Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsDeeply felt message about race--too bad it's not finished
Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2001
This book reads exactly like what it is: a book Ellison worked on off and on for most of his life, and never finished. Only after he died did someone piece together his drafts into a "finished" novel. Of course, it isn't finished--or Ellison would have sent it off to the publisher himself. This explains why it meanders forever in spots, and doesn't have (in my opinion) a satisfactory end.
All that aside, I don't agree that this book is "unreadable" or a waste of time. Ellison always had powerful things to say about race in America, and a mastery of language to bring to the task.
Ellison's point in Juneteenth is that Blacks are martyrs in their acceptance of the suffering imposed on them by whites, and that whites are irredemably evil--and, if I read the end right, damned to spend eternity in hell as a result.
Apparently this is true even if whites "see the light", are reborn black, and raised black--as Bliss--one of the books two real characters--as, most obviously through nightly staged "resurrection" out of the coffin, but at least symbolically at birth, and then again when he suffers an almost fatal illness as a very young child. Despite these early influences, as soon as Bliss reached adolesence, he abandoned blacks, turned white, and became a populist racist demagogue politician.
In contrast, Daddy Hickman (the other character) undergoes his own salvation (turning, through the influence of Bliss' birth and near fatal illness) from a life of a road musician to become a man of god. Even as a traveling preacher, he becomes more Christ-like, in contrast to the typical portrayal in literature (and movies) of white evangilists as charltain hustlers. In the end, Daddy Hickman apparently has the power to reach right into hell to try to save (yet again) Bliss from the eternal fire. It is, of course, unclear whether Hickman succeeds in saving Bliss, but similarly it is unclear (I think this is Ellison's underlying message) whether white America is beyond salvation.
On one level, this is a book about the unsettled state of race relations in America. On another level, the story of Bliss is the oft told story of balck and white friendship which is inevitably destroyed at adolesence (triggered here by a white female movie star).
I thought Juneteenth was interesting, certainly has a well defined point of view on American race relations, and continues (in spots) Ellison's powerful way with words. But clearly this is not a finished novel, and no one should expect that it is when they pick it up.
