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Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth

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Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and African American Identity By CHRISTOPHER Z. HOBSON One weakness of much radical thought is its use of abstract, formalized categories and a reductionist method. Radical theories often begin with some area of social existence— the nation and national identity, the system of production and class, race/ethnicity, gen- der, and others—that they use as a basic category to explain social life. Though there is nothing wrong with using such categories, they are most often reified, that is, treated as real and objective; for example, gender theories assume that people really are of one gender or another, whether “essential” or “socially constructed,” rather than that gender is an idea that partly explains some ways people act. Radical theories further often take a reductionist approach, treating the chosen categories as exclusive of and/or more basic than others rather than simultaneous and functional (that is, the same person may act in terms of class in some situations and nationality in others). Abstract and reductionist thinking misses the complexity of social experience, most of which occurs through the interaction of multiple categories of experience. In particular, thinking that reduces social behavior to seemingly objective categories like economic-social class misses (or deliberately discounts) the importance of cultural ideas of various kinds—political, social, religious, historical, communal, etc. One example of the multidimensionality of social experi- ticular group and different from those of other groups, a ence is the complex nature of African American (Black) way of living, feeling, thinking, and experiencing, and this identity in the U.S. When radicals have tried to explain culture is largely what African Americans are. One must be African American identity in terms of various social cate- careful not to reduce African American culture to any one gories—oppressed nation, superexploited section of the (or two or three) dimension(s), but to see it as a whole, as proletariat, oppressed caste, or a combination of these or “the self-conception in terms of which most Negroes have others—they have most often not dealt with the basic role actually lived and moved, and had their personal being for of culture. Yet African Americans are defined in large part all these years,” as the novelist and critic Albert Murray by African American culture, circular as that may sound. wrote in 1970.1 Further, culture is not just a reflection of African Americans take part in a historically defined, evolv- some more basic (which usually means more material) ing, complex continuum of attitudes characteristic of a par- aspect of existence; it is a partly individual, partly collective Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and African American Identity 50 way of finding pattern in life in the present, past, and envi- Communist Party for several years, until he concluded that sioned future. To quote Murray again—he is talking about the CP subordinated Negroes’ interests to its own desire for blues music, but the point is true about Black culture over- power. In later years he was a political liberal. He is most all—it is not just a way of “making human existence bear- famous for his novel Invisible Man (1952), which develops a able physically or psychologically,” but “to make human distinctive view of racial identity and U.S. society—a view he existence meaningful” (58). adds to and also changes in his final novel, Juneteenth.This work, the central portion of a much larger planned three- One of the best ways to learn about African American cul- part novel that he worked on for the last forty years of his ture is to read African American literature—plenty of it, life, was edited after his death by John F. Callahan and pub- fiction, poetry, drama, essays, autobiography, from the lished separately in 1999.2 Most of Juneteenth was written eighteenth century to today. After all, artistic creation of from the 1950s to the 1970s; Ellison’s later work was on all kinds often provides as complex and serious a view of other sections of his unfinished manuscript. social, moral, and ethical realities as political writing—or more so. However, in looking at African American litera- Juneteenth centers on two characters: a racist white U.S. ture one must guard against assuming that one knows in senator, Adam Sunraider, who is fatally shot on the Senate advance what definition of African American culture is floor sometime in the 1950s, and an older African valid and then evaluating the artists one reads according to American minister, Rev. Alonzo Z. “Daddy” Hickman, who, how close they come to this conception. This approach we learn, raised the future senator as a boy preacher, Bliss, usually means one assumes that African Americans are in his congregation earlier in the century. As even this defined by some objective category (nation, superexploited sketch suggests, Juneteenth is not intended as a social-real- section of class, etc.) and that the writers’ subjective ideas ist novel but as a kind of comic-tragic tall tale about racial about identity are accurate or distorted reflections of this identity in the U.S. and what Ellison sees as the impor- reality. In other words, this is a variety of abstract, reduc- tance of African American culture in and for the struggle tionist thinking. One needs to start from the other end: for democracy. African American literature is a way African Americans have had of defining and determining (deciding by defin- To understand what Juneteenth says about African ing) their identity, and by reading different African American identity, we first need to look very quickly at American authors, one can see what African Americans Invisible Man’s view of the same topic. As that novel’s think about this identity, i.e., what it is.And one must many readers will remember, it is told by a first-person guard against being satisfied with first impressions and narrator who never reveals his name, who is raised and glib generalizations—one must understand the depth and educated in the south in the 1930s, moves to New York complexity of the topic, the existence of a long prior dis- after being expelled from a Negro college, and eventually cussion with its own major and secondary trends. joins and then leaves the Brotherhood, a radical organiza- tion very similar to the Communist Party. Almost every Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) is among the most complex and scene of Invisible Man mixes realistic description, fable, original African American novelists and essayists. Ellison was folktale, metaphor, and symbolism. (For example, the born in Oklahoma City, attended Tuskegee Institute (now tenth chapter, set in the “Liberty Paint” factory in New Tuskegee University) but did not graduate, and moved to York,combines realistic descriptions of production and a New York in 1937. There, he was helped by Langston Hughes union meeting with a factory floorplan representing the and befriended by Richard Wright, and was close to the power relations in U.S. industry and a symbolic account of The Utopian 51 U.S. whiteness—“If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right single thing, Negro or African or would-be white White.”) Along the way the narrator encounters multiple American, but a created culture amalgamating all these. In models of African American identity, from the middle- a later chapter, he sketches a trio of zoot-suited Black class professionalism of his college to the folk and blues youths, “their legs swinging from their hips in trousers culture of working-class Negroes to the class radicalism that ballooned upward from cuffs fitting snug about their and racial assimilationism of the Brotherhood, and in the ankles; their coats long and hip-tight with shoulders far process works out a conception of his own. In a powerful too broad to be those of natural western men…speak[ing] scene, he is present when an old Black couple is being a jived-up transitional language full of country glamour, evicted, their possessions piled in the street: think[ing] transitional thoughts…” (440-41). Ellison sees African American identity as self-created, fluid, stitched I turned aside and looked at the clutter of household together from odds and ends of every U.S. culture; the objects which the two men continued to pile on the zoot suit, a group style of Mexican American youth in curb. And as the crowd pushed me I looked down to World War II that caught on with Blacks and white hip- see looking out of an oval frame a portrait of the old sters, is the perfect emblem of this process. Still later, the couple when young, seeing the sad, stiff dignity of narrator encounters Rinehart, a protean con-man who is their faces there…. My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely minister, gambler, lover, and numbers-runner for different carved and polished bones, “knocking bones,” used to audiences. Rinehart clearly embodies the danger of chaos accompany music at country dances…. Pots and pots in a completely fluid identity without any self-imposed or of green plants were lined in the dirty snow, certain communal restraints. Still, Invisible Man emphasizes the to die of the cold; ivy, canna, a tomato plant. And in a “infinite possibilities” of self-created identity in a world basket I saw a straightening comb, switches of false whose very illogic makes it “concrete, ornery, vile and sub- hair, a curling iron, a card with silvery letters against limely wonderful” (576). Invisible Man’s narrator, referring a background of dark red velvet, reading “God Bless to his tormentors, calls this self-created, fluid, amalgamat- Our Home”; and scattered across the top of a chif- ed mix of cultural influences “the beautiful absurdity of fonier were nuggets of High John the Conqueror, the their American identity and mine” (559).
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