Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison

First published: 1999; revised as Three Days Before the Shooting, 2010

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of plot: Early to mid-twentieth century

Locale: Washington, D.C., the American South, and the American Midwest

Principal characters

• Reverend Alonzo Hickman,
• Senator Adam Sunraider (Bliss),

The Story:

The Reverend Alonzo Hickman and members from his congregation descend on Washington, D.C., to confront Senator Adam Sunraider, who has made a name for himself with his race-baiting speeches. The congregation believes it can “save” Sunraider from himself, since he, as a boy named Bliss, once belonged to their church. Unbeknownst to them, Sunraider’s racist rants are part of his plan to spur passive blacks into revolutionary action. The church members attend a session of Congress to hear one of the senator’s racist speeches.

The congregation’s plans to redeem Sunraider are foiled when he is shot by one of its members, an angry young boy named Severen. As Sunraider lies on the Senate floor, he begins to remember his life. He continues his reveries as he is taken to the hospital, and Hickman interrupts and corrects some of Sunraider’s recollections. In the hospital, Hickman sits at the bedside of the fatally wounded senator. Delirious, hallucinating, the senator offers up a mea culpa and “confession” but, at the same time, castigates Hickman for his role in Sunraider’s fate. Sunraider passes out but while unconscious flashes back to his childhood as Bliss, when he knew Hickman as Daddy Hickman.

Daddy Hickman promises Bliss ice cream if he will climb into a wooden coffin. Hickman, a preacher, has decided that the only way to unite the black and white races in America is to put on a “revival” show featuring a young white boy, Bliss, rising from the coffin as a new Christ. Bliss is a typical young boy; he is afraid of the darkness of the closed coffin. Hickman tells him he can take his Easter bunny into the casket with him, but Bliss will enter only if he can bring his teddy bear with him because, he says, “bears ain’t afraid of the dark.”

Sunraider continues to relive his childhood at random, recalling events in no particular order. As Bliss, he stands up to a group of African American bullies by beating them at a game of the dozens and hitting one of the boys in the forehead with a stone (recalling David’s battle with Goliath). The most traumatic and significant event of Bliss’s childhood, the one that drives him away from Hickman and his congregation, occurs at one of the revival shows: As Bliss is rising from the coffin on cue, a red-haired woman from the crowd rushes the stage, attempts to grab him, and calls him “Cudworth,” claiming to be his mother. The black women in the congregation pull her away and rush Bliss off to a safe hiding place. Although he does not get a good look at the woman’s face, Bliss never forgets her red hair. After he runs away, he decides to film his adventures across the South and the Midwest. However, his real motive for making the film is that he hopes, one day, to find the red-haired woman.

After the revival show but before Bliss leaves for good, Hickman tries to placate the boy by taking him to see a movie. Hickman dislikes this new form of entertainment since it tempts people not only to confuse illusion and reality but also to prefer the former to the latter. Hickman’s reservations turn out to be well founded. The film they see features a red-haired Mary Pickford, and Bliss, who has never been in a theater before, is so transported by the experience that he believes he is actually in the film with the actress. Worse, he believes she is his mother. From that moment on, he goes from movie house to movie house, shoots film in town after town, searching for the red-haired woman.

Still a young boy and as a white preacher speaking in the voice of black Baptists, Bliss is intoxicated with his powers of persuasion; he becomes a miniature version of Hickman. He meets and falls for a young black girl named Laly, but all he dreams of is making her over into someone else. Just as Hickman made him a “black” boy with white skin, so Bliss believes he can transform Laly—and himself—into an Indian princess and prince. That dream quickly dissipates when local ruffians—having observed Bliss and his assistants, Donelson and Karp, taking pictures and shooting film—threaten them at gunpoint.

As Sunraider drifts in and out of consciousness, Hickman undergoes his own crises. He feels guilty for not preventing Severen from shooting Sunraider and for betraying both his congregation and Bliss by putting so much faith in, and responsibility on, a child. Hickman’s true motives for raising Bliss as a preacher and a symbol of racial reconciliation are related to the mystery of Bliss’s birth. Hickman’s brother, Bob, was once involved in an illicit affair with the red-haired woman. When she became pregnant, she panicked and informed the police that she’d been raped by Bob. Bob was arrested, but, before he could be tried in court, a lynch mob hanged him. The red-haired woman, desperate to shield her lie, gave birth in secrecy and, one night, brought the newborn to Hickman’s cabin. Wracked with guilt, she begged him to take the child as compensation for his dead brother. Hickman, outraged, grabbed her by the throat, intending to strangle her. She did not resist, telling him he had every right to kill her. However, Hickman could not bring himself to murder the mother of his nephew. He relented, took the child, invented a cover story (a black man traveling with a white child, he told everyone that he was the child’s servant), and began his ministry.

Bibliography

Aithal, S. Krishnamoorthy. “Juneteenth: A Novel for the New Millennium.” American Studies International 38, no. 3 (October, 2000): 115-121. Focuses on the humanity and complexity of Hickman’s relationship to Bliss. Argues that Ellison uses irony to explore the ways that both Hickman and Bliss attempt to overcome the burden of American history by trying to meet each other outside the realms of their particular expertise: culture and politics.

Applebome, Peter. “Ralph Ellison’s Elusive Novel, Juneteenth.” Crisis (The New) 106, no. 2 (March/April, 1999): 38-39. Based on an interview with editor John Callahan, this article discusses the cultural and literary events that led up to the anticipated publication of Juneteenth.

De Santis, Christopher C. “Juneteenth, by Ralph Ellison.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 19, no. 3 (September, 1999): 172-173. Emphasizes that Juneteenth challenges simple notions of race and identity as its essentially musical structure moves back and forth across dizzyingly constructed and discarded identities.

Jones, Malcolm. “Visible Once Again.” Newsweek 133, no. 21 (June 24, 1999): 69. Argues that as good as the novel is, characterized by Ellison’s refusal to give in to simple binary oppositions regarding culture and race in America, it is burdened by Ellison’s self-consciousness that he was writing the long-anticipated follow-up to Invisible Man. Nonetheless, Ellison was unique in wedding high and low culture by combining literary culture with music (blues and jazz)—not to show off but because he is a fan of both art forms.

O’Meally, Robert G. “How Can the Light Deny the Dark?” Atlantic Monthly 284, no. 1 (July, 1999): 89-90. Summarizes the history behind the publication of Juneteenth, as well as O’Meally’s relationship to Ellison, focusing specifically on the folk cultural elements in the novel as well as in Invisible Man.

Pinsker, Sanford. “America, Race, and Ralph Ellison.” Sewanee Review 108, no. 2 (Spring, 2000): lix-lxxiii. Reads Juneteenth as essentially a tone poem, a fragment among the thousands of unpublished pages left behind by Ellison. For Pinsker, the major problem with the novel is the lack of psychological development of Bliss and the decision by Callahan to render what was apparently going to be a postmodern work as a more traditional novel.

Shank, Barry. “Bliss, or Blackface Sentiment.” boundary 2 30, no. 2 (Summer, 2003): 46-63. Argues that, in both Invisible Man and Juneteenth, Ellison interrogates the productive and limited possibilities of blackface. Insofar as blackface describes not only the minstrel tradition but also the very nature of American culture—that what is native in American culture is, in large part, black—it is the source of the myth of distinct black and white cultures and identities.