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Juneteenth |
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 Juneteenth byRalph Ellison Random House Canada (Vintage International) 368 pages, 2000 ISBN 0375707549 Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart Read our author profile Ralph Ellison began his second novel Juneteenth after his inordinate success with Invisible Man in 1952. Ellison had to reconstruct fifteen years’ work after a 1967 house fire destroyed his only manuscript. When he died in 1994, he left behind 2,000 manuscript pages broken down into Books I, II, and III - pages that were filled with sketchy, disjointed notes, plot lines, dialogue, and synopses. Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, gleaned the most-intact and stand-alone portion of the manuscript from Book II, to publish one of the literary sensations of 1999, forty-seven years later, and five years after Ellison’s death. Set in 1955, Juneteenth is part Southern revival meeting, part commentary on African-American status in 1950s America, part remembrance, and part reflection. Juneteenth is the story of Senator Adam Sunraider, a New Englander known primarily for his intense hatred of blacks. During a particularly inflammatory speech against blacks on the Senate floor, Sunraider, riddled with bullets and near death, asks for the man who raised him, Alonzo Z. "Daddy" Hickman, a black man. Daddy Hickman, who just happens to be in Washington, DC trying to see the Senator, remains by Sunraider’s bedside, reflecting and remembering. It’s never clear whether Sunraider is white and was raised by blacks, or if he was black and very light-skinned and could pass for white. Daddy Hickman doesn’t know the Senator by the name Adam Sunraider. He had called the boy Bliss and trained him in his own likeness. Somehow, Daddy Hickman became the child’s guardian, but this issue is never clarified. However, Daddy Hickman raises Bliss to be a preacher. But along the way, Bliss/Sunraider runs away and turns against the black community that loved and cared for him. Could it have been that he went in search of the mother who abandoned him? Or to search for the white woman with the red hair who tried to kidnap him during a revival meeting, claiming to be his mother? The reasons for Bliss’s departure from the black community are never discussed and leave a hole that would not be tolerated from an author of less stature. The story moves back and forth between the present - Daddy Hickman at the wounded man’s bedside - and the past, the raising of Bliss and his work as a little preacher; and Bliss as a young man traveling the country as a moviemaker. Bliss’ tenure as filmmaker adds a confusing element to the story which could have been deleted. Juneteenth has many good qualities and many problems. It reflects Ellison’s great talent and his ability to dig deep into the human psyche. The imagery is superb. The anecdotes of Bliss as a child are wonderfully written and extremely representative of small boys, black and white, growing up during the 1950s. However, Ellison’s stream-of-conscious style is often difficult to follow, as in Sunraider’s long-winded speech in Chapter two. Too many unanswered questions lead me to wonder if publishing an unfinished novel, like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, might have been a better idea, depending on the state in which Ellison left the manuscript. Published posthumously on June 19, 1999, the title Juneteenth is used symbolically in celebration and in recognition of June 19, 1865 - the day Texas slaves were officially freed by the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation two and a half years earlier. The symbolism of the title reflects Ellison’s deep commitment to the writing of the fight for freedom. Juneteenth is now celebrated in all of America’s fifty states and is a state holiday in Texas. |
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