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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
Callahan: Perhaps severs. Severen severs Sunraider--cuts him off because Sunraider has cut him off, tried to sever their sacred ties of father and son.
De Santis: Is this ever made clear in the novel?
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Callahan: There are some clues, but the notes help. Severen is Sunraider's son, and in some of the offshoots, the drafts, Ellison gives us bits of Severen's history. It's opaque and merely suggestive, and it gets tangled up, but Ellis on hoped at some point that he could bring Severen fully into the book, partly through McIntyre's good offices. Remember, Sunraider cuts himself off from the woman--in some drafts her name is Lavatrice--whom he did love and, having made love to, leaves. He moves on, and in moving on he cuts himself off from her, and cuts himself off from the child that comes of their union. In offshoot drafts Ellison makes it clear that Sunraider, once he makes his fortune, sends a lawyer to come and take the child away from Janie, the black woman who's raising him in Oklahoma, but he does not reveal himself to Severen. Severen goes off on his own, to France among other destinations. So there's a succession of unnatural human breaks, severances. Severen's name is symbolic in that sense.
De Santis: I'd like to turn now to the critical reception of Juneteenth. One comment that particularly stands out in my mind appeared in a Newsweek piece by Malcolm Jones, who suggested that the second reading of the novel is better than the first. And I would add that third and fourth readings reveal all the more the novel's complexities.
Callahan: I found Malcolm Jones's comment instructive. He's writing for a weekly news magazine, and, despite the pressure of weekly deadlines, he has enough respect for literature to read the book twice and talk to his readers as equals: "Good the first time and better the second." If you want to get a sense of the fullness of this book, you've got to go back to it again, probably more than once, and as Jones in Newsweek and Gates in Time have said, readers ought to take a look at Ellison's notes after they read the book. (I included a selection of Ellison's notes after the text of Juneteenth, but they didn't make it into the bound galleys. I think some reviewers might have missed them, but they're important.)
Juneteenth will be taught, argued about, and, I think, reread and revered long after the worms have worked their way through me, and perhaps you, too! As long as there's an American literature, it'll be up there on the shelf of the essential books.
De Santis: Not all reviewers, of course, have been as positive about Juneteenth as Jones and Gates. While most critics found moments of brilliance in the novel, some feel that, in the words of Michiko Kakutani (New York Times 25 May 1999), it is ultimately "Callahan's narrative."
Callahan: Well, that's reductive; it oversimplifies and distorts a complex matter. Juneteenth is a posthumously published narrative of which Ellison is the author and I am the editor. In that sense the book is inevitably a collaboration. But it is Ellison's book in the special way of an unfinished work edited posthumously without the active participation of its author.
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