Invisible Man, which Ralph Ellison published in 1952, was one of the great debuts in contemporary literature. Alternating phantasmagoria with rock-ribbed realism, it delved into the blackest (and whitest!) corners of the American psyche, and quickly attained the status of legend. Ellison's follow-up, however, seemed truly bedeviled--not only by its monumental predecessor, but by fate itself. First, a large section of the novel went up in flames when the author's house burned in 1967. Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising, and expanding his initial vision. When Ellison died in 1994, he left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Yet this mythical mountain of prose was clearly unfinished, far too sketchy and disjointed to publish. Apparently Ellison's second novel would never appear. Or would it? Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, has now quarried a smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. Gone are the epic proportions that Ellison so clearly envisioned. Instead, Juneteenth revolves around just two characters: Adam Sunraider, a white, race-baiting New England senator, and Alonzo "Daddy" Hickman, a black Baptist minister who turns out to have a paradoxical (and paternal) relationship to his opposite number. As the book opens, Sunraider is delivering a typically bigoted peroration on the Senate floor when he's peppered by an assassin's bullets. Mortally wounded, he summons the elderly Hickman to his bedside. There the two commence a journey into their shared past, which (unlike the rest of 1950s America) represents a true model of racial integration. Adam, we discover, was born Bliss, and raised by Hickman in the bosom of the black community. What's more, this rabble-rouser was being groomed as a boy minister. ("I tell you, Bliss," says Hickman, "you're going to make a fine preacher and you're starting at just the right age. You're just a little over six and Jesus Christ himself didn't start until he was twelve.") The portion of Juneteenth that covers Bliss's ecclesiastical education--perhaps a third of the entire book--is as electrifying as anything in Invisible Man. Ellison juggles the multiple ironies of race and religion with effortless brilliance, and his delight in Hickman's house-wrecking rhetoric is contagious: Bliss, I've heard you cutting some fancy didoes on the radio, but son, Eatmore was romping and rampaging and walking through Jerusalem just like John! Oh, but wasn't he romping! Maybe you were too young to get it all, but that night that mister was ten thousand misters and his voice was pure gold. In comparison, though, the rest of the novel seems like pretty slim pickings. For one thing, much of the plot--including Bliss's transformation from pint-sized preacher to United States senator--is absent. For another, Ellison's confinement of the two top-billed players to a hospital room makes for an awfully static narrative. Granted, he intended their dialogue to exist "on a borderline between the folk poetry and religious rhetoric" (or so he wrote in his notes). But this is a dicey recipe for a novel, and Juneteenth veers between naturalism and hallucination much less effectively than its predecessor did. None of this is to assail Ellison's artistry, which remains on ample display. The problem is that Callahan's splice job--which well may be the best one possible--remains weak at the seams. So should readers give Juneteenth a miss? The answer would still have to be no. The best parts are as powerful and necessary as anything in our literature, evoking Daddy Hickman's own brand of verbal enchantment. "I was talking like I always talk," he recalls at one point, "in the same old down-home voice, that is, in the beloved idiom... [and] I preached those five thousand folks into silence." Ellison, too, is capable of preaching the reader into silence--and that's not something we can afford to overlook.


From Publishers Weekly
When Ralph Ellison died in 1994, he left behind a manuscript he'd been working on since the '50s. John Callahan's introduction to this long-awaited edition explores Ellison's life and the history of this second novel (after, of course, the classic Invisible Man), cataloguing such disasters as the near-finished manuscript being destroyed in a fire in 1967. The novel turns out to have survived the many obstacles to its birth, for after a rather windy beginning, Ellison writes beautifully, in the grand, layered Southern tradition. The narrative begins in 1950s Washington, D.C., with Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator who is gunned down on the Senate floor while a man named Hickman watches in the gallery. Rushed to the hospital, Sunraider requests Hickman's presence, and the story of the two men's agonized relationship is told in flashbacks as Hickman attends the dying senator. Decades before, Alonzo Hickman was an ex-trombone player turned circuit preacher raising a young boy of indeterminate race named Bliss.The boy assists Hickman in his revivals, rising out of a white coffin at a certain moment in the sermon. Bliss grows up to change his name to Adam Sunraider and, having passed for white, has gone from being a flimflam artist and movie maker to the U. S. Senate Always, however, he is in flight from Hickman. These flashbacks showcase Ellison's stylized set pieces, among the best scenes he has written, especially as his incandescent images chart the mysteries and legacies of slavery. Bliss remembers his courtship of a black woman in a piercingly sweet reverie, and he revisits a revival meeting on Juneteenth (June 19), the date in 1865 on which slaves in Texas were finally informed of the Emancipation Proclamation. The sermon in this section is perhaps the highlight of the novel, sure to achieve classic status on its own merits. The revival meeting is interrupted by a white woman who claims Bliss is her son, after which Bliss begins his odyssey for an identity that takes him, by degrees, away from the black culture of his youth. Gradually, we learn of the collusion of lies and violence that brought Bliss to Hickman in the first place. Editor Callahan, in his informative afterword, describes the difficult process of editing Ellison's unfinished novel and of arranging the massive body of work into the unwieldy yet cohesive story Ellison wanted to tell. The difficulties he faced are most obvious in the ending, which is Faulknerian to a fault, even to the overuse of the word "outrage." Nonetheless, this volume is a visionary tour de force, a lyrical, necessary contribution to America's perennial racial dialogue, and a novel powerfully reinforcing Ellison's place in literary history. 100,000 first printing; BOMC double main selection. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Grade 11 Up-By Ralph Ellison. Both a jazz novel and a thunderous sermon, it offers up in its language a song of praise to the richness of the African American experience. A redemptive counterpoint to the Invisible Man's existentialism, it is a reckoning of sorts with Ellison's own life's journey and a parable about God and race in America. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Ellison made his mark with the classic Invisible Man. Now, after 40 years, he's back with a novel whose title commemorates June 19, 1865, the day Union troops marched into Galveston, TX, and announced the Emancipation Proclamation. It's the Fifties, and a young black man has shot a racist senator. As he lay dying, he launches a conversation with an elderly black minister from his past.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Louis Menand
...there is no evidence ... that Ellison ever considered Juneteenth as a title for the book he was struggling to produce. Not that it matters. For whatever that book might have been, this is not it.


The Atlantic Monthly, Robert G. O'Meally
The best news is that Juneteenth is written with unmistakable Ellisonian zest, depth, and elegance, and that the work holds together as a complete, aesthetically satisfying, and at times thrilling whole. A novel set substantially in the black church and in or near the halls of Congress, Juneteenth concerns matters spiritual and political, and is braced with the rhythm of the blues.


From AudioFile
This novel traces the mysterious and unlikely reunion of two men--a racist U.S. senator and an elderly black minister. In a dramatic scene, Senator Sunraider is shot by an assassin; when he inexplicably calls Reverend Hickman to his deathbed, a hidden history is revealed. Their shared past is the focus of the novel, and it expands to encompass race and relationships in America. Ellison's book is a winding path; it's almost symphonic in its complex blending of parts, bits of dialogue, and stream-of-consciousness declarations. Fernandez is a strong guide on this path; he uses skillful vocal shifts and syncopated pauses to aid the listener's appreciation of Ellison's novel. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
Forty years in the making, second novel published
"To That Vanished Tribe into Which I Was Born: The American Negroes." So reads the author's dedication in Ralph Ellison's long-awaited, unfinished, and posthumously published second novel, Juneteenth. Within this puzzling, nearly paradoxical dedication lies the heart of Ralph Ellison's life work: an almost quixotic search for an American identity. Not his own American identity, but much more a naming, a labeling of that personality that makes America, its hatreds and possibilities, its glories and opportunities missed. Into this racial, paranoiac cauldron Ellison placed the American Negro, validating his presence, insisting on his visibility.

The author's first novel, Invisible Man , one of the most important American novels of the 20th century and Ellison's most seminal work, chronicles the existential journey of an unnamed black man attempting to discover his identity and role in a hostile and confusing world that refuses to acknowledge his existence. The issues of alienation and rejection, exclusion and isolation suffuse Invisible Man . Similar themes carry the recently released Juneteenth, forty years in the making but never fully brought to completion by the author. Ellison began writing what was to be titled Juneteenth in 1951, just prior to the publication of Invisible Man . The fame garnered from his first novel, a later loss by fire of a manuscript in progress, and ultimately death by cancer in 1994 all prevented Ellison from completion of the elusivesecondnovel. And in life, it weighed on him. In the novel's introduction, editor John F. Callahan points to Ellison's tongue-in-cheek reference to his "novel-in-progress (very long in progress)." In The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison , Saul Bellow tells of a "dinner attended by foreign celebrities at which editor Georges Simenon (a prolific and popular Belgian-French novelist) asked Ellison how many novels he had written, and when he learned that there was only one he said, "To be a novelist one must produce many novels. Ergo, you are not a novelist." That indurate remark was a wounded albatross carried by Ellison to his grave.

Juneteenth positions two protagonists. The Reverend Alonzo Hickman, called "God's Trombone," is a "jazzman turned Baptist minister." Senator Adam Sunraider is "a self-named, race-baiting politician, formerly Bliss...a little boy of indefinite race who looks white and who, through a series of circumstances, comes to be reared by the Negro minister."

Reverend Hickman has found God yet wisely understands that souls are best saved with strong doses of pulpit-pounding religiosity and even larger doses of theatric flair. Hickman grooms Bliss into a boy preacher, teaching him the finer points of the salvation game. The crowning moment of their traveling ministry is the raising of the child Bliss from a center-placed coffin, Bible and cross in hand, proclaiming to be "the resurrection and the life." The crowd loves it.

Bliss grows and rebels, discovering the options afforded him by his light complexion along the way. He, too, learns the fine art of theater, but in a more clinically demonic manner. He abandons Hickman and all things black, suppresses Bliss, renames himself Sunraider, and ultimately wins a state senatorial position, rejecting then persecuting the community that raised him. Now an avowed racist, he is assassinated by a black man while race baiting on the Senate floor.

This story of two men, one deeply ensconced within the culture of black community, the other opportunistic and self-loathing, is told from Sunraider's hospital deathbed. While offering an interesting story line, it is in the dialogue that the book suffers. Limited by circumstance (Sunraider is dying), much of the dialogue is conveyed by some sort of understood osmosis between the two — not conversation as much as a collaborative and mutual retelling of their stories. Introspection, sermons, and speeches are woven throughout the text. Possibly confusing? Possibly frustrating? The reader may find it so. Juneteenth's underlying themes prove much more interesting. Author and critic Albert Murray, in comparing Ellison to Richard Wright, states in Encarta Africana that "Ellison, no less than Wright, rejects the black church as a vehicle for expression, which means both rejected the central communal institution in black life. Oddly, one finds more about black religion in the work of Wright the Marxist than in Ellison the folklorist. Both Ellison and Wright, staunch individualists, are wary of the harshness of conformity and anti-intellectualism in black life."

Ellison's treatment of the black church and its ministry in Juneteenth was, then, true to form. Verging on stereotype and caricature, Ellison's cynically humorous contempt for both clergy and their flock lays thinly veiled.

Still, Ellison remains the quintessential interpreter of the African-American scene. Juneteenth is a novel for the Ellison reader interested in issues of American identity and racial equality. And while not written of the same timber as invisible Man , Ellison, through race, culture, conflict, and schism, may have done even more in offering reason for the extinction of "that vanished tribe." The second novel has been published, the albatross removed. Ralph Waldo Ellison rests in peace.

— Max Rodriguez

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 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.

SYNOPSIS

The long-awaited literary landmark — Ralph Ellison's second novel.

FROM THE CRITICS

Louis Menand - The New York Times Book Review \

What is especially revealing about Juneteenth, in fact, is how invested Ellison had become in the past....The unfinished novel begins in the 1950's and looks entirely backward. It is as though Ellison had hoped to resurrect the world of black Oklahoma, the world of his ''American Negro.'' That he came to feel that world was lost forever may not have been the least of the reasons he was unable to finish his book.

Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

...[P]rovides the reader with intimations of the grand vision animating Ellison's 40-year project....[B]rilliant passages suggest that [the novel] might have used the rich, interpenetrating strands of American language to underscore the...ways in which individuals use language to both define and reinvent themselves.

Book Magazine

...[A] tight, dream-like work....[A] forceful lament....Juneteenth is a song that radiates as prayer and praise for all who live and love and accept suffering.

Library Journal

The late Ralph Ellison's 1952 debut, Invisible Man, remains as fine an American novel as has appeared since World War II. Afterward, he worked periodically on his "novel in progress (very long progress)" until his death in 1994. A third of that sprawling manuscript is published here, his literary executor explains in the introduction. So how are we to evaluate it, if we even should? This ambitious book (whose title refers to the 1865 day when word of Emancipation finally reached Texas slaves) certainly has the rhetorical flourishes and bluesy erudition found in Invisible Man, and its criss-crossing story is original and bold: an Oklahoma boy-preacher with racially vague features becomes a bigoted Northern Senator, Adam Sunraider, before his life intersects again with that of his estranged black mentor, Rev. Alonzo Hickman, around a 1955 assassination. The two characters are vivid, but whereas in his masterpiece the soaring language seemed an extension of the tormented narrator, too often here it clearly comes from the omniscient Ellison himself. Ellison's fans will nevertheless find much to savor and can only wonder about the unseen chapters. For all fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/99.]--Nathan Ward, "Library Journal" Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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