Opus Two - Review

National Review, June 14, 1999 by Joseph Blotner

Mr. Blotner, professor of English emeritus of the University of Michigan, is the author of biographies of William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.

Juneteenth: A Novel, by Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan (Random House, 362 pp., $25)

Senator Adam Sunraider of South Carolina muses on his deathbed in one of this posthumous novel's many interior monologues. In the present time, about 1955, he thinks back to a time before he was born, June 19, 1865, when Union troops landed at Galveston, Texas, and their commander told the cheering slaves they were free. "'Juneteenth,' the Senator said, closing his eyes, his bandaged head resting beneath his hands. Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion."

One of the nation's most vehement anti-Negro politicians, Sunraider has been shot while addressing the Senate chamber. The assassin was a young black man who rose in the gallery from among a busload of South Carolina Negroes led there by Rev. Alonzo Z. Hickman, who happens to be the senator's foster father, a black Baptist preacher and evangelist so powerful that he is known as "God's Trombone." A huge musician, a rounder and a rambler in his youth, Hickman was led to God after an illicitly pregnant white-skinned woman knocked on his door one night just in time for him to deliver her child. Even though her false accusation of rape caused the lynching of Hickman's brother, Robert, and the death of their mother, she forces the child upon Hickman. His resistant acceptance of this charge saves him from bitterness and leads to his life of ministry. He names the child Bliss, for this is what the boy brings to Hickman even as he grows up in ignorance of his tragic parentage. Though his skin is light and his hair is straight, he is accepted as somehow black.

As Reverend Bliss, he becomes a prodigy as a child preacher, counterpointing Hickman's evangelistic sermons with his own. For Hickman and his congregation he is a symbol of God's promise until, rejecting his role at last and seeking his mother, he runs away. Hickman keeps track of him through a network of friends as he undergoes a transformation partially recapitulating Hickman's own youth. Bliss becomes a con man, a bogus film producer, and finally achieves wealth and power as Sen. Sunraider, rabble-rousing politician. It is only with this Washington expedition of Hickman's congregation, lobbying for reforms, that the two men come together again at last as the senator is being transported to the hospital, mortally wounded. Ellison's method has been called antiphonal; and somewhat like the powerful statement- and-response pattern in church, the conversations and meditations of the two men reveal the senator's attempt to find a "way home."

Ellison dedicated his novel "To That Vanished Tribe into Which I was Born: The American Negroes." Though Juneteenth is about liberation as well as resurrection, it is not a novel of black militancy. Though it celebrates the kind of independence Ellison saw in his namesake, Ralph Waldo Emerson, in a more pervasive way it celebrates faith, the kind Ellison sees embodied in "those old Negroes whom I'm trying to make Hickman represent," he once wrote, those who "never left the original briar patch."

The author himself was not such a Negro. Trained as a classical musician at the Tuskegee Institute, Ellison immersed himself in modern literature and found his vocation as a short-story writer and essayist. His extraordinary range extended to jazz as well as traditional spirituals. He drew also upon the profane, as in his use of "the dozens," a traditional contest of rhyming abuse and mutual defamation of the antagonists' mothers. He learned from contemporary black writers and drew heavily as well on traditional elements in black culture. Certain white writers such as Joel Chandler Harris, author of Uncle Remus's tales of Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear, also inspired Ellison in the use of folk models as well as 20th-century symbolism.

But Ellison found his most important influences in the great modernists, among them Eliot and Yeats, Joyce and Faulkner. Like Joyce, he employed symbolic objects and actions to add levels of meaning in his complex narration and plotting. With his work marked increasingly by fluidity of time sequence, he profited from Joyce's use of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Faulkner's use of interior monologue provided the same kind of example while the vast extent of his Yoknapatawpha saga appealed to Ellison in his ambitious attempts to render the dilemmas of characters immersed in history as well as present time. In his use of leitmotifs and patterns of imagery, he profited not only from Eliot and Yeats but from poets such as his friend Robert Penn Warren.

Ellison gave evidence of the mastery he had achieved with his 1952 novel, Invisible Man. Invisible because he feels he is seen only in terms of racist stereotypes, the protagonist tries to define himself as a unique individual and to reject the identities imposed upon him successively in the worlds of college, industry, and politics. After a series of brief illusory achievements, he encounters duplicity and exploitation that lead to disasters, climaxing in the chaos of the Harlem riots. He escapes by hibernating under the city street in a space he illuminates brightly by tapping the power-company line. At last, as he prepares to emerge, he tells the reader, "Who knows but that on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" It is an extraordinarily rich, multifaceted, and powerful book, perhaps the best American novel in the post-World War II era.