Book Description
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. . . .
In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a
race-baiting senator from a New England state, is mortally
wounded by an assassin's bullet while making a speech on the
Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him,
Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Hickman, an old
black minister, to be brought to his side. The Reverend is
summoned; the two are left alone. Out of their conversation,
and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne
in silence for many long years, a story emerges. For this
United States senator, once known as Bliss, was raised by
Reverend Hickman in a religion- and music-steeped black
community not unlike Ralph Ellison's own childhood home.
He was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful
black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and
the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace
the course of their shared life in "an anguished
attempt," Ellison once put it, "to arrive at the
true shape and substance of a sundered past and its
meaning." In the end the two men arrive at their most
painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding
the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the
senator's confronting how deeply estranged he has become from
his true identity.
Juneteenth draws on the full richness of America's black
cultural heritage, from the dazzling range of vernacular
sources in its language to the way its structure echoes the
call-and-response pattern of the black church and the riffs
and bass lines of jazz. It offers jubilant proof that
whatever else it means to be a true American, it means to be
"somehow black," as Ellison once wrote. For even as
Senator Sunraider was bathed from birth in the deep and
nourishing waters of African-American folkways, so too are
all Americans.
That idea is the cause for which Ralph Ellison gave the
last full measure of his devotion. At the time of his death,
he was still expanding his novel in other directions,
envisioning a grand, perhaps multivolume, story cycle.
Always, in Ellison's mind, the character Hickman and the
story of Sunraider's life from birth to death were the
dramatic heart of the narrative. And so, with the aid of
Ellison's widow, Fanny, his literary executor, John Callahan,
has edited this magnificent novel at the center of Ralph
Ellison's forty-year work-in-progress--Juneteenth, its
author's abiding testament to the country he so loved and to
its many unfinished tasks.
