Juneteenth (48 page)

WE HAVE SECEDED FROM THE MOTHER!

HOORAY FOR US!

TO HELL WITH CHARLEY!

They have constructed it themselves, the Senator’s mind went on, brought the parts together and gathered in conspiratorial secret like a group of guerrillas
assembling the smuggled parts of a machine gun!—And they’ve made the damn thing run! 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! It’s a mammy-made, junkyard construction and yet those clowns have made it work, it runs!…

And now the machine roared back, braking with a violent, stiffly sprung rocking of body and a skidding of tires, and again the men were looking out of the open window
.

“Listen, Sunrobber,” the nearest called, “what the hell was that you just said about our little heap?”

“Hell, mahn,” the middle man said, “don’t ask he no’ting! I done tole you the bahstard has low-rated our little load! The mahn done low-rated our pride and joy, so don’t ask the bahstard not’ing, just show he whadt de joecah kin do!

“And remembah us mah-toe, mahn:

Down Wid de Coon Cawdge
,
Up WID DE JOE CAH!

“Then, mahn, I say, KICK HIM ASS!”

“Yeah, man; but not so fas’,” one of the others said. “Not before we give his butt a little ride …”

A blast of heat struck him then, followed by the opening of the door. And as a dark hand reached down, he seemed to hear
the sound of Hickman’s consoling voice, calling from somewhere above.

NOTES

Editor’s note:
From the time of
Invisible Man’s
publication in 1952 until Ralph Ellison’s death in 1994, he wrote down literally thousands of notes pertaining to all facets of his novel-in-progress. Some he jotted in haste on magazine subscription cards or scrawled indecipherably on the back of used envelopes, bills, or any scrap of paper close at hand. Others he copied carefully into one of the half-dozen notebooks he kept for the purpose. Still others he typed. Some of the notes carry on for several pages, spilling over into description or dialogue, as if in the act of brooding over a scene or character, the writer became his own muse. Others are brief, cryptic, or in some cases even interrupted by another, sometimes unrelated, thought that took urgent possession of Ellison’s mind during the act of writing. After his death I found the notes every which way in Ellison’s papers. As far as I could tell, they had not been arranged in any particular order. What follows is a selection and sequence of notes that I hope will give the reader a sense of Ellison thinking through the characters, scenes, themes, and method of his ambitious, extended saga of America told and hinted at in
Juneteenth
.

Action takes place on the eve of the Rights movement but it forecasts the chaos which would come later.

Remember that “the essence of the story is what goes on in the minds of the characters on a given occasion.” The mind becomes the real scene of the action. And in the mind scene and motive are joined. Even the opposing characters are transferred there as images.

The method is naturally antiphonal. Senator and Rev. Hickman, little Bliss and Daddy Hickman. The antiphonal section, or Emancipation myth, is spun out in hospital where Senator confesses to Hickman under pressure of conscience, memory and Hickman’s questions and it takes form of Bliss’s remembered version versus Hickman’s idiomatic accounts.

The thing to remember about the antiphony between Daddy Hickman and little Bliss is that the two are building a scene within a scene and it must be on a borderline between the folk poetry and religious rhetoric. Thing to do is to point it up.

(They needn’t talk, thus dramatizing a lack of communication, but the past is with them and in them. Problem is to make it eloquent.)

The sermon of Hickman and Bliss which takes place on Juneteenth must be related to later speeches made by the Senator while in Washington.… The rhythms of all this should feed back one upon the other proving not only perspectives by incongruity, but ironies, and some measure of comedy.

Make Washington function in Hickman’s mind as a place of power and mystery, frustration and possibility. It is historical, it is the past, it is slavery,
the Emancipation and a continuation of the betrayal of the Reconstruction. He would have to imagine or try to imagine what Bliss knew about the city and its structure of power. He would wonder how, given his early background, Bliss could have gone so far in the gaining and manipulation of power, the juxtapositions of experience and intelligence which allowed him to make his way.

Hickman has staked a great part of his life on the idea that by bringing up the boy with love, sacrifice and kindness he would do something to overcome the viciousness of racial division. He accepted Bliss’s mother’s most incongruous request in desperation. Hate would not assuage his grief over his brother’s lynching and his mother’s death so he takes the baby, becomes a minister, brings the boy up as a little minister and then suffers when the boy runs away. Yet does not lose his idea, instead it intensifies his faith. It drives him to keep up with the boy’s career, especially when boy becomes a politician, and it takes him to Washington when he learns that he is in danger. He wants to talk to learn what happened, what led to break and to negative acts toward Negroes after boy became powerful. Was it perversity, or was it that the structure of power
demanded
that anyone acting out the role would do so in essentially the same way?