Juneteenth: Ralph Ellison’s Prophetic Tale
Last year, Juneteenth, an intra-Black American celebration became a national holiday via the stroke of President Biden’s pen. The progression of ritual and artistic forms beginning within the bosom of Black American experience becoming recognized and appreciated nationally also occurred with blues, gospel, jazz, r&b, hip hop and other forms of musical practice. There’s a poetic justice attendant to the national holiday that began yesterday on June 19th—for me at Carnegie Hall for the Juneteenth celebration at Carnegie Hall for which Jewel served as Executive Producer—and is celebrated on this very day across the United States.
Last year we also published an excerpt from Ralph Ellison’s posthumously released Juneteenth, which Ellison’s literary agent, John Callahan, guided to publication in 1999. (Yesterday was also Father’s Day, which has poetic resonance by virtue of one of the characters Ellison created being named “Daddy” Hickman.) Here’s the background that we wrote of then, which is and will remain relevant to contemporary American experience, followed by the excerpt, including an interpolation of a quote from a classic Ellison essay.
Ralph Ellison
As part of a university-wide recognition of the towering legacy of a literary master, New York University held a virtual event in honor of Ralph Ellison, who taught there from 1970-1979. Professor John Callahan, Ellison’s friend and literary executor, was one of the guests. Callahan declared that Ellison was a prophetic writer who moved people by foretelling, by attuning himself to the continuing present that is time, where the past isn’t really past and the future an infinitude of possibilities.
How we interpret the past in the present for the sake of the future is a choice.
Professor Callahan told of the release of a portion of Ellison’s second novel in 1999, five years after Ellison’s death, a novel over which Ellison had labored for 40 years, as Juneteenth, the part of the long manuscript of over 2,000 pages most compressed and continuous as a narrative.
Callahan laid out the basics of the storyline: a young boy of indeterminate race, whose momma was white and daddy was colored, was literally midwifed and raised by a Negro jazz man and trombonist who became a preacher of the Word. The boy was called Bliss, the Negro elder was Hickman, Daddy Hickman.
Bliss was raised in the bosom of the blues idiom, where the sacred is secularized and the secular is sacralized. Daddy Hickman molded Bliss into a young child preacher. Bliss, wearing a white tuxedo, would engage in call-and-response preaching in holy roller church services and tent revivals. But that mixture of sacred power and the ways of the earthly flesh was too much for the young man to handle—he abandoned and rejected the old ways and went out into the secular, material world, becoming a movie maker and flim flam man. Then, after making his way to Oklahoma, where he had an affair with a beautiful woman who was part Native American, part Black American, and part European American, impregnating then abandoning her (too), the boy, now a man, remade himself yet again, this time as a race-baiting Senator, Adam Sunraider, from “a New England state.”
All in the narrative revolves around the Senator being shot, an assassination attempt by the child-man (son) left behind in Oklahoma, followed by the Senator calling for Daddy Hickman, who at his bedside, tries to help the Senator, to help Bliss, remember not only what he left behind but that which he had become a traitor to.
This excerpt, from Juneteenth, is from a bedside conversation in which Hickman and the Senator recall the occasion of a great gittin’ up mornin’ of freedom called Juneteenth, and sermons they gave together on that day:
“The occasion? It was another revival, wasn’t it?’
‘Course, it was a revival, Bliss – but it was Juneteenth too. We were celebrating Emancipation and thanking God. Remember, it went on for seven days.’
‘Juneteenth,’ the Senator said, ‘I had forgotten the word.’
‘You’ve forgotten lots of important things from those days, Bliss.’
‘I suppose so, but to learn some of the things I’ve learned I had to forget some others. Do you still call it ‘Juneteenth,’ Revern’ Hickman? Is it still celebrated?’
Hickman looked at him with widened eyes, leaning forward as he grasped the arms of the chair.
‘Do we still? Why, I should say we do. You don’t think that because you left . . . Both, Bliss. Because we haven’t forgot what it means. Even if sometimes folks try to make us believe it never happened or that it was a mistake that it ever did . . .’
‘Juneteenth,’ the Senator said, closing his eyes, his bandaged head resting beneath his hands. Words of Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion. . .”
. . . . “Tell us about it, Reveren’ Hickman . . .
We had to take the Word for bread and meat. We had to take the Word for food and shelter. We had to use the Word as a rock to build up a whole new nation, ’cause to tell it true, we were born again in chains of steel. Yes, and chains of ignorance. And all we knew was the spirit of the Word. We had no schools. We owned no tools, no cabins, no churches, not even our own bodies.
The rock, the terrain upon which we struggle, is itself abstract, a terrain of ideas that, although man-made, exerts the compelling force of the ideal, of the sublime: ideas that draw their power from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. We stand, as we say, united in the name of those sacred principles. But indeed it is in the name of these same principles that we ceaselessly contend, affirming our ideals even as we do them violence.
—Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station”
We were chained, young brothers, in steel. We were chained, young sisters, in ignorance. We were schoolless, toolless, cabinless – owned . . .
Amen, Reveren’ Bliss. We were owned and faced with the aweinspiring labor of transforming God’s Word into a lantern so that in the darkness we’d know where we were. Oh, God hasn’t been easy with us because He always plans for the loooong haul. He’s looking far ahead and this time He wants a well-tested people to work his will. He wants some sharp-eyed, quick-minded, generous-hearted people to give names to the things of this world and to its values. He’s tired of untempered tools and half-blind people to give names to the things of this world and to its values. He’s tired of untempered tools and half-blind masons!
Therefore, He’s going to keep on testing us against the rocks and in the fires. He’s going to plunge us into the ice-cold water. And each time we come out we’ll be blue and as tough as cold-blue steel! Ah yes! He means for us to be a new kind of human. Maybe we won’t be that people but we’ll be a part of that people, we’ll be an element in them, amen! He wants us limber as willow switches and he wants us tough as whip leather, so that when we have to bend, we can bend and snap back into place. He’s going to throw bolts of lightning to blast us so that we’ll have good footwork and lightning-fast minds.
He’ll drive us hither and yon around this land and make us run the gauntlet of hard times and tribulations, misunderstanding and abuse. And some will pity you and some will despise you. And some will try to use you and change you. And some will deny you and try to deal you out of the game. And sometimes you’ll feel so bad that you’ll wish you could die. But it’s all the pressure of God. He’s giving you a will and He wants you to use it. He’s giving you brains and He wants you to train them lean and hard so that you can overcome all the obstacles. Educate your minds! Make do with what you have so as to get what you need! Learn to look at what you see and not what somebody tells you is true.
Pay lip service to Caesar if you have to, but put your trust in God. Because nobody has a patent on truth or a copyright on the best way to live and serve Almighty God. Learn from what we’ve lived. Remember that when the labor’s back-breaking and the bossman’s mean our singing can lift us up. That it can strengthen us and make his meanness but the flyspeck irritation of an empty man. Roll with the blow like ole Jack Johnson. Dance on out of his way like Williams and Walker. Keep to the rhythm and you’ll keep to life.
God’s time is long; and all short-haul horses shall be like horses on a merry-go-round. Keep, keep, keep to the rhythm and you won’t get weary. Keep to the rhythm and you won’t get lost. We’re handicapped, amen! Because the Lord wants us strong! We started out with nothing but the Word – just like the others, but they’ve forgot it . . . We worked and stood up under hard times and tribulations. We learned patience and to understand Job. Of all the animals, man’s the only one not born knowing almost everything he’ll ever know. It takes him longer than an elephant to grow up because God didn’t mean him to leap to any conclusions, for God Himself is in the very process of things. We learned that all blessings come mixed with sorrow and all hardships have a streak of laughter.