Book Review: Juneteenth is the great unfinished book that makes Ralph Ellison (1913-94) one of that elite group of great novelists who published just one novel: Emily Bronte, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, and (irony of ironies) Margaret Mitchell. Ordinarily I don't read unfinished novels published after the author's death (such as The Last Tycoon or Go Set a Watchman). It seems unfair to the author and doesn't give the reader a full sense of the writer's intent or vision. Here I made an exception largely because of the recent holiday. I'm glad I did. Since Ralph Ellison didn't complete or publish this effort, I cannot fault him for any flaws in the work, but I can admire its many successes. Likewise I can't blame the editor (John F. Callahan), as I'm sure he did the best he could with a massive and chaotic archive. Ellison set out to follow his classic Invisible Man (1952) with what may've been a Faulknerian, multi-volume epic of African American history told through an authoritative and exhilarating use of the black oral tradition. A mythic mix of language and identity. The reasons for its failure to reach fruition are detailed in Callahan's thorough introduction. The bit we have, Juneteenth, is told through a Woolfian stream of consciousness: speeches, sermons, thoughts, delusions, and vernacular, intimate or contentious conversations. At times the constant inundation of words is overwhelming, without any phrase making an impact before being trampled on by seven other phrases following in quick succession. Too many notes, too many words, too hard to focus. Like drinking from a fire hose. There is no single narrative but scraps intermingled like bread crumbs along a trail that the reader tries desperately to track through interweaving streams of sensory overload. Monologue and dialogue meld. But when it does work, which is often enough, Ellison is brilliant. A flashback to a call-and-response church sermon given by the two main characters is overload in the best possible way, the history of African arrival to this country told in pure poetry slam perfection "We were born again in chains of steel. Yes, and chains of ignorance. And all we knew was the spirit of the Word. We had no schools. We owned no tools, no cabins, no churches, not even our own bodies." When it works there are moments of transcendence, as when a delegation of seniors from a black church congregate at the Lincoln Memorial and Ellison gives us a meditation upon that great and all-too-human martyr. As an unfinished work there is little narrative drive, little forward propulsion beyond the reader wondering about the moment of metamorphosis from what we're told happened to the painfully little we learn about what is. There is no real beginning, middle, and end -- we enter in the middle of a conversation. The basic story rests heavily on the two central characters: a white, race-baiting U.S. Senator and the black tent-show preacher who raised him. The whole swirls around Juneteenth, that happy commemoration of the resurrection that we call Emancipation, that overdue proclamation broken by conciliation and compromise: "A bunch of old-fashioned Negroes celebrating an illusion of emancipation." That great moment as unfinished as this book. But somewhere in the 40 years of writing in the wilderness that arrived at Juneteenth, Ellison strikes gold often enough that readers can see the vision he had for it, even as we can see Lincoln's vision, even if neither has been realized or perfected. There's so much here of violence, and pain, and injustice that still rings relevant today: "Why can't they realize that when they dull their senses to the killing of one group of men they dull themselves to the preciousness of all human life?" For the historians, Callahan apparently assembled Juneteenth from Book II of what may have been a possible three volume sequence within Ellison's greater reservoir of notes, disks, and typescripts. In 2010, Callahan published a longer version of this novel, over a thousand pages, as Three Days Before the Shooting. I've not seen a copy and this version, however truncated, is enough for me. As incomplete, fragmented, limited, and unblessed by the author as this may be, the many pieces still unite to speak of matters we need to hear. [4★]
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