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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
The earlier version unfolds dramatically within a reverie of Hickman's. He is at Senator Sunraider's bedside for hours; almost imperceptibly they have acted out an antiphonal, call-and-response going back and forth between the two of them. Sunraider is clearly dying, and Hickman is with him, musing about Sunraider, about his tragedy--its Americanness, its avoidability. And in the middle of Hickman's reverie, while the Senator is asleep, the old man has a reverie within his reverie in which he recalls the trip to the Lincoln Memorial the previous afternoon, the afternoon before the Senator's assassination. In this version it's a wonderful, charged scene because at this point we know the Senator is dying from wounds suffered in his assassination. We know what's happening and what has happened in the narrative. The scene crackles with dramatic tension, for in the present moment, Hickman is at the bedside of the dying Senator, trying to make sense of things, musing, with terrific regret in his mind, in his voice, about the things the Senator failed to see, and now he lies dying. And then in the midst of this reverie, Hickman remembers taking the brothers and sisters to the Lincoln Memorial the previous day. And the scene unfolds from there. In Book II you encounter that scene with an awareness of the assassination, with an awareness of where Hickman is in the present, at the Senator's bedside, and then the scene goes forward. I might add, too, that the scene is pithier and more idiomatic in its diction than in later versions. Ellison sometimes tended to over-elaborate and over-refine Hickman's language in later versions and revisions, almost as if he were instructing Hickman. But this earlier stuff comes to a powerful climax at the end of the scene. Hickman and the others are about to leave the Memorial, but they don't get on a tour bus. Instead, Ellison puts us back in Hickman's mind, in the hospital, with an absolutely wonderful line: "'And to think,' Hickman thought, stirring suddenly in his chair, 'we had hoped t o raise ourselves that kind of man.'" With his form and with this one line, Ellison's brought together his themes of identity and the tragic evasion of fatherhood and kinship, personally, racially, and nationally." 'Father Abraham,'" one of the sisters asks Hickman at the Lincoln Memorial," 'is that Father Abraham?'"" 'Yes,'" Hickman replies over and over, affirming Lincoln's right to be called "father," and Ellison brings the scene back to the present of Hickman's "secret son," Senator Sunraider, formerly the little boy, Bliss.
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De Santis: In thinking about the form of Juneteenth, do you consider Ellison's talents as a novelist to be in any way more mature here than in Invisible Man.
Callahan: During the course of this project, I had to stop myself from thinking that there had to be some natural progression, or trajectory, in Ellison's development as a novelist. I had to realize that the Ellison of the late 1980s and early 1990s was not necessarily a more mature novelist than the Ellison of the 1960s and 1970s. I had to remind myself that, for God's sake, he had written Invisible Man and published it ten, fifteen, twenty years before he was writing these scenes which I liked so much. I had to remind myself that the Ellis on writing in the '60s and early '70s was as mature as any novelist needs to be. Again, the thing that is wonderful about Juneteenth, aside from the vernacular vitality and lyricism of the language, is its dramatic tension and the fact that its form is neither linear nor circular--it flows out and back and around in a spiral. Everything spirals out from the encounter that these two men have in the present at the Senator's bedside. There are reflections backwards, forwards , reflections at many different points of time and space, but they all proceed from a continuing, immediate spatial moment in time. The novel is a high-modernist, vernacular literary moment. Faulkner and Joyce and Woolf and Proust are some of the writers Ellison was talking to in this book. And he was not conversing only with writers. As Henry Louis Gates points out, what Duke Ellington was playing and Romare Bearden was painting, Ellis on was putting into words and literary form. He brought jazz and collage to the modernist novel.
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