives of white Americans? What is its role in American culture as a whole?

8. What do you think of Bliss's role in Hickman's show as the son who rises from the dead? Is this exploitative on Hickman's part, given that Bliss is so clearly afraid of being imprisoned in the coffin for this theatrical resurrection? Do you feel sympathetic toward Bliss in his need to break free of Daddy Hickman's control over his life?

9. What is the relationship between Sunraider's public references to black Americans as "those alien-minded groups who refuse the sacred obligations of becoming true Americans... these internal enemies" and one of his private thoughts that appears on the same page—"How here I reject them and out of my rejection rule them. They create their own darkness and in their embarrassment left all to chance my changed opportunity" [pp. 60-61]. How important is self-hatred in his transformation? We don't know, finally, whether Sunraider is white or of mixed race. Does it matter? Why should he desire so strongly to reject the people who raised him?

10. What is the relationship between preaching and music (gospel, jazz, and blues) in Juneteenth, particularly in Hickman's description of the Juneteenth celebration in Chapter Seven? How do these musical rhythms affect Ellison's prose style?

11. One of the book's most important scenes takes place when Hickman and his followers go to pray at the Lincoln Memorial and feel a profound identification with "father Abraham" [p. 281]. Why does this sequence have such a strong emotional impact? Are Hickman and his followers the true inheritors of Lincoln's moral integrity?

12. With his adoption by Hickman, Bliss effectively becomes the child of an entire community, and Hickman speaks of the adoption in communal terms. "We took the child and tried to seek the end of the old brutal dispensation in the hope that a little gifted child would speak for our condition from inside the only acceptable mask. That he would embody our spirit in the councils of our enemies—but oh! what a foolish miscalculation" [p. 271]! What is the moral principle that Hickman and his followers have attempted to live by? Why are they faithful to Sunraider to the end?

13. What does Hickman mean when he says, "Little Bliss was father to the man and the man was also me" [p. 320]? How is Hickman, a gambler-musician turned preacher, changed by the presence of Bliss in his life? What happens during their long conversation in the hospital? Is there forgiveness and reconciliation between them?

14. The final chapter is a hallucinatory stream of memories and visions in the senator's mind. Filled with danger and escape, it seems to recapitulate in dreamlike form many of the scenes of Bliss's childhood—among them, the figure of his red-haired mother and the wealthy world of riding habits, ball gowns, and shooting jackets [see Chapter Ten], and a little boy in red pantaloons who might be an image of himself and who also seems to merge with the little clown in blackface on page 249. How does the final chapter change your perspective on Sunraider and his betrayal of Hickman? Is there a sense of justice here, since Sunraider is threatened with violence from blacks and whites alike?

15. How is your response to Juneteenth affected by the afterword, in which Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, explains that he extracted the narrative he says "best stands alone as a single, self-contained volume" from over 2, 000 pages of typescript that Ellison had worked on for over 40 years?

16. For discussion of Juneteenth and Invisible Man

1. Ellison's novels are part of an ongoing and necessary dialogue in American literature that, like the work of such writers as Mark Twain and William Faulkner, examines the issue of race—and more importantly, the mixing of races—as a haunting and potentially liberating aspect of American history. If you've read works of Faulkner and Twain, how do the works of Ellison take up and modify their themes and concerns? How is Adam Sunraider related thematically to the protagonist of Invisible Man?

17. 2. Both Invisible Man and Juneteenth are centered upon a restless and driven protagonist; one is a black man, and one is, or at least passes for, white. In Invisible Man, many forces conspire to "keep this nigger-boy running." What, in Juneteenth, provokes Bliss/Sunraider's flight? Can Juneteenth be seen as a continuation of the earlier novel? How do the two works differ?

18. 3. The "battle royal" scene and Tod Clifton's Sambo dolls are among many details in Invisible Man that emphasize the degradation of black people at the hands of whites. Does the dignity of Hickman in Juneteenth, even in the face of humiliation, seem to make Juneteenth a more hopeful, less satirical book than its predecessor?

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For anyone who cares about American literature and the seemingly insolvable pain of race, Juneteenth is a must-read.”—USA Today

“Juneteenth is written with unmistakable Ellisonian zest, depth, and elegance. . . . The work holds together as a complete, aesthetically satisfying, and at times thrilling whole.”—The Atlantic

“Impressionistic, jazzy, and Faulknerian, assembled from stories inside of stories, dreams, flights of memory, and bolts of rhetoric.”—New York

“First-rate Ellison, exploring race and America in dreamlike prose.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Ellison wrote better sentences than just about anybody. . . . Juneteenth is good the first time, better the second. His meanings slip and slide, they are associative, like American culture, where nothing is every quite what it seems, nor stays that way for long, and where absolutely nothing is purely black and white.”—Newsweek

“A stunning achievement . . . Juneteenth is a tour de force of untutored eloquence. Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental.”—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time

From the Publisher

The Barnes & Noble Review
Forty years in the making, second novel published
"To That Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes." So reads the author's dedication in Ralph Ellison's long-awaited, unfinished, and posthumously published second novel, Juneteenth. Within this puzzling, nearly paradoxical dedication lies the heart of Ralph Ellison's life work: an almost quixotic search for an American identity. Not his own American identity, but much more a naming, a labeling of that personality that makes America, its hatreds and possibilities, its glories and opportunities missed. Into this racial, paranoiac cauldron Ellison placed the American Negro, validating his presence, insisting on his visibility.
The author's first novel, Invisible Man , one of the most important American novels of the 20th century and Ellison's most seminal work, chronicles the existential journey of an unnamed black man attempting to discover his identity and role in a hostile and confusing world that refuses to acknowledge his existence. The issues of alienation and rejection, exclusion and isolation suffuse Invisible Man . Similar themes carry the recently released Juneteenth, forty years in the making but never fully brought to completion by the author. Ellison began writing what was to be titled Juneteenth in 1951, just prior to the publication of Invisible Man . The fame garnered from his first novel, a later loss by fire of a manuscript in progress, and ultimately death by cancer in 1994 all prevented Ellison from completion of the elusivesecondnovel. And in life, it weighed on him. In the novel's introduction, editor John F. Callahan points to Ellison's tongue-in-cheek reference to his "novel-in-progress (very long in progress)." In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison , Saul Bellow tells of a "dinner attended by foreign celebrities at which editor Georges Simenon (a prolific and popular Belgian-French novelist) asked Ellison how many novels he had written, and when he learned that there was only one he said, "To be a novelist one must produce many novels. Ergo, you are not a novelist." That indurate remark was a wounded albatross carried by Ellison to his grave.
Juneteenth positions two protagonists. The Reverend Alonzo Hickman, called "God's Trombone," is a "jazzman turned Baptist minister." Senator Adam Sunraider is "a self-named, race-baiting politician, formerly Bliss...a little boy of indefinite race who looks white and who, through a series of circumstances, comes to be reared by the Negro minister."
Reverend Hickman has found God yet wisely understands that souls are best saved with strong doses of pulpit-pounding religiosity and even larger doses of theatric flair. Hickman grooms Bliss into a boy preacher, teaching him the finer points of the salvation game. The crowning moment of their traveling ministry is the raising of the child Bliss from a center-placed coffin, Bible and cross in hand, proclaiming to be "the resurrection and the life." The crowd loves it.
Bliss grows and rebels, discovering the options afforded him by his light complexion along the way. He, too, learns the fine art of theater, but in a more clinically demonic manner. He abandons Hickman and all things black, suppresses Bliss, renames himself Sunraider, and ultimately wins a state senatorial position, rejecting then persecuting the community that raised him. Now an avowed racist, he is assassinated by a black man while race baiting on the Senate floor.
This story of two men, one deeply ensconced within the culture of black community, the other opportunistic and self-loathing, is told from Sunraider's hospital deathbed. While offering an interesting story line, it is in the dialogue that the book suffers. Limited by circumstance (Sunraider is dying), much of the dialogue is conveyed by some sort of understood osmosis between the two — not conversation as much as a collaborative and mutual retelling of their stories. Introspection, sermons, and speeches are woven throughout the text. Possibly confusing? Possibly frustrating? The reader may find it so. Juneteenth's underlying themes prove much more interesting. Author and critic Albert Murray, in comparing Ellison to Richard Wright, states in Encarta Africana that "Ellison, no less than Wright, rejects the black church as a vehicle for expression, which means both rejected the central communal institution in black life. Oddly, one finds more about black religion in the work of Wright the Marxist than in Ellison the folklorist. Both Ellison and Wright, staunch individualists, are wary of the harshness of conformity and anti-intellectualism in black life."
Ellison's treatment of the black church and its ministry in Juneteenth was, then, true to form. Verging on stereotype and caricature, Ellison's cynically humorous contempt for both clergy and their flock lays thinly veiled.
Still, Ellison remains the quintessential interpreter of the African-American scene. Juneteenth is a novel for the Ellison reader interested in issues of American identity and racial equality. And while not written of the same timber as invisible Man , Ellison, through race, culture, conflict, and schism, may have done even more in offering reason for the extinction of "that vanished tribe." The second novel has been published, the albatross removed. Ralph Waldo Ellison rests in peace.

— Max Rodriguez

What is especially revealing about Juneteenth, in fact, is how invested Ellison had become in the past....The unfinished novel begins in the 1950's and looks entirely backward. It is as though Ellison had hoped to resurrect the world of black Oklahoma, the world of his ''American Negro.'' That he came to feel that world was lost forever may not have been the least of the reasons he was unable to finish his book.
— The New York Times Book Review \

Louis Menand

...[P]rovides the reader with intimations of the grand vision animating Ellison's 40-year project....[B]rilliant passages suggest that [the novel] might have used the rich, interpenetrating strands of American language to underscore the...ways in which individuals use language to both define and reinvent themselves.
—New York Times

Michiko Kakutani

The late Ralph Ellison's 1952 debut, Invisible Man, remains as fine an American novel as has appeared since World War II. Afterward, he worked periodically on his "novel in progress (very long progress)" until his death in 1994. A third of that sprawling manuscript is published here, his literary executor explains in the introduction. So how are we to evaluate it, if we even should? This ambitious book (whose title refers to the 1865 day when word of Emancipation finally reached Texas slaves) certainly has the rhetorical flourishes and bluesy erudition found in Invisible Man, and its criss-crossing story is original and bold: an Oklahoma boy-preacher with racially vague features becomes a bigoted Northern Senator, Adam Sunraider, before his life intersects again with that of his estranged black mentor, Rev. Alonzo Hickman, around a 1955 assassination. The two characters are vivid, but whereas in his masterpiece the soaring language seemed an extension of the tormented narrator, too often here it clearly comes from the omniscient Ellison himself. Ellison's fans will nevertheless find much to savor and can only wonder about the unseen chapters. For all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/99.]--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Gr 11 Up-By Ralph Ellison. Both a jazz novel and a thunderous sermon, it offers up in its language a song of praise to the richness of the African American experience. A redemptive counterpoint to the Invisible Man's existentialism, it is a reckoning of sorts with Ellison's own life's journey and a parable about God and race in America. Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

The book has moments of magnificence, and throughout, one feels the presence of Ellison's moral intelligence, his refined lucidity, his ambition and clean sensibility.
— The New Republic

James Wood

...[The] reader...may find Juneteenth less coherent and powerful than Invisible Man. But he is also likely to find here the same richness, power, and complexity in the uniquely American voice of one of this country's most versatile modern masters.
— National Review

Joseph Blotner

[The book is] cause for celebration as well as regret....Ellison's mission is to show memory's ability to set one free....[B]uried deep in the novel...lies an exceptionally insightful synopsis of race relations in America.
— The Christian Science Monitor

Trudy C. Palmer

Juneteenth contains the most resonant and alluring usus of the American idiom I've read in a while. It's got dream speech and movie talk and the music of the revival meeting and the language of teh juke joint all rolled into one. It rolls and riffs...[O]pen it and read, brothers and sisters, read...If publishing Juneteenth was a mistake, let us have more of them.
— The New York Observer

D. T. Max