It took the nation 156 years to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. After Ralph W. Ellison, the esteemed author, published his novel “Invisible Man” in 1952, nearly a half-century went by before “Juneteenth” was completed in 1999, though it’s not exactly accurate to say he alone finished the book. The novel was still a hodge-podge of 2,000 pages when Ellison’s editor and friend John Callahan assembled the pieces into what he called “a novel of liberation.”
While Ellison, who died in 1994 at the age of 81, never saw the published manuscript, his genius resonates on practically every page, and to a great degree the metaphors and creativity that made “Invisible Man” such a celebrated book are pervasive in “Juneteenth.”
Ellison was born in Oklahoma, not far from Galveston, Texas, where on June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger and his union troops arrived to inform Black residents they were no longer in bondage. That announcement of liberation came more than two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
The intention here is not to review the novel, which is the work of two men with very complicated and often differing viewpoints, but to see how it provides context for the holiday. Oddly, the holiday is only mentioned a couple of times, and you are left to wonder why it was given that title. To gather some understanding of the book, two characters have to be showcased and explained, and Ellison and Callahan open in this manner: “It is Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, and a race-baiting senator has just been shot on the Senate floor by a young black man. On his deathbed the senator calls out for a mysterious stranger, an elderly black Baptist minister from Georgia, who comes to his side. Their remarkable conversation and the memories it sparks take them back through the senator’s life to the deeply buried secrets of their shared past.”
If the protagonist is invisible in Ellison’s magnum opus, indivisibility could be the trope in “Juneteenth,” particularly as the novel unfolds mainly through a conversation between Rev. Alonzo Hickman, a jazzman turned Black preacher, and Senator Adam Sunraider, who was formerly called Bliss, a race-baiting politician. As Callahan explains in the book’s introduction, Hickman and Bliss are a veritable double helix, their lives mysteriously and intricately bound in kinship and race. Bliss is a youngster when he flees Hickman and his Baptist congregation. Like the young man in “Invisible Man,” he reinvents himself, at first as a filmmaker and then a flimflam man, and Ellison’s tendency to play on words is apparent here.
The African American experience is artfully delineated through a variety of episodes, similar to the way Ellison unravels Black history in his previous novel. It is through a network of chauffeurs, Pullman porters, and waiters that Hickman keeps track of Bliss. When he learns that
Bliss’s life is in danger, he leads members of his congregation to D.C. to warn his prodigal son, who by now is a senator. But he and his followers are not allowed anywhere near the politician, and from their seats in the gallery they witness a young Black man rising in the gallery to shoot the senator. “Lawd, why hast thou…” the senator says in Black vernacular. He is astonished when a voice he recognizes answers above him says, “For thou hast forsaken…me.”
Rushed to the hospital and attended, the senator calls for only Hickman to be brought to his bedside. Here begins the conversation, replete with flashbacks and foreshadowing that the novel unfolds, and Ellison deftly revives Bliss’s childhood, the little boy who looks white, Callahan relates, but talks Black, ultimately loved and accepted in Hickman’s community.
Their conversation is part reverie and resurrection as Bliss recalls his indoctrination as a boy minister and traveling with Hickman like a trickster-cum-preacher, a man of the Bible, and in Ellison’s words, “God’s own straight man.”
Some of Ellison’s best writing evolves as the senator, in a somewhat feverish state, begins to recount his life after his flight from Hickman, where he was essentially a hustler, and conman, fleecing people of their earnings. The senator even recalls a love affair, but it is as opaque and clouded with meaning as his other ramblings and half-remembered incidents growing up in Oklahoma, much like Ellison’s teen years there. Putting all the pieces together is something Ellison and Callahan let readers figure out. Scattered throughout the text are historical clues and literary signposts often subtly dropped, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, his namesake, and clever names like Bliss, where he puns the old saying “ignorance is bliss where it’s folly to be wise.” Hickman may also remind us of Bledsoe and Trueblood, their names signifying elements of brutality and kinship.
No less baffling is why the book is titled ” Juneteenth” when it gets only a passing nod: once as the time in which Bliss wanders off and when it’s cited in one of Hickman’s sermons. At the end of their long conversation, Hickman compels Bliss to discuss that eventful Juneteenth night when he began that long journey through the corridors of history, forcing him to summon the dark and light of his fading memory. This is rendered in Ellison’s typical sense of the absurd and surrealism.
Perhaps the best summary and conclusion is delivered by Ellison’s alter-ego or co-author: “Dismissive at first of Juneteenth as ‘the celebration of a gaudy illusion,’ the Senator realizes too late that his liberation is bound up with the Negro American communion expressed by and on Juneteenth Day. But, Ellison hints in his epigraph, it is not too late for those surviving ‘to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern,’ the pattern of art. Always in progress, Ellison’s work may now find pause.” Indeed, there is a momentary pause and pulse that echoes “the rich babel of idiomatic expression around me, a language full of imagery and rhetorical canniness,” Ellison once concluded.
The changing personalities of Bliss, running in vain for self-discovery, make it difficult to discern his true feelings about Juneteenth. Is it a day that we should celebrate, or dismiss as just another gaudy illusion that places its celebrants in another form of captivity? The young wayward man at the center of “Invisible Man” retreats from the world by going underground, and his closing words “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you.”
In as much as Ellison has given us a novelistic way to appreciate and apprehend the holiday, he has spoken most eloquently and eternally for us, and we should accept both his imagination and guidance into those often forgotten moments of reverie and reverence—and read the book.