★ (of 5)

• Full Title: Juneteenth
• Author: Ralph Ellison
• Year: 1999 (mine was 2018 special edition)
• Pages: 348*
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Random House
• ISBN 978-0-3853-6598-7 (leatherbound special edition)
• Wikipedia Page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

(* The 348 pages refers only to the text of Juneteenth; the edition I bought also contains Invisible Man, as well as numerous notes, introductions, and afterwords for a total of more than 800 pages.)

 

Summary

Never finished, and never published during Ellison’s lifetime (he died in 1994), Juneteenth was supposed to be his second novel — after the widely acclaimed Invisible Man. Reportedly, Ellison wrote more than 2,000 pages toward it, not including hundreds of lengthy notes scattered about his residence. Longtime friend John F. Callahan, with the advice of Ellison’s widow, forged these 300-odd pages from that mess and published it in 1999. (Eleven years later, Callahan published Three Days Before the Shooting [more on Wikipedia], which is apparently the same novel, but longer.)

The story that’s preserved in Juneteenth is a mass of impressions, wordplay, and nonsense that might mean something to a literary scholar or to a close friend of Ellison’s, but to me it was entirely a waste of time. The basic facts of the story I have been able to glean: A group of religious Black people come to Washington, D.C., led by Rev. Hickman, and attempt to speak with a powerful Senator for unknown reasons. They are rebuffed, but hang around Washington for a few days and eventually are present for the Senator’s speach in the Capitol. During the speech, the Senator is shot. At the hospital, the Senator awakes long enough to request the presence of Rev. Hickman at his bedside, and then relapses into a coma. (That’s all in the first couple of chapters.) The rest of the book is one part the Senator remembering his past in a series of fever dreams and one part Rev. Hickman remembering the past just as unlucidly. Occasionally they speak briefly to each other in the hospital room, but then the book relapses into remembered impressions.

 

Praise

I could find very little about this book to praise, aside from the following quotation from page four: “...we’re among the counted but not among the heard.”

 

Points Off For...

First, either the author or editor chose to have large sections of the book entirely in italics. If these passages were supposed to differentiate the coma dreams from the memories, or something else, it wasn’t clear.

Second, large sections of the books contained dialog but without quotation marks, so it’s never clear if someone is talking or if they’re thinking, or if the narrator is telling us something.

Third, some of the paragraphs go on for pages, without saying anything of substance.

Fourth, it is almost never clear what is happening, or when, or where, or with/by whom.

Bliss, I take it, is the childhood name of the now hospitalized Senator. Bliss was white, born of a mysterious white woman who approached Hickman moments before giving birth, and left with the Black man, who wasn’t yet a reverend. Hickman became a preacher and raised the white boy as his own, never knowing who the white woman was or why she came to him or why she left the baby with him. Bliss grows up a child preacher, helping Rev. Hickman, until at some point — just after seeing his first motion picture — runs away. Mysteriously, years later, he appeared in another state as a Senator who seems to side against Black people, though that part isn’t clear either.

The book never makes clear why the Senator was shot, why he ran away (back when he was Bliss), what he did after running away, or how he came to be a Senator. It never makes clear why the woman came to Hickman in the first place, or why Hickman took the baby as his own, or why Bliss changed his name. (If his new name is revealed, I missed it — it’s just “Senator” in the present and “Bliss” in the past.

There is no resolution, no storyline, no point.

There is an 11-page speech from the Senator, just before he’s shot, that doesn’t say anything. (“Time flows past beneath us as we soar. History erupts and boils with its age-old contentions. But ours is the freedom and decision of the New, the Uncluttered, and we embrace the anguish of our predicament, we accept the penalties of our hopefulness. So on we soar, following our dream.” And so on.)

At another point, there are nearly 50 pages of a sermon by Rev. Hickman, interspersed by quips from Bliss, which seems to be a poor retelling of the Bible, mixed with a poor retelling of history, and the point of the whole thing seems to be that slavery was a blessing, because without it Black people never would have been forced into Christianity (which the sermon says is a good thing). Reading that section felt like drinking a pitcher of flat, warm beer that’s been laced with LSD.

 

Conclusion

I’m sad that I spent so much time reading this book, thinking there would be some revelation near the end, some explanation, some set of paragraphs that would tie it together somehow. Helpfully, editor Callahan included some of Ellison’s notes at the end, and I gained more understanding from those half-a-dozen pages that from the entire rest of the book.

The only reason I kept reading was because I bought the two-in-one edition and had already read Invisible Man. I didn’t want to have a handsome volume on my shelf and later tell people “I only read the first half.” But I will definitely advise others to only read the first half.

 

 

---

---

comments powered by Disqus