The Last Sublime Riffs Of a Literary Jazzman

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The politics of Ellison's mode of literary representation were quite controversial, especially among other black writers. Despite the international literary community's embrace of him, the response to Ellison from blacks was tempered, first by the nascent civil rights movement emerging in the mid-'50s, and then by the sometimes desperate passions generated by the Black Power movement that sought to replace the philosophy of passive resistance with an urgently revolutionary militance. Ellison's unrelenting insistence upon the burdens of the individual's responsibility for her or his fate proved anathema to a younger generation of Black Power advocates hell-bent on achieving "Freedom Now" through "any means necessary."

Ellison was scorned and isolated. His great theme had been the evasion of identity; this new Black Power generation demanded the shedding of one collective identity--that of "the Negro"--but its replacement with a new one, a collective self based upon Afros, Africa and a vaguely defined politics of cultural nationalism. Ellison, who would be booed on college campuses in the late '60s, went into a self-imposed internal exile, hoping that the black-nationalist storm would blow itself out to sea.

Ironically, it was precisely when black nationalists were deriding Ellison for not being "black enough" that he was delving deeply--as deeply as any writer has done--into that grand and still largely uncharted reservoir that is African-American vernacular culture--collective, often anonymous, ribald and witty. At its best, Juneteenth is a tour de force of untutored eloquence. Ellison sought no less than to create a Book of Blackness, a literary representation of the tradition at its most sublime and fundamental.

Because of this, one can only lament that these outtakes, these marvelous solos, although crafted together by an extraordinarily gifted editor, did not appear in their proper place and order as part of the larger composition Ellison envisioned but could never complete. It is for this reason that we eagerly await Callahan's scholarly edition of the novel as Ellison left it in all of its fragmented and riotous confusion. Of Juneteenth, the leitmotif that Callahan has extracted from the whole, we can do no better than to cite Ellison's take on the Mississippi: Juneteenth "is a muddy masculine son-of-a-bitch and marvelous."