Juneteenth (Revised)

CHAPTER 1

Two days before the shooting a chartered planeload of Southern Negroes swooped down upon the District of Columbia and attempted to see the Senator. They were all quite elderly: old ladies dressed in little white caps and white uniforms made of surplus nylon parachute material, and men dressed in neat but old-fashioned black suits, wearing wide-brimmed, deep-crowned panama hats which, in the Senator's walnut-paneled reception room now, they held with a grave ceremonial air. Solemn, uncommunicative and quietly insistent, they were led by a huge, distinguished-looking old fellow who on the day of the chaotic event was to prove himself, his age notwithstanding, an extraordinarily powerful man. Tall and broad and of an easy dignity, this was the Reverend A. Z. Hickman--better known, as one of the old ladies proudly informed the Senator's secretary, as "God's Trombone."

This, however, was about all they were willing to explain. Forty-four in number, the women with their fans and satchels and picnic baskets, and the men carrying new blue airline take-on bags, they listened intently while Reverend Hickman did their talking.

"Ma'am," Hickman said, his voice deep and resonant as he nodded toward the door of the Senator's private office, "you just tell the Senator that Hickman has arrived. When he hears who's out here he'll know that it's important and want to see us."

"But I've told you that the Senator isn't available," the secretary said. "Just what is your business? Who are you, anyway? Are you his constituents?"

"Constituents?" Suddenly the old man smiled. "No, miss," he said, "the Senator doesn't even have anybody like us in his state. We're from down where we're among the counted but not among the heard."

"Then why are you coming here?" she said. "What is your business?"

"He'll tell you, ma'am," Hickman said. "He'll know who we are; all you have to do is tell him that we have arrived. . . ."

The secretary, a young Mississippian, sighed.

Ralph Ellison was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of the novel Invisible Man (1952), winner of the National Book Award and one of the most important and influential American novels of the twentieth century, as well as numerous essays and short stories. He died in New York City in 1994.

John F. Callahan is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. He is the editor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray and the Modern Library edition of The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison and is literary executor of Ralph Ellison s estate.
 
Charles Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Washington. A MacArthur fellow, he is the author of twenty-five books, among them the novel Middle Passage, which received the 1990 National Book Award for fiction

[A] vastly ambitious informing allegory, an allegory made rich, as in Invisible Man, with the sensory details of which Ellison was such a master."  -The New York Review of Books

"[A] stunning achievement. . . . Juneteenth is a tour de force of untutored eloquence.  Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary composition of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental."  -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Time  

"Juneteenth . . . threatens to come as close as any since Huckleberry Finn to grabbing the ring of the Great American Novel."  -Los Angeles Times

Eloquent, ardent, and worth the wait. . . . Beautifully written and imaginatively conceived, Juneteenth, like Invisible Man, deserves to be read and reread by generations. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution