Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  The fifteen families on their way to the promised land were Disallowed by “fair-skinned colored men,” “shooed away” by “blue-eyed, gray-eyed yellowmen in good suits,” because they were too black: so black they must be trashy. And so they became “a tight band of wayfarers bound by the enormity of what happened to them. Their horror of whites was convulsive but abstract. They saved the clarity of their hatred for the men who had insulted them in ways too confounding for language.” What this meant for Haven and for Ruby was that anyone marrying outside the coal-black 8-rock bloodlines, “tampering” with the gene pool, was an outcast, no longer welcome in a community “as tight as wax,” no longer even represented in a Christmas schoolroom reenactment of the Nativity that hybridized the birth of Christ with the trek story and the creation myth of the 8-rock forefathers. So what if all those generations kept going “just to end up narrow as bale wire”? In Ruby, nobody dies.

  Until they do. And even then, at least in Paradise, they don’t. Because the midwife Lone is there to teach Consolata how to raise the dead. And Soane’s boys who died in Vietnam are as likely to show up leaning on her Kelvinator as Mavis’s twins, who died in the mint-green Cadillac, will be heard laughing in the convent dark. And Dovey has a “Friend,” who may be the apparition that led the fifteen families to their Haven, who visits her in the garden on his way to someplace else. And the fire-ruined house in the wilderness where Deacon meets his secret love is full of ash people, fishermen, nether shapes, and a girl with butterfly wings three feet long. And in the meadow where the convent women run from the guns of Ruby, there is a door. And on the other side of the door is solace and Piedade, who’ll bathe them in emerald water and bring shepherds with colored birds on their shoulders “down from the mountains to remember their lives in her songs.”

  Something astonishing happens here. While, as usual, Morrison is complicating our understanding of black communities, with their very own scapegoats and pariahs as well as their raven-wing circles of sorrow, she also prestidigitates another kind of Reconstruction. Having reminded us in her Harvard lectures, Playing in the Dark, of the invisibility of black Americans in our classic literature—and yet their gravity and torque, and yet their ghostly resonance—she not only rewrites that literature (Hawthorne and Melville) but our history as well (from the Middle Passage of a Mayflower to colonial New England’s City on the Hill to the destiny-manifesting westward Voortrek), and even our sacred texts (the Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural). And in this rewriting, with its Xenophon and Moses and Balboa, odysseys and iliads, expulsions and displacements, lost tribes and diasporas, she dreams a second Republic “of longing, of terror, of perplexity, of shame, of magnanimity,” in which white people are entirely spectral, a cloud on the water, a shadow mind.

  Piedade; Pietà. Consolata; consolation. Hunted; haunted. Convent, covenant, coven. Morrison names: Seneca, Divine, Elder, Drum, Juvenal, Easter, Royal, Pious, Rector, Little Mirth, Flood, Fairy, Praise, Pryor, Apollo, Faustine, Chaste, Hope, and Lovely. She evokes: late melon and roast lamb, wild poppies and river vine, burnt lavender and broken babies, cherubim and body bags. And she redeems: There is a ghost for every family secret and every horror in history, and the language to forgive them. If we knew how she did it, we’d have literary theory instead of world radiance. I was holding my breath, and she took it away.

  Ralph Ellison, Sort Of (Plus Hemingway and Salinger)

  UPON HIS DEATH in 1994, Ralph Ellison left behind some two thousand pages of a never-finished second novel—more than forty years of fine-tuning what his literary executor, John F. Callahan, calls a “mythic saga of race and identity, language and kinship in the American experience” and what the despairing rest of us, waiting for Ralph like Lefty or Godot, came to think of as The Invisible Book. Two decades of stingy excerpts, from 1959 through 1977, were followed by two more of enigmatic silence. Of course, in 1967, between teases, a book-length manuscript of “revisions” perished famously in the flames that consumed his Berkshires summer house. In the history of our literature, this misfortune has assumed the symbolic heft of a Reichstag fire, and maybe even the burning of the Library at Alexandria. Was it also Ellison’s alibi for failing to follow up on himself? Only Albert Murray knows for sure.

  While sitting on this second novel, he was otherwise not too arduously engaged in writing about Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson, Jimmy Rushing, Charlie Parker and the blues; lecturing on democracy, morality, and the novel; reviewing Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Erskine Caldwell, and Gunnar Myrdal; rethinking the psychic kinks in his relationship with William Faulkner and Richard Wright; insisting, over and over again, that T. S. Eliot and André Malraux had influenced his sense of vocation more decisively; showing up at L.B.J.’s White House during the Vietnam War, speaking at a West Point commencement, getting himself interviewed. Almost everyone wanted, if not more Invisibility, then some other piece of him, some pound of black spokesperson. In the early sixties, there’d been an exchange of vituperations with Irving Howe, who thought he ought to be angrier. From the late sixties Willie Morris remembers, in New York Days, Ellison’s being called an Uncle Tom at Grinnell College, in bloodthirsty Iowa. In the early seventies, I was an appalled witness at a literary cocktail party when Alfred Kazin told him he should spend less time at the Century Club and more at the typewriter, followed by a scuffle on the wet street, from which an equally appalled cabbie roared away without a fare, like the locomotive of history. And just last month, at a City University conference, a Rutgers professor who may have seen too many episodes of The X-Files actually suggested that Ellison, in his only novel, had said such terrible things about the “Brotherhood” of the Communist Party just to curry favor with a freaked public during the McCarthy shamefulness.

  On the other hand, I also recall teaching The Invisible Man in paperback in the midsixties to a roomful of teenage girls in a belfry of an Episcopal church in Roxbury, Massachusetts. These quick-witted, slow-burning, high-flying Afro-Caribbean birds of paradise had been discarded by the racist Boston School Committee: bagged, tagged, and trashed. Yet they showed up two nights a week, a chapter at a time, to engage the selves they discovered in his pages, read aloud from their journals, write their own stories, and fall headlong into passionate disputation about metaphor and identity, politics and work, even incest—and tell me things I didn’t want to know about their streets. Much later I’d receive invitations to several graduations from colleges like Spelman and Shaw. But this was long after yogurt-faced liberals like me had been told to get out of Roxbury—in the spring of 1967, pursuant to the secret resolutions of the Newark Black Power Conference, which resolutions had been written by precisely those militants who would call Ralph Ellison an Uncle Tom even as he was saving the lives of their sisters.

  “Writers don’t give prescriptions,” said the poet Ikem in Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah. “They give headaches.”

  Anyway, here at last is a respectable chunk of what he withheld to the grave. Personally, I wish Random House had published all two thousand pages, if not on a CD-ROM, then loose in a box for each reader to assemble on our own, according to our solitary need, like a customized mantra. Structure, about which he had been so finicky, be damned. Yes, from Ellison’s notes and drafts Callahan has fashioned a shapely synecdoche that coheres—a duet between “Daddy” Hickman, the black Southern preacher who’s come to Washington in 1955 to warn a man he raised as a boy of impending violence, and Sunraider, the white New England senator who was brought up black but turned savagely on the color of this kindness; a Lincoln-haunted and Oedipus-inflected dialogue of downhome homilies, grandiose dreams, and primal crime; a dialectic of masked pasts and screened memories; a call-and-response antiphony of flimflam riffs; a matched fall of twinned tricksters into shared mystery, lost history, and filmed illusions. As in Faulkner, the past keeps happening. But gripped at the throat, Juneteenth also seems to long for choral movement and symphonic orchestration; breathing space an
d digressive license; clarification, specificity, amplitude.

  Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of wow.

  Once there was a series consisting of a man and a boy and a boar hog, a cat and a big hairy spider—all shot in flight as they sought to escape, to run away from some unseen pursuer. And as I sat in the darkened hotel room watching the rushes, the day’s takes, on a portable screen, the man seemed to change into the boy and the boy, changing his form as he ran, becoming swiftly boar and cat and tarantula, moving ever desperately away, until at the end he seemed, this boar-boy-spider-cat, to change into an old man riding serenely on a white mule as he puffed on a corncob pipe. I watched it several times and each time I broke into a sweat, shaking as with a fever. Why these images and what was their power?

  Imagine Bliss—a little white boy under a circus tent in a pine grove at a revival meeting of black Baptists, “a miniature man of God” inside a narrow box breathing through a tube. He is called Bliss “because they say that is what ignorance is.” He is dressed to kill because he is presumed dead. The box he’s in, with angels blowing long-belled trumpets and carved clouds floating in an egg-shaped space, is a coffin. When the singing stops, Bliss, his Bible, and his teddy bear will pop out “like God’s own toast, to ask the Lord how come He has forsaken him”:

  Hurry! They’re moving slow, like an old boat drifting down the big river in the night and me inside looking up into the black sky, no moon nor stars and all the folks gone far beyond the levees. And I could feel the shivering creep up my legs now and squeezed Teddy’s paw to force it down. Then the rising rhythm of the clapping hands was coming to me like storming waves heard from a distance; like waves that struck the boat and flew off into the black sky like silver sparks from the shaking of the shimmering tambourines, showering at the zenith like the tails of skyrockets. If only I could open my eyes. It hangs heavy-heavy over my lids. Please hurry! Restore my sight. The night is black and I am far… far… I thought of Easter Bunny, he came from the dark inside of a red-and-white striped egg.

  Like rabbits popping out of a magic top hat, Bliss come back from the dead is a regularly scheduled trick in Daddy Hickman’s circuit show. Never mind how this little white boy ended up with the black evangelicals, on the nomadic road during the Great Depression from Oklahoma to Alabama to Georgia, among so many surrogate parents who raised him to talk and to walk as if he were Yoruban. (A captivity narrative!) Never mind how Hickman got himself transformed from a juke-joint jazz man into Bliss’s designated father and “God’s own trombone,” blowing his horn in the devil’s outback. (“No mercy in my heart…. Only the choking strangulation of some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood, hate, or heartbreak.”) Never even mind the mock Resurrection. Christ already rose for these Baptists. What they really seek is a Second Coming of Father Abraham—the emancipating Lincoln who, in freeing the slaves, freed himself, and so truly became “one of us.” According to Hickman, “We just couldn’t get around the hard fact that for a hope or an idea to become real it has to be embodied in a man, and men change and have wills and wear masks.” And so: “We made a plan, or at least we dreamed a dream and worked for it but the world was simply too big for us and the dream got out of hand.”

  But look at it from Bliss’s point of view, a “chicken in a casket.” Being dead is hard work for which he wants to be paid, if not in sex, about which he’s begun to wonder, then at least some ice cream. And what does he get instead? On Juneteenth—the anniversary of the summer’s day in 1865 when Union troops landed in Galveston, Texas, and their commanding officer told the slaves only two and a half years late that they were free, for which 5,000 colored folks have gathered in an Alabama swamp to eat 500 pounds of catfish and snapper, 900 pounds of ribs, 85 hams, a cabbage patch of coleslaw, and who knows how many frying chickens and butter beans, while listening as seven different preachers “shift to a higher gear,” beyond the singing and the shouting into a territory of “pure unblemished Word,” the “Word that was both song and scream and whisper,” beyond sense “but leaping like a tree of flittering birds with its own dictionary of light and meaning”—Bliss gets a white woman, a complete stranger, who says that she’s his mother, who claims: “He’s mine, MINE!… You gypsy niggers stole him, my baby.”

  So she isn’t his mother. White people lie a lot. His real mother, as a matter of fact, caused the death and mutilation of Hickman’s brother, after which baby Bliss was handed over as a sort of hostage to the jazz man, who accepted him “as I’d already accepted the blues, the clap, the loss of love, the fate of man.” Why not? “Here was a chance to prove that there was something in this world stronger than all their ignorant superstition about blood and ghosts.” Still, even to imagine such a mother, to conceive of an ice-creamy white birthright, will lead Bliss to run away from Daddy Hickman; to deny and rage; to hide in “surprise, speed, and camouflage”; to cut the string, scud high places, bruise himself and snag at times on treetops but keep on sailing into shadows—first to make movies and illusions, then to make a vengeful son, and finally, as Sunraider, to make hateful politics. Ellison asks us to remember Greek legend, folk literature, and the entire Amerindian structuralist mythology of the stolen child.

  But the swamp scene alone is enough to remind us of his remarkable powers of sorcery. Though never a stranger to interior monologue, lyrical afflatus, or angry agitprop, Ellison may be the greatest of jazz sermonizers and homiletic blues guitarists ever to write fiction. He probably picked up tips on how to do it from Melville in Moby-Dick and Joyce in Portrait of the Artist, and passed them on for Toni Morrison to improve on when Beloved’s Baby Suggs took to her sacred grove. As in the swamp, where on “this day of deliverance” they look at “the figures writ on our bodies and on the living tablet of our heart,” so, too, at the Lincoln Memorial, with “the great image slumped in the huge stone chair” and then again on the floor of Congress when Sunraider in mid-demagoggle is attacked by the Great Seal of the United States—by E PLURIBUS UNUM itself, with the olive branch, the sheaf of arrows, the sphinxlike eyes, a taloned clutch, and a curved beak like a scimitar—he dazzles us into a surreal sentience.

  For Ellison, that Great Seal is a hybrid, a mongrel, an alloy, a scramble of stew meats and a weave of sinews, cultures, language, genius, and love. This is the bass line. Admixed America is a Tintoretto:

  You can cut that cord and zoom off like a balloon and rise high—I mean that cord woven of love, of touching, ministering love, that’s tied to a baby with its first swaddling clothes—but the cord don’t shrivel and die like a navel cord beneath the first party dress or the first long suit of clothes. Oh, no, it parts with a cry like a rabbit torn by a hawk in the winter snows and it numbs quick and glazes like the eyes of a sledge-hammered ox and the blood don’t show, it’s like a wound that’s cauterized. It snaps with the heart’s denial back into the skull like a worm chased by a razor-beaked bird, and once inside it snarls, Bliss; it snarls up the mind. It won’t die and there’s no sun inside to set so it can stop its snakish wiggling. It bores reckless excursions between the brain and the heart and kills and kills again unkillable continuity. Bliss, when Eve deviled and Adam spawned we were all in the dark, and that’s a fact.

  The trouble with Juneteenth is that it’s almost all sermons and jazzy dreaming. How did Bliss ever get into politics—in New England!—and become Sunraider? Surely there are pages, chapters, a whole other novel to explain his assassin, missing like the mothers. From Invisible Man, we knew what Tuskegee was like, Harlem, a paint factory, a cell meeting, and the sidewalk where Tod Clifton bled to death. Juneteenth asks us to intuit, from two men talking to each other and to ghosts, from nightmare passages and beseeching light, four hundred years of complicitous history that keeps Daddy Hickman from getting to the nation’s capital in time to stop a fatal bullet. Charged by language alone to imagine the holy dove and winged bull, the Lion, the Lamb, and the Rock, what we see instead is “the devastation of the green wood! Ha! And in the blac
kened streets the entrails of men, women, and baby grand pianos, their songs sunk to an empty twang struck by the aimless whirling of violent winds. Behold! the charred foundations of the House of God.”

  Maybe he couldn’t finish because America, lacking in comfort and radiance, fresh out of Lincolns, wouldn’t let him. We amounted to less than he needed and believed. Or maybe, more dreadfully, baby Bliss is Jesus after all. And Sunraider is the Christianity he grew up to be.

  Nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down to superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away.

  Still, let’s be grateful for what we have, and consider how much worse it could have been. It could have been, for dire instance, something like the posthumous Hemingway of True at First Light.

  Between the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, for The Old Man and the Sea, and the Nobel Prize in 1954, which he didn’t bother to collect in person, Ernest Hemingway left Cuba for Africa with his fourth wife, Mary, to shoot something for Look magazine—a leopard, a lion, or a gazelle; maybe even himself, at least symbolically. We know now from his biographers that the British colonial rulers of Kenya made him an honorary game warden, and set him up in a privately stocked safari camp, to attract tourists who had been scared away by the Mau Mau. That, overweight and manic-depressive, with bad eyes, bad knees, and a distended liver, he was so drunk most of the time that he couldn’t shoot straight. That he would crack up two airplanes, rupturing a kidney, dislocating a shoulder, crushing several vertebrae, and collapsing an intestine. Nevertheless, in the bush, Papa shaved his head, dyed his shirts a tribal pink and orange, and carried a spear to go courting a local Wakamba girl, the “lovely and impudent” Debba. And never stopped writing for his life.