Two months after that interview, Ellison died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 80. His friend and literary executor, John Callahan, found himself responsible for the more than 2,000 pages of work Ellison left behind, without any instructions on what to do with it. From this voluminous material Callahan extracted what would become a 350-page novel, “Juneteenth,” published in 1999.
The novel opens with an assassination attempt by a young black man against Adam Sunraider, a notoriously bigoted senator from a New England state. Critically injured, the senator calls to his side Reverend Alonzo Hickman, a former jazz musician turned Baptist minister who took in Sunraider as a child and raised him as a preaching prodigy. As Hickman and Sunraider recall their past together, they focus on an eventful sermon celebrating the Juneteenth holiday in a Southern church, during which the young Bliss—as Sunraider was then known—learns his mother was a white woman. The revelation launches him on his path of independence from Hickman, and eventually to a career in entertainment and controversial politics.
In an interview in 2010, Callahan stated that writer’s block hadn’t been Ellison’s problem. “Ellison wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote,” he said. He also agreed with Rampersad’s conclusion that Ellison lost “about a summer’s worth of revisions” in the 1967 fire. In the end, after 40 years of work, it appeared the weight of massive expectations, the unwieldy bulk of the narrative and the pressure to give voice to the transformative events of the times had combined to ensure Ellison would never complete the sweeping novel of America he envisioned.
Despite its long delayed arrival, and its inevitable failure to live up to the success of “Invisible Man,” Ellison’s “Juneteenth” stands as a tribute to a writer’s life spent grappling with the contradictions and complexities of race. On his deathbed, the fictional Senator Sunraider, who dismisses the Juneteenth holiday as “the celebration of a gaudy illusion,” realizes his own narrative is not just a tale of freedom and success. Instead, it is intrinsically tied to the story of the young man who shot him and the story of the former slaves who learned of their independence that June day in 1865.