Unfinished business

June 19^th – or Juneteenth has a poignant meaning as Emancipation Day. It was and continues to be a day for celebrating the end of slavery and the beginning of a new chance at life.  It was on this day that the Union Army in 1865 brought news of emancipation to African-Americans in one of the farthest corners of the Confederate States—Texas, effectively marking the death of slavery in the United States.

But the date makes me think of something else, of the late author Ralph Ellison http://newsreel.org/video/RALPH-ELLISON and of his career.  His book, Invisible Man, published in 1952, is one of the great debuts in contemporary literature. It delved into the black and white corners of the American psyche and quickly attained the status of legend, exploring the theme of man’s search for his identity and place in society as seen from the perspective of an unnamed black man in the New York City of the 1930’s. Ellison's follow-up, Juneteenth, 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.  Then he spent decades reconstructing, revising and expanding his initial vision. When he died, he left behind some 2,000 pages of manuscript. Yet this mythical mountain of prose was unfinished, far too disjointed to publish. It seemed as if Ellison's second novel would never appear.

Or would it? Ellison's literary executor, John Callahan, compiled a smaller, more coherent work from all that raw material. 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 speech 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.

I like to think of the book as a monumental testament to the power of friendship and editorship.  It must have taken courage and dedication for Callahan to sort through notes, and passages of dialogue, and sections of narrative told in the bits and pieces that Ellison left behind, and then to dare to somehow put it all together in some sort of coherent form. And he was left with making authorial decisions about the narrative structure and character development. 

But unfortunately the final result is messy, incomplete, and largely unsatisfying. While there are scenes in Juneteenth that hint at Ellison's lyrical brilliance, the jigsaw puzzle effect of the storyline is sketchy, leaving me with a mixture of emotions—sadness over the destruction of the original manuscript and that Ellison never lived to finish his great life work, and disappointment that Juneteenth, as we have it, missed the mark and is a novel that maybe never should have been published.