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"Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth - Interview
African American Review, Winter, 2000 by Christopher C. De Santis, John F. Callahan
Along the way I had raved to Christine, who was painting in another part of the room, about the Hickman-Bliss narrative, what Ellison had called Book II. Now, hearing my frustration, she said, "Why don't you have another look at that manuscript you love so much?" I did, and that's when it hit me that I was going about this task the wrong way, that I was working within a necessity that there be one novel, period. A single, coherent, continuous novel. And it struck me that, whatever Ellison's intentions and hopes had been, that wasn't what he had done. What he did was to leave fragments--some extremely fragmentary and others all but complete--of several potential novels or narratives within his saga. And what had always seemed to me his most powerful, moving, compelling, and fully crafted material--the narrative where he is truly in his prime--was all but complete, an all but complete narrative within the whole. That realization was enormously exciting and satisfying.
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To test out my hunch, I went back to an episode that I had very much liked in several versions--the scene in which Reverend Hickman brings the members of his congregation to the Lincoln Memorial. I read out loud Ellison's latest version of that scene, and then the earlier version from Book II. In the later version, Ellison has Hickman concerned about giving the people in his congregation something to do after they are turned away from the Senator's office. Ellison records all of Hickman's movements at the hotel: He takes a shower; he lies down and takes a nap; Deacon Wilhite calls him and wakes him up; he comes down to the lobby, goes outside, gets into a tour bus with the others; they ride to the Lincoln Memorial, get off the tour bus, go up the steps, look at the Memorial; and, finally, the scene unfolds. Afterwards, they go down the steps, get back onto the tour bus and go back to the hotel. Now, some critics say that the pages missing from Juneteenth are wonderfully multi-layered, circular stuff. Well, much of it is circular, but not in the way that some think or perhaps hope it is.
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