I recommend devoting a portion of the weekend of Juneteenth to reading a particular passage from the novel “Juneteenth,” by Ralph Ellison. The advice holds whether you are familiar with the occasion—which commemorates the date, in 1865, when the enslaved black people of Texas received belated word of their emancipation—or were ignorant of it until our recent national racial reckoning, which pushed the celebration of Juneteenth onto the calendars of various states and corporations. I suspect that the new prominence of the holiday has driven interest in the book; when I went to buy a new copy on Amazon, I was told that I had to wait for weeks. I suppose that a few of these recent purchasers were seeking an overview or explainer. The interest of such a reader will perhaps be disappointed by “Juneteenth,” but the novel is like a wild shot that hits its target nonetheless, on the strength of one passage that shows how to regard the holiday as a holy day.
In a pinch, any passage of Ellison will do. The novelist was a tremendous writer of passages who spent four decades, between the incandescent accomplishment of “Invisible Man” and his death, in 1994, producing many reams of stunning ones that never coalesced into a proper novel. He had the problem of a house fire that consumed at least some of a manuscript; he had the challenge of setting down an expansive parable about race in America in bright, hard language, like the radiant vernacular of a jazz-head Joyce. He had been dead for seventeen years when the bulk of this latter work was published as an eleven-hundred-and-thirty-six-page behemoth called “Three Days Before The Shooting . . .”—a vast slab of gorgeous marble amounting to an incomplete monument. “Juneteenth,” published in 1999, at three hundred and sixty-eight pages, is the fine effort of his executor, John F. Callahan, to shape the manuscript into a comprehensible sculpture.
The book concerns a race-baiting United States senator named Sunraider and a Baptist preacher named Hickman. The Reverend Hickman is black, and he was called to God after a career as a jazz trombonist. Sunraider is white—or, at least, fair enough that it seems so to his New England constituents—and he has passed into politics following a spell as a filmmaker and con artist, after a youth spent as a child preacher whom Hickman raised from infancy. The story line flows as an unfolding of their personal history. The mid-nineteen-fifties setting of the novel sees Hickman going to Washington, D.C., where a would-be assassin badly wounds Sunraider as he speaks on the floor of the Senate. Sunraider receives Hickman in his hospital room, and we move through the senator’s memories and reveries as the older man draws him out and spurs him on.
The chief significance of Juneteenth within “Juneteenth” is an eruption at a revival meeting that opened a week of prayer and community, back when Sunraider was a child named Bliss. (Decide for yourself whether the ripeness of the names of the characters—another figure is called the Reverend Eatmore—indicates allegorical excess or constitutes an appropriate evocation of American surreality.) On this night, under that tent, when Bliss was six or seven, a white woman charged out of a crowd to claim the boy as her son. The nature of her claim is the motor of the plot, but I’m interested here in what comes before that central scene: a remarkable seventh chapter in which Bliss, the boy who lives submerged within Sunraider, lies in a hospital bed and recollects a sermon that he and Hickman preached, in call-and-response fashion, at the outset of a Juneteenth celebration.
The setting is Alabama. The tent is pitched on a local holy site. It had been Choctaw land; the swamp reclaimed it; the black folk filled it in with black soil and made a graveyard for slaves. The crowd numbers five thousand. The heat of evening is palpable in the prose. Hickman, with his author’s every endorsement, begins making a frame for the understanding of Juneteenth, by exhorting worshippers to approach it as something like Passover—a day of deliverance on which to tell stories that keep history alive in memory. He teases out meaning. His substance is to identify a blessing within the calamity of American slavery. The people of Africa, having been robbed from home, having been dispossessed and dispersed—having been left “eyeless, tongueless, drumless, danceless, songless, hornless, soundless, sightless, wrongless, rightless, motherless, fatherless, brotherless, sisterless, powerless”—were, thus bereft, positioned to receive the Word of God.
You may have heard such things before, at Sunday service, but the miracle of the chapter is that Hickman says it in a way that speaks even to any unbeliever. Ellison captures the soul of an oratorical tradition, as if reverse-engineering a prototype of a black-church sermon. In the flashback, at a world-class cadence, Hickman speaks of fortitude:
The speech goes on like so, thrumming, describing powers forged under oppression that inspire peace amid chaos. Near the end of the chapter, the sustaining cadences of the sermon give way to a description of “the feasting part,” where a catalogue of loaves of sandwich bread, and barbecue, and fifteen gallons of hot sauce punctuates the scene with a merger of Biblical tones and secular motions. The sermon’s message of tenacity—the rendering of social forces on a spiritual level—resonates with the current moment, or at least I’d like to think so, seeing people in the streets with a long road before them. The heart of the “Juneteenth” sermon sounds to me like an exhortation to them: “Never mind the laughers, the scoffers—they come around because they can’t help themselves. They can deny you but not your sense of life. . . . Just keep on inching along like an old inchworm. If you put one and one and one together soon they’ll make a million too. There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free!”
Race, Policing, and Black Lives Matter Protests
- The death of George Floyd, in context.
- The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests.
- Who, David Remnick asks, is the true agitator behind the racial unrest?
- A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism.
- The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments, and what comes next.
- The quest to transform the United States cannot be limited to challenging its brutal police.
