Juneteenth

by Ralph Ellison

  Stifling an upsurge of laughter the Senator plunged ahead, tensing his diaphragm to release the full resonance of his voice. But as he did so it was as though his hearing had been thrown out of phase. Resounding through the acoustics of the chamber, his voice seemed controlled by the stop-and-go fluctuations of a hypersensitive time-delay switch, forcing him to monitor his words seconds after they were uttered and feeding them back to him with a hollow, decaying echo. More puzzling, between the physical sensation of statement and the delayed return his voice was giving expression to ideas the likes of which he had never articulated, not even in the most ambiguous of rhetorical situations. Words, ideas, phrases were jetting from some chaotic region deep within him and as he strove to regain control it was as though he had been taken over by some mocking ventriloquistic orator of opposing views, a trickster of corny philosophical ambition.

  “But … but … but … now … now … now …” he heard, “let let us consider consider consider, the broader broader implication … cations of of our our current state. In this land it is our fate to be interrogated not by our allies or enemies but by our conduct and by our lives. Our … ours … ours is the arduous burden burden … den privilege of self-regulation and self-limitation. We are of a nation born in blood, fire and sacrifice. Thus we are judged, questioned, weighed—by the revolutionary ideals and events which marked the founding of our great country. It is these transcendent ideals which interrogate us, judging us, pursuing us, in terms of that which we do or do not do. They accuse us ceaselessly and their interrogation is ruthless, scathing, seldom charitable. For the demands they make of us are limitless. Under the relentless pressure of their accusation we seek to escape the intricate game-work of our enterprises. We make for the territory. We plunge into the edenic landscape of our natural resources. We seek out the warm seacoasts of leisure, the quiet cool caverns of forgetfulness—all made possible by the very success of our mind-jolting revolution and the undeniable accomplishments of our labor and dedication. In our beginning our forefathers summoned up the will to break with the past. They questioned the past and condemned it and severed themselves from its entangling tentacles. They plunged into the future accepting its dangers and its glories. Thus with us it is instinctive to evaluate ourselves against the examples of those, humble and illustrious alike, who preceded us upon this glorious stage and passed on. We are a people of joy and anguish. Our joy made poignant by our anguish. Of us is demanded great daring, great courage, great insight, prudence and even greater self-discipline.

  “For we are like those great birds which, moved by an inborn need to test themselves against the mystery and promise of the universe, take off on powerful wings to be carried by fierce winds and gentle currents to great heights and far places. Like them we are given to maneuvering miraculously through treacherous passages and above marvelous plateaus and fertile valleys. It is our nature to soar and by following the courses mapped through the adventurous efforts of our fathers we affirm and revitalize their awesome vision. We are reapers and sowers, destroyers and creators, wheelers and dealers, finders and keepers—and why not? Since we are also generous sharers of that which we discover through our dedication and daring.

  “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. Sometimes our clouds are fleecy and translucent, veiling thinly the sun; sometimes dark and stormy, lashing us with the wickedness of winter. We toss and swirl, pivot and swoop. We scrape the peaks or go kiting strutless toward the void. Ofttimes, as appears to be true of us today, we plunge down and down, we go round and round faltering and accusing ourselves remorselessly until, reminded of who we are and what we are about and the cost, we pull ourselves together. We lift up our eyes to the hills and we arise.

  “God enclosed our land between two mighty oceans and, setting us down on the edge of this mighty continent, he threw us on our own. Our forefathers then set our course ever westward, not, I think, by way of turning us against the past and its lessons, although they accused it vehemently—for we are a product of those lessons—but that we should approach our human lot from a fresher direction, from uncluttered perspectives. Therefore it is not our way, as some would have it, to reject the past; rather it is to overcome its blighting effects upon our will to organize and conduct a more human future. We are called a consumer society and much is made of what is termed the ‘built-in obsolescence’ of our products. But those who do so miss the point: Yes, we are a consumer society, but the main substance of our consumption consists of ideals. Our way is to render ideals obsolescent by transforming them into their opposites through achieving and rejecting their promises. Thus do our ideals die and give way to the new. Thus are they redeemed, made manifest. Our sense of reality is too keen to be violated by moribund ideals, too forward-looking to be too long satisfied with the comforting arrangements of the present, and thus we move ever from the known into the unknown, for there lies the more human future, for there lies the idealistic core.

  “My friends, and fellow citizens, I would remind you that in this our noble land, memory is all: touchstone, threat and guiding star. Where we shall go is where we have been; where we have been is where we shall go—but with a difference. For as we proceed toward our destination, it is ever changed by the transformations wrought by our democratic procedures and by the life-affirming effects of our spirit. Here we move ever toward past-future, by moonlight and by starlight, soaring by dead reckoning along courses mapped by our visionary fathers!

  “Where we have been is where we shall go. We move from the realm of dreams through the valley of the practical and back to the realm of rectified dreams. Yes, but how we arrive there is our decision, our challenge and our anguish. And in the going and in the arriving our task is to tirelessly transform the past and create and re-create the future. In this grand enterprise we dance to our inner music, we negotiate the unknown and untamed terrain by the soundings of our own inner ear. By the capacity of our inner eye for detecting subtleties of contour, landmark and underground treasure, we shape the land. Indeed, we shall reshape the universe—to the forms of our own inner vision. Let no scoffers demand of us, ‘How high the moon?’ for not only can we supply the answer, in time we shall indeed fly them there! We shall demonstrate once again that in this great, inventive land man’s idlest dreams are but the blueprints and mockups of emerging realities, technologies and poems. Here in the fashion of our pioneer forefathers, who confronted the mysteries of wilderness, mountain and prairie with crude tools and a self-generating imagination, we are committed to facing with courage the enormous task of imposing an ever more humane order upon this bewilderingly diversified and constantly changing society. Committed we are to maintaining its creative momentum.

  “Committed we are to maintaining its involved and complex equilibrium.

  “Committed to keeping it soaring ever forward in the materialization of our sublime and cornucopian dream. We rush ever onward, and often violently, yes, but on the adventurous journey toward the fulfillment of that dream, no one … no … one … not one, I say, shall … shall … be … bee … bee … denied … denied.…”

  Thinking, Am I drunk, going insane?, the Senator paused, sweeping the curve of anonymous faces above him with his eyes.

  “No,” he continued, “no one shall be denied. An enormous task, some might say, a rash dream. Yet ours is no facile vision. Each day we suffer its anguish and its cost. It requires effort of an order to which only a great and unified nation, a nation conditioned to riding out the chaos of history as the eagle rides out the whirlwind, can arise. Therefore it is our duty to confront it with subtle understanding. Confront it with democratic passion. Confront it with tragic insight, with love and with endless good humor. We must confront it with faith and in the awareness of that age-old knowledge whic
h holds that it is in the nature of the human enterprise that great nations shall not, must not, dare not evade their own mysteries but must grapple with them and live them out. They must solve their innermost dilemmas through the expenditure of great physical and spiritual effort. Yes, for great nations evolve and grow ever young in the conscious acceptance and penetration of their own most intimate secrets.

  “Thus it is that we must will to remember our defeats and divisions as we remember our triumphs and unities so that we may transcend and forget them. Thus we must forget the past. Indeed, our history records an undying, unyielding quest for youthful sages, for a newfound wisdom fired by a vibrant physicality. Thus again we must forget the past by way of freeing ourselves so that we can reassemble its untidy remnants in the interest of a more human order.

  “Oh, yes; I understand: To some this goal appears too difficult. To others, too optimistic, too unworldly—even though they would agree that we are indeed a futuristic people. Ah, but in the face of this bright and inescapable intuition, dark doubts afflict them. Dark realities inhibit their powers of decision. They succumb to the shallow, somber materiality of our bountiful power and pursue it blindly, selfishly for itself. They yearn for a debilitating and self-defeating tranquillity. They falter before the harsher necessities of action, whether that action calls for the exercise of force or charity, charity or force. And before those ever-present dilemmas requiring the exercise of charity supported by force they oscillate pathetically between olive branch and arrows. They lose their way and in their stumbling indecision they reward aggression and justify indolence. In their hands charity becomes a force of cancerous malignancy, and power a self-destructive agency that destroys themselves, their children and their neighbors.

  “Nevertheless, we must accept forthrightly that arduous wisdom which holds that those who reject the lessons of history, or who allow themselves to be intimidated by its rigors, are doomed to repeat its disasters. Therefore I call upon them to remember that societies are artifacts of human design and that they are man-determined. Human societies float like great spaceships between earth and sky, dependent upon both but enjoying the anguish of human will and initiative. Man is born to act, to make mistakes, and to die. This all men know. But in the graceful acceptance of his fate, and in his protracted and creative dying, man builds his monument, he structures and makes manifest his accusation of the universe. He secures his earthly gains, sets the course of the ever-receding future and makes art of his yearning.

  “So again, my friends, we become victims of history only if we fail to evolve ways of life that are more free, more youthful, more human. We are defeated only if we fail in the task of creating a total way of life which will allow each and every one of us to rise high above the site of his origins, and to soar released and ever reinvigorated in human space!”

  The Senator smiled.

  “I need not remind you that I am neither seer nor prophet,” he went on, “but history has put to us three fatal questions, has written them across our sky in accents of accusation. They are, How can the many be as one? How can the future deny the Past? And How can the light deny the dark? The answer to the first is: Through a balanced consciousness of unity in diversity and diversity in unity, through a willed and conscious balance—that is the key phrase, so easy to say yet so difficult to maintain.

  “For the second, the answer lies in remembering that, given the nature of our vision, of our covenant, to remember is to forget and to forget is to remember selectively, creatively! Yes, and let us remember that in this land to create is to destroy, and to destroy—if we will it so and make it so, if we pay our proper respect to remembered but rejected things—is to make manifest our lovely dream of progressive idealism.

  “And how can the light deny the dark? Why, by seeking ever the darkness in lightness and the lightness in darkness. As we incorporate and humanize nature we filter and blend the spectrum, we exalt and we anguish, we order the world.

  The land was ours before we were the land’s.

  So saith the poet. And so it is as it was in Eden. In darkness and in lightness it is ours to name and ours to shape and ours to love and die for. So let us not falter before our complexity. Nor become confused by the mighty, reciprocal, enginelike stroking of our national ambiguities. We are by no means a perfect people—nor do we desire to be so. For great nations reach perfection, that final static state, only when they pass their peak-promise and exhaust their grandest potentialities. We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum. Ours is a youthful nation; the perfection we seek is futuristic and to be made manifest in creative action. A marvel of purposeful political action, it was designed to solve those vast problems before which all other nations have been proved wanting. Born in diversity and fired by determination, our society was endowed with a flexibility designed to contain the most fractious contentions of an ambitious, individualistic and adventurous breed. Therefore, as we go about confronting our national ambiguities, let us remember the purposes of our built-in checks and balances, those constitutional provisions which serve like subtle hormones to regulate the ingenious metabolism of our body politic. Yes, and as we check our checks and balance our balances, let us in all good humor balance our checks and check our balances, keeping each in proper order, issuing credit to the creditable, minus to plus, and plus to minus.

  “E pluribus unum!” the Senator shouted, pointing toward the Great Seal attached to the wall of the gallery. “Observe there the message borne in the beak of the noble bird under whose aegis our nation thrives! Note the olive branch and arrows! Contemplate its prayer and promise—E PLURIBUS UNUM. Regard the barred shield that protects us, the stars of state leaping high in the sunburst of national promise. Mark the olive branch extending peace and prosperity to all. Consider the historically established fact that its ready arrows are no mere boast of martial preparedness. They are symbolic of our aggressive determination to fulfill our obligations to humankind in whatever form they take or wherever they might arise. So let us take wing with our emblem. Let us flesh out its ideals. Let us unite like the flexing feathers that lift it aloft. Let us forge ahead in faith and in confidence—E PLURIBUS UNUM!”

  In the hushed silence the Senator stared out across the chamber as though taken with a sudden insight. Then, leaning forward with a look of amazement, he stroked his chin and waved his hands in a gesture of impatience.

  “Recently,” he continued in a quietly confidential tone, “our national self-confidence has come under attack from within. It is said that too many of our national projects have gone astray; that problems of long existence are proving to be unresolvable; that our processes of governance have broken down; and that we are become a distraught and weary people. And I would agree that something of a darkness, an overcast has come upon us. There are seasons in the affairs of nations, and this is to be expected. But I disagree that the momentary disruptions which rack our society are anything new or sufficient reason for despair.

  “My friends, in such a nation as ours, in a nation blessed with so much good fortune, with so much brightness, it is sometimes instructive when we are so compelled, to look on the dark side. It is a corrective to the bedazzlement fostered by the brightness of our ideals and our history. The gentlemen from Pennsylvania will recall that the dark and viscous substance which once fouled the water of their fair state gave way under scientific scrutiny and soon gave radiance to their gloom. It made bright their homes and cities, became a new source of wealth. The gentlemen from Alabama and Georgia will recall the life-giving resuscitation of the old legend of sailing ship days, in which sailors dying of thirst took what appeared to be black-humored advice from a passing ship’s captain and, plunging their buckets into what appeared to be pure brine, drew sweet spring water from the depths of the sea. They’ll recall too that during a dark time in a dark section of the South a miracle was discovered beneath the hull of the humble peanut which proved similar to that of the loaves an
d the fishes. Yes, and this to the well-being of their state and nation.

  “So in dark days look steadily on the darker side, for there is where brightness sometimes hides itself.

  “Therefore let us have faith, hope and daring. And who can doubt our future when even the wildest black man behind the wheel of a Cadillac knows—Please, please!” the Senator pleaded, his face a mask before the rising ripple of laughter, the clatter of applause, “Hear me out: I say that even the wildest black man rampaging the streets of our cities in a Fleetwood knows that it is not our fate to be mere victims of history but to be courageous and insightful before its assaults and riddles.”

  And then, with a face most serious in its composure, he went on: “We have reached a sad state of affairs, gentlemen, wherein this fine product of American skill and initiative has become so common in Harlem that much of its initial value has been sorely compromised. Indeed, I am led to suggest, and quite seriously, that legislation be drawn up to rename it the ‘Coon Cage Eight.’ And not at all because of its eight superefficient cylinders, nor because of the lean, springing strength and beauty of its general outlines. Not at all, but because it has now become such a common sight to see eight or more of our darker brethren crowded together enjoying its power, its beauty, its neo-pagan comfort, while weaving recklessly through the streets of our great cities and along our superhighways. In fact, gentlemen, I was run off the road, forced into a ditch by such a power-drunk group just the other day.

  “Let us keep an eye on the outrages committed by the citizens whom I’ve just described, for perhaps therein lies a secret brightness, a clue. Perhaps the essence of their untamed and assertive willfulness, their crass and jazzy defiance of good taste and the harsh, immutable laws of economics, lies in their faith in the flexible soundness of the nation.

  “Yes”—the Senator smiled, nodding his head with mock Elizabethan swagger—“methinks there is much mystery here. But one mystery at a time, I say. In the meantime, let us seek brightness in darkness and hope in despair. Let us remind ourselves that we were not designated the supine role of passive slave to the past. Ours is the freedom and obligation to be ever the fearless creators of ourselves, the reconstructors of the world. We were created to be Adamic definers, namers and shapers of yet undiscovered secrets of the universe!