Darkness Visible

“History has put to us three fatal questions, has written them across our sky in accents of accusation,” Sen. Adam Sunraider shouts from the well of the Senate in Ralph Ellison’s “Juneteenth.” “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 year is 1955, and the “us” that the Senator refers to is the American people. And the three questions the Senator asks can be lumped under the great American rubric of Race.

Few would doubt that race not only continues to be the Great American theme, more than six score and twice seven years after the end of the Civil War. “Huckleberry Finn,” that “seminal if not great novel” as Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Ford calls it, with its story of a white boy and a black man floating down the muddy aorta of the heart of the heart of the country, continues to find its way onto lists of Great American Novels, even while it is drummed out of well-meaning, if misguided, schools around the country, precisely because we are chained as a people to these questions.

Ford (white) himself took a boat ride from Mark Twain’s birthplace in Hannibal, Mo., with jazz and culture maven Stanley Crouch (black). It was the hope of some well-meaning, if misguided, editor that the men might discover what it is about America that Twain implanted so movingly beneath Huck and Jim’s different-colored skins. It was no surprise that the two writers wound up spending less than a day on the same boat and filed a couple of pieces they might just as well have written back home.

After all, you don’t whip up Huck and Jim, or answer the Senator’s three fatal questions, on a day trip. It took Ralph Ellison nearly half a century to write “Juneteenth” after the publication of his masterpiece, “Invisible Man.”

The answer the Senator gives is as paradoxically Orwellian as it is American--”In dark days look steadily on the darker side, for there is where brightness sometimes hides itself.” And it is doubly provocative--for Sen. Sunraider, although he represents one of the states of New England, has a national reputation as a race-baiter, an implacable foe to black man, woman and child. Nevertheless, his answer to the three fatal questions is the key to “Juneteenth,” a book that threatens to come as close as any since “Huckleberry Finn” to grabbing the ring of the Great American Novel.

For Sunraider was not always a politician, not always a white supremacist, preaching the gospel of the light. In earlier years, he worked in the shadows of the infant film industry, crossing the country with a cameraman and a director, filming the small towns of the early century. And before that, he was known as the Rev. Bliss, a child preacher, traveling from tent to tent, under the care of his big black father, Daddy Hickman.

It has been 40 years since Bliss ran from Daddy Hickman and his life as a light-skinned black boy. The elderly Hickman has known for some time that the hated Senator used to be the child, Bliss, whom he raised as his own son and taught to preach the gospel. But word has come to him recently that there is special trouble brewing. And sure enough, while Hickman and his congregation are watching from the gallery as the Senator asks his three “fatal questions” on the floor, a young man stands up and shoots the Senator.

But the Senator does not die. From the ambulance, he calls for Daddy Hickman. And from that call, Ellison fashions his magnificent novel. As the Senator falls in and out of consciousness, Hickman speaks to him from his bedside, reminds him of the past that he has so thoroughly denied. The Senator is able to ask only the merest of questions. But his mind is strong enough to wander back itself, through chapters and verses of superb poetry; as does Hickman’s mind, reckoning back on his own past as a gambler and musician, playing a big brass trombone in juke joints from Texas to Georgia, who took in the orphaned infant Bliss on his road to Damascus.

The stories wander with the easy fluidity of a Malcolm Lowry or an early James Joyce, never in anger and often in humor at the strange distant past. On one Juneteenth (the anniversary of the June day in 1865 when the Union soldiers brought word to the blacks of Texas that they had been freed), Hickman remembers how a red-headed white woman, convinced that Bliss was her lost son, burst into a tent in Alabama and tried to pull the 6-year-old boy away.

“Next thing I know she’s got you by the head and Sister Susie Trumball’s got one leg and another sister’s got the other, and others are snatching you by the arms--talking about King Solomon, he didn’t have but two women to deal with, I had seven--I tell you, Bliss, when it comes to chillun, women just ain’t gentlemen.”

Although the Senator outs himself in his wandering state, losing his way among the white and the black words of his linguistic past (“Here in this country it’s change the reel and change the man. Don’t look! Don’t listen! Don’t say and the living is easy!”), it is Hickman, the conscious Jim, not the comatose Huck, who is the rock of “Juneteenth” and Ellison’s most glorious creation. Both long-suffering Job and converted Saul, Hickman is a two-fisted preacher who is not afraid to use music and lights and theatrical effect to guide the prayers of blacks just one generation younger than emancipation. Bliss gets his start in the pulpit, in fact, as the center-stage player in a Daddy Hickman routine, lying quietly in a lily-white coffin, breathing through a hidden tube until, on the cue of “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” he sits up and with his eyes still closed, flings his arms out with a woeful “Lawd, why has thou forsaken me?”

It’s a piece of theater that owes more to Stanislavsky than Elmer Gantry, never canny and cynical.

“You start it, you draw your strength and inspiration out of the folks,” Hickman tells the young Bliss. “If they’re cold, you heat them up; when they get hot, you guide the flame.” And much of the theater of “Juneteenth” is held in Hickman’s sermons and Bliss’s political speeches. Part of the genius of Ellison is the control with which he guides this Literature of Oration away from the nodding heat of Sunday morning and toward the burning mystery of story. The answer to the burning mystery of Hickman’s story--why, after all these years, has he come to Washington, D.C., to sit at the bedside of the devil--is revealed in a final coup as dramatic as any in the Bible.

Ellison deals his Huck as good a chance at philosophy as his Jim. In his final delirium, the Senator sees himself attacked on the road by a phantom car, “an arbitrary assemblage of chassis, wheels, engine, hood, horns--a junkyard sculpture mechanized--an improvisation of vast arrogance and subversive and malicious defiance which [blacks] had designed to outrage and destroy everything in its path.” It’s a domestic model, no doubt about it, America itself. “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!”

Yet the other essential mystery of “Juneteenth” is what turned Bliss into the Senator, what soured childhood love into racial hate. If this mystery is left unanswered, perhaps that is one of the necessary casualties of this particular edition of “Juneteenth.” The novel was never completed by Ellison, although he worked on it for more than 40 years, until his death in 1994. His literary executor, John F. Callahan, was left with the noble job of turning the junkyard jalopy of the boxes and files and notes and revisions that were left after Ellison’s death into the phantom car of the Senator’s vision. It is a miracle of the imagination that (one can only imagine) Ellison couldn’t bear to take off the blocks in the garage while the country was still changing around him.

As Callahan explains in an introduction and an afterword, this version of “Juneteenth” is a reader’s version and presents only a single volume of what Ellison at certain times planned to be a trilogy. Perhaps one of those other volumes--promised in a fully noted scholarly edition--will solve the Senator’s mystery. Until then, we have the solace of this journey with Ellison and his two heroes, as they float down the muddy river of the Senator’s last few hours and, in that simple Pieta, give eloquent answers to America’s fatal questions.