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Rushed to the hospital, Sunraider requests Hickman's
presence, and the story of the two men's agonized
relationship is told in flashbacks as Hickman attends the
dying senator. Decades before, Alonzo Hickman was an
ex-trombone player turned circuit preacher raising a young
boy of indeterminate race named Bliss.
The boy assists Hickman in his revivals, rising out of a
white coffin at a certain moment in the sermon. Bliss grows
up to change his name to Adam Sunraider and, having passed
for white, has gone from being a flimflam artist and movie
maker to the U. S. Senate. Always, however, he is in flight
from Hickman.
These flashbacks showcase Ellison's stylized set pieces,
among the best scenes he has written, especially as his
incandescent images chart the mysteries and legacies of
slavery. Bliss remembers his courtship of a black woman in a
piercingly sweet reverie, and he revisits a revival meeting
on Juneteenth (June 19), the date in 1865 on which slaves in
Texas were finally informed of the Emancipation
Proclamation. The sermon in this section is perhaps the
highlight of the novel, sure to achieve classic status on
its own merits.
The revival meeting is interrupted by a white woman who
claims Bliss is her son, after which Bliss begins his
odyssey for an identity that takes him, by degrees, away
from the black culture of his youth. Gradually, we learn of
the collusion of lies and violence that brought Bliss to
Hickman in the first place.
Editor Callahan, in his informative afterword, describes the
difficult process of editing Ellison's unfinished novel and
of arranging the massive body of work into the unwieldy yet
cohesive story Ellison wanted to tell.
The difficulties he faced are most obvious in the ending,
which is Faulknerian to a fault, even to the overuse of the
word "outrage." Nonetheless, this volume is a visionary tour
de force, a lyrical, necessary contribution to America's
perennial racial dialogue, and a novel powerfully
reinforcing Ellison's place in literary history.
Source: Publisher’s Weekly |
