Juneteenth

by Ralph Ellison

  The Senator started up, trying to answer, but now there came a jetlike blast, and seeing the machine leaping into furious motion he rolled, turning completely over as he tried to escape its path—But instead of crushing him, the machine was braking and surging backwards with a blast of red and white light erupting from its rear. And then thundering with a rapid shifting and reshifting of gears it left the street once more and hung above him like a hovercraft, the black passengers looking down upon him with grim satisfaction, awaiting his next move….

  “Hey, Mister Motharider,” the voice called down to him, “how’s this for a goongauge?”

  “Hey, Shep,” the man in the middle said, “don’t ask he not’ing! Let’s show Charley how de car can curb. I don’t tink he believes you cawn drive dis bloody t’ing.”

  “No, I don’t believe he does,” the driver said. “O.K., Charley boy, watch me snatch the butter from the duck!”

  Staring into the grinning faces, the Senator scrambled to his knees, thinking, Who are they? as the machine shot away and shattered the quiet of the street with the flatulent blasts from its dual exhaust. He watched it lunging up the boulevard at a forward slant, seeming to flatten out and become more unreal the farther it receded into the distance. Techniques of intimidation, that’s what they’re using, the Senator thought. They were waiting for me; they were watching the building for the moment I started across the street so they could intimidate me. So they’ll be back and I’d better leave….

  And even as he watched the car floating away he was aware that somehow it was beginning to flow backwards upon its own movement, dividing itself and becoming simultaneously both there in the distance and here before him, where now it throbbed and puttered, a miragelike image of black metal agleam with chrome, and there up the boulevard, where it was resonating street and buildings with the thunder of its power. And it came to the Senator that he was watching no ordinary automobile. This was no Cadillac, no Lincoln, Oldsmobile or Buick—nor any other known make of machine; it was an arbitrary assemblage of chassis, wheels, engine, hood, horns, none of which had ever been part of a single car! It was a junkyard sculpture mechanized! An improvisation, a bastard creation of black bastards—and yet, it was no ordinary hot rod. It was an improvisation of vast arrogance and subversive and malicious defiance which they had designed to outrage and destroy everything in its path, a rolling time bomb launched in the streets….

  And now the image of the machine gleamed and quivered and throbbed before him, glowing with flames of luminous red that had been painted along the sides of the threatening, shark-finned fenders which guarded its licenseless rear. Two slender radio antennae affixed to either side of the trunk lazily whipped the air, one flying an enormous and luxuriantly rippling coon’s tail and the other displaying in miniature the stars and bars of the Confederacy while across the broad expanse of its trunk he saw the enormous image of an open switchblade knife bearing the words:

  WE HAVE SECEDED FROM THE MOTHER!

  HOORAY FOR US!

  TO HELL WITH CHARLEY!

  They have constructed it themselves, the Senator’s mind went on, brought the parts together and gathered in conspiratorial secret like a group of guerrillas assembling the smuggled parts of a machine gun!—And they’ve made the damn thing run! No single major part goes normally with the rest, yet even in their violation of the rigidities of mechanical tolerances and in their defiance of the laws of physics, property rights, patents—everything—they’ve forced part after part to mesh and made it run! It’s a mammy-made, junkyard construction and yet those clowns have made it work, it runs!…

  And now the machine roared back, braking with a violent, stiffly sprung rocking of body and a skidding of tires, and again the men were looking out of the open window.

  “Listen, Sunrobber,” the nearest called, “what the hell was that you just said about our little heap?”

  “Hell, mahn,” the middle man said, “don’t ask he no’ting! I done tole you the bahstard has low-rated our little load! The mahn done low-rated our pride and joy, so don’t ask the bahstard not’ing, just show he whadt de joecah kin do!

  “And remembah us mah-toe, mahn:

  Down Wid de Coon Cawdge,

  Up WID DE JOE CAH!

  “Then, mahn, I say, KICK HIM ASS!”

  “Yeah, man; but not so fas’,” one of the others said. “Not before we give his butt a little ride …”

  A blast of heat struck him then, followed by the opening of the door. And as a dark hand reached down, he seemed to hear the sound of Hickman’s consoling voice, calling from somewhere above.

  NOTES

  Editor’s note: From the time of Invisible Man’s publication in 1952 until Ralph Ellison’s death in 1994, he wrote down literally thousands of notes pertaining to all facets of his novel-in-progress. Some he jotted in haste on magazine subscription cards or scrawled indecipherably on the back of used envelopes, bills, or any scrap of paper close at hand. Others he copied carefully into one of the half-dozen notebooks he kept for the purpose. Still others he typed. Some of the notes carry on for several pages, spilling over into description or dialogue, as if in the act of brooding over a scene or character, the writer became his own muse. Others are brief, cryptic, or in some cases even interrupted by another, sometimes unrelated, thought that took urgent possession of Ellison’s mind during the act of writing. After his death I found the notes every which way in Ellison’s papers. As far as I could tell, they had not been arranged in any particular order. What follows is a selection and sequence of notes that I hope will give the reader a sense of Ellison thinking through the characters, scenes, themes, and method of his ambitious, extended saga of America told and hinted at in Juneteenth.

  Action takes place on the eve of the Rights movement but it forecasts the chaos which would come later.

  Remember that “the essence of the story is what goes on in the minds of the characters on a given occasion.” The mind becomes the real scene of the action. And in the mind scene and motive are joined. Even the opposing characters are transferred there as images.

  The method is naturally antiphonal. Senator and Rev. Hickman, little Bliss and Daddy Hickman. The antiphonal section, or Emancipation myth, is spun out in hospital where Senator confesses to Hickman under pressure of conscience, memory and Hickman’s questions and it takes form of Bliss’s remembered version versus Hickman’s idiomatic accounts.

  The thing to remember about the antiphony between Daddy Hickman and little Bliss is that the two are building a scene within a scene and it must be on a borderline between the folk poetry and religious rhetoric. Thing to do is to point it up.

  (They needn’t talk, thus dramatizing a lack of communication, but the past is with them and in them. Problem is to make it eloquent.)

  The sermon of Hickman and Bliss which takes place on Juneteenth must be related to later speeches made by the Senator while in Washington.… The rhythms of all this should feed back one upon the other proving not only perspectives by incongruity, but ironies, and some measure of comedy.

  Make Washington function in Hickman’s mind as a place of power and mystery, frustration and possibility. It is historical, it is the past, it is slavery, the Emancipation and a continuation of the betrayal of the Reconstruction. He would have to imagine or try to imagine what Bliss knew about the city and its structure of power. He would wonder how, given his early background, Bliss could have gone so far in the gaining and manipulation of power, the juxtapositions of experience and intelligence which allowed him to make his way.

  Hickman has staked a great part of his life on the idea that by bringing up the boy with love, sacrifice and kindness he would do something to overcome the viciousness of racial division. He accepted Bliss’s mother’s most incongruous request in desperation. Hate would not assuage his grief over his brother’s lynching and his mother’s death so he takes the baby, becomes a minister, brings the boy up as a little minister and then suffers when the boy runs away. Yet d
oes not lose his idea, instead it intensifies his faith. It drives him to keep up with the boy’s career, especially when boy becomes a politician, and it takes him to Washington when he learns that he is in danger. He wants to talk to learn what happened, what led to break and to negative acts toward Negroes after boy became powerful. Was it perversity, or was it that the structure of power demanded that anyone acting out the role would do so in essentially the same way?

  Hickman is intelligent but untrained in theology. Skilled with words, he reads and mixes his diction as required by his audience. He is also an artist in the deeper sense and has actually been a jazz musician. He has been a ladies’ man, but this ceased when he became a preacher. Devout and serious, he is unable to forget his old, profane way of speaking and of thinking of experience. Vernacular terms and phrases bloom in his mind even as he corrects them with more pious formulations. In other words he is of mixed culture and frequently he formulates the sacred in profane terms—at least within his mind. Orally he checks himself.

  Proposition: A great religious leader is a “master of ecstasy.” He evokes emotions that move beyond the rational onto the mystical. A jazz musician does something of the same. By his manipulation of sound and rhythm he releases movements and emotions which allow for the transcendence of everyday reality. As an ex-jazzman minister Hickman combines the two roles, and this is the source of his leadership. He possesses a power which is not directly active—or at least not recognized for what it is in the South’s political arena, but it is there.

  Bliss, [Hickman] said, there are facts and there is truth; don’t let the facts ever get in the way of your recognizing and living out the truth. And don’t get the truth confused with the law. The law deals with facts, and down here the facts are that we are weak and inferior. But while it looks like we are what the law says we are, don’t ever forget that we’ve been put in this position by force, by power of numbers, and the readiness of those numbers to use brutality to keep us within the law. Ah, but the truth is something else. We are not what the law, yes and custom, says we are and to protect our truth we have to protect ourselves from the definitions of the law. Because the law’s facts have made us outlaws. Yes, that’s the truth, but only part of it; for Bliss, boy, we’re outlaws in Christ and Christ is the higher truth.

  Hickman tells Bliss, “Little boy, we have a covenant, but when you ran away you broke it. You fell down, Bliss; you fell down. But that doesn’t change a thing. Not for you, not for me, ever …”

  Negroes appear to whites to enjoy themselves more because they have so little of that which is material. They appear to whites to suffer grief, heartbreak, and sadness more because they have, apparently, so much to be unhappy about. And the source of that unhappiness is seen as based in their color and social status rather than in their humanity.

  Hickman has tried to teach Bliss not to turn himself into a figure based upon the materialization of himself, i.e., into someone whose identity is based upon color alone. He has tried to teach him to see himself and those close to him in terms of their inner spirit, their human quality, their quiet, understated heroism.

  [Hickman] has his own unique way of looking at the U.S. and is much concerned with the meaning of history. There is mysticism involved in his hope for the boy, and an attempt to transcend the hopelessness of racism. After the horrors connected with or coincidental with his coming into possession of the child he reverts to religion and in his despair begins to grope toward a plan. This involves bringing up the child in love and dedication in the hope that properly raised and trained the child’s color and features, his inner substance and his appearance would make it possible for him to enter into the wider affairs of the nation and work toward the betterment of his people and the moral health of the nation.

  Bliss symbolizes for Hickman an American solution as well as a religious possibility. Hickman thinks of Negroes as the embodiment of American democratic promises, as the last who are fated to become the first, the downtrodden who shall be exalted.

  But he is tested in every way by the little boy—and especially after the boy has run away. These are ideas when grasped at their fullest, and they go to the heart of the American dilemma as far as Negroes are concerned. Hickman is tested of his faith in his own people and in his belief in America. A question of fatherhood in one sense, and in terms of his maturity, his spiritual maturity also. H. affirms ultimately for himself, to save his own sanity and soul. He clings to an idea and urges his people to do the same because he sees in this direction an affirmation of his own humanity.

  To surrender Bliss, or the hope symbolized by the child, is to accept not only defeat but chaos, human depravity.

  Hickman and the old Negroes have learned charity, hope, and faith under the most difficult conditions.

  “Bliss, you can count on this: I’ll be there when you finally are forced to remember me!”

  “I never want to remember,” Bliss had replied.

  Hickman knows the true identity of Sunraider through having had friends and members of his church keep an eye on the runaway. This had continued over the years, and he has opposed anyone who thought of exposing Sunraider—even though Sunraider’s political position appalls him and he holds his peace out of the compact he made after the third time Bliss ran away and was caught, and out of loyalty to his old dream. He also feels guilty for his role in Sunraider’s career of deception and prays that the Senator will change his ways. Hickman despises the man, but loves the boy whom the man had been.

  This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be.

  A novel about the rootless American type—products of our loneliness. Those who reject the self in favor of some illusion, who while proclaiming themselves democrats thirst and hunger for aristocracy. Who become actors and confidence men, demagogues, swindlers, and spiteful destroyers of the nation.

  Bliss rejects Christianity as sapping of energies, Hickman sees it as a director of energies. In this he foreshadows Martin Luther King, while Sunraider repeats the betrayals of the past.

  Bliss, the little boy, learns the viciousness of the human condition while missing its grandeur, precisely because he was catapulted into manhood too early.

  Bliss has seen fear on faces of Negroes, the white woman has called herself his mother; Hickman and [Sister BearMasher] have taken redhead to town; Bliss has been taken home by Negro woman and there he raises her gown during night. Next day he is taken to see Hickman, who has been beaten. He feels guilty over beating, believing that it is connected with his being snatched by the white woman and with his having raised the nightgown. On the other hand he is fascinated by the white woman and tries to follow her, is brought back by church member. Later when Hickman is recovering he takes Bliss to see movie and it is here that Bliss begins to have fantasy that his mother is one of the white stars.

  Bliss’s coffin is a threshold, a point between life and death. Note that after its symbolism of rebirth (Christian) he does indeed find rebirth—but in an ironic reversal he becomes white and anything but the liberator he was being trained to become.

  Bliss realizes political and social weakness of Hickman and other Negroes when he’s taken from his coffin, and this becomes mixed with his yearning for a mother—whom he now identifies with the redheaded woman who tried to snatch him from his coffin. Which was a symbol of resurrection in drama of redemption that Hickman has structured around it. But he goes seeking for life among whites, using the agency of racism to punish Negroes for being weak, and to achieve power of his own. As with [the] man, [the] politician’s politics is a drama in which he plays a role that doesn’t necessarily jibe with his own feelings. Nevertheless he feels humiliated by a fate that threw him among Negroes and deprived him of the satisfaction of knowing whether he is a Negro by blood or only by culture and upbringing. He tells himself that he hates Negroes but can’t deny his love for Hickman. Resents this too.<
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  He is a man who sees the weakness in the way social hierarchy has dealt with race and it is through the chink that he enters white society and exploits it.

  He is a rootless man, an American who has turned upon his loneliness and twisted it into spite and opportunism. He is full of nameless fears and in seeking to overcome them he bypasses the humanizing influence of that mastery, since this would require that he accept himself and his past, and uses the insight to destroy others. The center does not hold.

  “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  are full of passionate intensity.”

  That is, “Let us break bread together,” is counterposed by the drowning of innocence, the assassination of character, the destruction of belief.

  Bliss, remembering Hickman’s talks about R. W. Emerson, refers to his motion-picture camera as a “transparent eyeball.” Through which he is able to see possibility in its latent state, his “blue glass” peers into blue scenes and characters but he is unable to see that which he looks upon.

  Bliss’s purpose (immediate) is to get money to carry him further west. Secondarily and psychologically, it is to manipulate possibility and identities of the townspeople and to take revenge upon his own life. And to play! He is the artist as child in this.

  The more Bliss plays with the camera as a means of forgetting then of denying, and then of distorting, burlesquing, the more he is forced to forget the old identity and to speculate upon what it might have meant and what it might have become. Thus he abandons art. Each adventure is thus no mere enclosure in his coffin, but a plunge into death. But with no Hickman standing over him, and no congregation singing and rejoicing and shouting that he (and they), the spirit, has been once more resurrected. He turns then to more malicious means of denial—he wants to emphasize their otherness of skin, or through their skin—by playing upon their own urge to denial. This is destructive and criminal and antihuman. Hickman knows this, just as Bliss knows this. Humanity must reside somewhere else.