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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
So, what are we to make of all this? I think Ellison's point, in the quote you read, is that what finally matters is talent, sensibility, and respect for the authenticity, the uniqueness, the individuality of the character, or in the case of my work with this book, of the writer and his voice, and the voices of his characters. I think those are the matters that come into play, and what does not come into play is any over-simplified category of race. As Ellison put it in "A Very Stern Discipline" in 1967: "What's inside you, brother; what's your heart like? What are your real values? What human qualities are hidden beneath your idiom?"
De Santis: Ellison always resisted that stereotyping, didn't he?
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Callahan: He absolutely did, yes. Over and over again, he insists that "whatever else he is, the true American is also somehow black"; the true American will have absorbed and embraced his or her cultural blackness. Likewise, he talks about black folks being in some sense white, in the sense that their experience, too, partakes of the mysteries and the complexities of all of American culture. We are all connected. Think about the very last line of Chapter 2 in Juneteenth: "Bliss be-eeee thee ti-ee that binds." This is the Senator's delirious, silent riffing, if you will, or variation, I assume, on "Blessed be the ties that bind." So these are the ties that we have, and they're indissoluble. We can try to break them, but when we Americans deny these human ties of kinship what we usually end up breaking is ourselves--we fracture ourselves, and it's uphill as we try to put ourselves back together again, which is what Sunraider strives to do against his will with the help of Hickman after he has rejected the bles sings of his upbringing as Bliss.
De Santis: But he isn't able to do it, right? He dies. Unlike Invisible Man, he can't go underground and hibernate for a while and come back whole, ready for meaningful action.
Callahan: That's right. It's too late. And that's the tragedy. Ellison always talked about the tragic consequences of that characteristic American tendency to evade our identities, and in this case, yes, the Senator's shock of recognition comes too late except in the sense that what Ellison valued as "conscientious consciousness" becomes the Senator's last form of action, and his story, his experience is a parable for the rest of us.
De Santis: Can you recall the most difficult moment in the process of editing Juneteenth? Was there ever a time when you seriously questioned whether or not there was indeed a novel emerging from the thousands of pages of manuscript and notes, and whether you were up to the task of finding it?
Callahan: Yes on both counts. When you take on a project like this one, I suppose you rely somewhat on hope, and in the religious tradition I grew up in, you learn pretty close to the age of reason that there are three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity, and that the weakest of these is hope. Nevertheless, sometimes hope is what you have, and I had hope when Fanny walked me into the study and said, "Well, Ralph had told people that he hoped to have something pretty soon, but I'm not sure how close he came to finishing." I hoped I would find a last complete manuscript; or, almost as good, that I'd find the manuscript complete up to the last scene, and then a draft, perhaps unrevised, of a last scene, an all but finished conclusion to the book. I dearly wished for that to be the case; I hoped that would be the case. For a long time I kept thinking, there must be more. I dreamed about hidden manuscript pages. I went back several times and looked in the apartment. At one point I contacted Sylvia Erskin e, the daughter of Albert Erskine, Ellison's editor, who is the executrix of her father's papers. She was very gracious and generous, and I thought, maybe there's something there. There wasn't. So I thought, let's go to Random House and the archives. Again, a dead end. Finally I told myself, "Look, John, what you have is what he left." I had to say, "Well, it isn't finished, it isn't even almost finished," and then I had the notes, and I went through them. It was a jolt realizing that what he left was not nearly finished. There was not one coherent, continuous narrative. I suspect there never was; at least I couldn't find it. And so I went on from there.
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