NOTES

Editor’s note: From the time of Invisible Man’s publication in 1952 until Ralph Ellison’s death in 1994, he wrote down literally thousands of notes pertaining to all facets of his novel-in-progress. Some he jotted in haste on magazine subscription cards or scrawled indecipherably on the back of used envelopes, bills, or any scrap of paper close at hand. Others he copied carefully into one of the half-dozen notebooks he kept for the purpose. Still others he typed. Some of the notes carry on for several pages, spilling over into description or dialogue, as if in the act of brooding over a scene or character, the writer became his own muse. Others are brief, cryptic, or in some cases even interrupted by another, sometimes unrelated, thought that took urgent possession of Ellison’s mind during the act of writing. After his death I found the notes every which way in Ellison’s papers. As far as I could tell, they had not been arranged in any particular order. What follows is a selection and sequence of notes that I hope will give the reader a sense of Ellison thinking through the characters, scenes, themes, and method of his ambitious, extended saga of America told and hinted at in Juneteenth.

Action takes place on the eve of the Rights movement but it forecasts the chaos which would come later.

Remember that “the essence of the story is what goes on in the minds of the characters on a given occasion.” The mind becomes the real scene of the action. And in the mind scene and motive are joined. Even the opposing characters are transferred there as images.

The method is naturally antiphonal. Senator and Rev. Hickman, little Bliss and Daddy Hickman. The antiphonal section, or Emancipation myth, is spun out in hospital where Senator confesses to Hickman under pressure of conscience, memory and Hickman’s questions and it takes form of Bliss’s remembered version versus Hickman’s idiomatic accounts.

The thing to remember about the antiphony between Daddy Hickman and little Bliss is that the two are building a scene within a scene and it must be on a borderline between the folk poetry and religious rhetoric. Thing to do is to point it up.

(They needn’t talk, thus dramatizing a lack of communication, but the past is with them and in them. Problem is to make it eloquent.)

The sermon of Hickman and Bliss which takes place on Juneteenth must be related to later speeches made by the Senator while in Washington.… The rhythms of all this should feed back one upon the other proving not only perspectives by incongruity, but ironies, and some measure of comedy.

Make Washington function in Hickman’s mind as a place of power and mystery, frustration and possibility. It is historical, it is the past, it is slavery, the Emancipation and a continuation of the betrayal of the Reconstruction. He would have to imagine or try to imagine what Bliss knew about the city and its structure of power. He would wonder how, given his early background, Bliss could have gone so far in the gaining and manipulation of power, the juxtapositions of experience and intelligence which allowed him to make his way.

Hickman has staked a great part of his life on the idea that by bringing up the boy with love, sacrifice and kindness he would do something to overcome the viciousness of racial division. He accepted Bliss’s mother’s most incongruous request in desperation. Hate would not assuage his grief over his brother’s lynching and his mother’s death so he takes the baby, becomes a minister, brings the boy up as a little minister and then suffers when the boy runs away. Yet does not lose his idea, instead it intensifies his faith. It drives him to keep up with the boy’s career, especially when boy becomes a politician, and it takes him to Washington when he learns that he is in danger. He wants to talk to learn what happened, what led to break and to negative acts toward Negroes after boy became powerful. Was it perversity, or was it that the structure of power demanded that anyone acting out the role would do so in essentially the same way?

Hickman is intelligent but untrained in theology. Skilled with words, he reads and mixes his diction as required by his audience. He is also an artist in the deeper sense and has actually been a jazz musician. He has been a ladies’ man, but this ceased when he became a preacher. Devout and serious, he is unable to forget his old, profane way of speaking and of thinking of experience. Vernacular terms and phrases bloom in his mind even as he corrects them with more pious formulations. In other words he is of mixed culture and frequently he formulates the sacred in profane terms—at least within his mind. Orally he checks himself.

Proposition: A great religious leader is a “master of ecstasy.” He evokes emotions that move beyond the rational onto the mystical. A jazz musician does something of the same. By his manipulation of sound and rhythm he releases movements and emotions which allow for the transcendence of everyday reality. As an ex-jazzman minister Hickman combines the two roles, and this is the source of his leadership. He possesses a power which is not directly active—or at least not recognized for what it is in the South’s political arena, but it is there.

Bliss, [Hickman] said, there are facts and there is truth; don’t let the facts ever get in the way of your recognizing and living out the truth. And don’t get the truth confused with the law. The law deals with facts, and down here the facts are that we are weak and inferior. But while it looks like we are what the law says we are, don’t ever forget that we’ve been put in this position by force, by power of numbers, and the readiness of those numbers to use brutality to keep us within the law. Ah, but the truth is something else. We are not what the law, yes and custom, says we are and to protect our truth we have to protect ourselves from the definitions of the law. Because the law’s facts have made us outlaws. Yes, that’s the truth, but only part of it; for Bliss, boy, we’re outlaws in Christ and Christ is the higher truth.

Hickman tells Bliss, “Little boy, we have a covenant, but when you ran away you broke it. You fell down, Bliss; you fell down. But that doesn’t change a thing. Not for you, not for me, ever …”

Negroes appear to whites to enjoy themselves more because they have so little of that which is material. They appear to whites to suffer grief, heartbreak, and sadness more because they have, apparently, so much to be unhappy about. And the source of that unhappiness is seen as based in their color and social status rather than in their humanity.

Hickman has tried to teach Bliss not to turn himself into a figure based upon the materialization of himself, i.e., into someone whose identity is based upon color alone. He has tried to teach him to see himself and those close to him in terms of their inner spirit, their human quality, their quiet, understated heroism.

[Hickman] has his own unique way of looking at the U.S. and is much concerned with the meaning of history. There is mysticism involved in his hope for the boy, and an attempt to transcend the hopelessness of racism. After the horrors connected with or coincidental with his coming into possession of the child he reverts to religion and in his despair begins to grope toward a plan. This involves bringing up the child in love and dedication in the hope that properly raised and trained the child’s color and features, his inner substance and his appearance would make it possible for him to enter into the wider affairs of the nation and work toward the betterment of his people and the moral health of the nation.

Bliss symbolizes for Hickman an American solution as well as a religious possibility. Hickman thinks of Negroes as the embodiment of American democratic promises, as the last who are fated to become the first, the downtrodden who shall be exalted.

But he is tested in every way by the little boy—and especially after the boy has run away. These are ideas when grasped at their fullest, and they go to the heart of the American dilemma as far as Negroes are concerned. Hickman is tested of his faith in his own people and in his belief in America. A question of fatherhood in one sense, and in terms of his maturity, his spiritual maturity also. H. affirms ultimately for himself, to save his own sanity and soul. He clings to an idea and urges his people to do the same because he sees in this direction an affirmation of his own humanity.

To surrender Bliss, or the hope symbolized by the child, is to accept not only defeat but chaos, human depravity.

Hickman and the old Negroes have learned charity, hope, and faith under the most difficult conditions.

“Bliss, you can count on this: I’ll be there when you finally are forced to remember me!”

“I never want to remember,” Bliss had replied.

Hickman knows the true identity of Sunraider through having had friends and members of his church keep an eye on the runaway. This had continued over the years, and he has opposed anyone who thought of exposing Sunraider—even though Sunraider’s political position appalls him and he holds his peace out of the compact he made after the third time Bliss ran away and was caught, and out of loyalty to his old dream. He also feels guilty for his role in Sunraider’s career of deception and prays that the Senator will change his ways. Hickman despises the man, but loves the boy whom the man had been.

This society is not likely to become free of racism, thus it is necessary for Negroes to free themselves by becoming their idea of what a free people should be.

A novel about the rootless American type—products of our loneliness. Those who reject the self in favor of some illusion, who while proclaiming themselves democrats thirst and hunger for aristocracy. Who become actors and confidence men, demagogues, swindlers, and spiteful destroyers of the nation.

Bliss rejects Christianity as sapping of energies, Hickman sees it as a director of energies. In this he foreshadows Martin Luther King, while Sunraider repeats the betrayals of the past.

Bliss, the little boy, learns the viciousness of the human condition while missing its grandeur, precisely because he was catapulted into manhood too early.

Bliss has seen fear on faces of Negroes, the white woman has called herself his mother; Hickman and [Sister BearMasher] have taken redhead to town; Bliss has been taken home by Negro woman and there he raises her gown during night. Next day he is taken to see Hickman, who has been beaten. He feels guilty over beating, believing that it is connected with his being snatched by the white woman and with his having raised the nightgown. On the other hand he is fascinated by the white woman and tries to follow her, is brought back by church member. Later when Hickman is recovering he takes Bliss to see movie and it is here that Bliss begins to have fantasy that his mother is one of the white stars.

Bliss’s coffin is a threshold, a point between life and death. Note that after its symbolism of rebirth (Christian) he does indeed find rebirth—but in an ironic reversal he becomes white and anything but the liberator he was being trained to become.

Bliss realizes political and social weakness of Hickman and other Negroes when he’s taken from his coffin, and this becomes mixed with his yearning for a mother—whom he now identifies with the redheaded woman who tried to snatch him from his coffin. Which was a symbol of resurrection in drama of redemption that Hickman has structured around it. But he goes seeking for life among whites, using the agency of racism to punish Negroes for being weak, and to achieve power of his own. As with [the] man, [the] politician’s politics is a drama in which he plays a role that doesn’t necessarily jibe with his own feelings. Nevertheless he feels humiliated by a fate that threw him among Negroes and deprived him of the satisfaction of knowing whether he is a Negro by blood or only by culture and upbringing. He tells himself that he hates Negroes but can’t deny his love for Hickman. Resents this too.

He is a man who sees the weakness in the way social hierarchy has dealt with race and it is through the chink that he enters white society and exploits it.

He is a rootless man, an American who has turned upon his loneliness and twisted it into spite and opportunism. He is full of nameless fears and in seeking to overcome them he bypasses the humanizing influence of that mastery, since this would require that he accept himself and his past, and uses the insight to destroy others. The center does not hold.

That is, “Let us break bread together,” is counterposed by the drowning of innocence, the assassination of character, the destruction of belief.

Bliss, remembering Hickman’s talks about R. W. Emerson, refers to his motion-picture camera as a “transparent eyeball.” Through which he is able to see possibility in its latent state, his “blue glass” peers into blue scenes and characters but he is unable to see that which he looks upon.

Bliss’s purpose (immediate) is to get money to carry him further west. Secondarily and psychologically, it is to manipulate possibility and identities of the townspeople and to take revenge upon his own life. And to play! He is the artist as child in this.

The more Bliss plays with the camera as a means of forgetting then of denying, and then of distorting, burlesquing, the more he is forced to forget the old identity and to speculate upon what it might have meant and what it might have become. Thus he abandons art. Each adventure is thus no mere enclosure in his coffin, but a plunge into death. But with no Hickman standing over him, and no congregation singing and rejoicing and shouting that he (and they), the spirit, has been once more resurrected. He turns then to more malicious means of denial—he wants to emphasize their otherness of skin, or through their skin—by playing upon their own urge to denial. This is destructive and criminal and antihuman. Hickman knows this, just as Bliss knows this. Humanity must reside somewhere else.

The point to stress has to do with what Bliss learns from his scam, and this has to do with the relationship between the movies and politics, and the American’s uncertainty as to his identity as an area exploited by the movies and politics alike.… He ties this in with his seduction of Severen’s mother, which gives him a sense of creative potency. He realizes that he doesn’t have to know who his parents were, and that he can create a political identity out of racial prejudice, and that this will not be questioned because it is centered not in biology and class, but in social power.

Bliss is fascinated by moments of blackness between cinematic frames, and his life is hidden here much as his activities before becoming politician are hidden. “Look for me between the frames, in the dark …”

Consider possibility that there is an obligatory incident missing from his character.

There is the contradiction that he continued to love the old people but exchanges his obligation to them and to his past for the formal possibilities available to him through betrayal. The imposition of social hierarchy based upon color upon human values.

Bliss’s attacks on Negroes are a form of running away. He feels a guilt which he will not admit. His adventures with moving-making ditto. He is fascinated that the secret of film lies in the fact that most of the action which gives a movie movement lies between the frames, in the dark. Thus the viewer is manipulated in the dark and he is the manipulator. This carries into his politics, wherein his motives are hidden behind what appears as simple racial prejudice, but in his twisted way he sees himself as putting pressure on Negroes to become more powerful through political action. One of the implicit themes at work here is Hickman’s refusal to act politically, his refusal to use politics as an agency for effecting change. And at this point we enter the historical circumstances of the fifties wherein the Negro ministers became overtly political through the agency of passive resistance.

Hickman, are you a minister-man or a minstrel man?

I’m both, I’m afraid—But remember, the Word is tricky!

N.B. For Bliss the riddle of the Sphinx takes the form of his recognizing that Americans are actors, thus his manipulating the camera. But this leads to his further confusing his own basic confusion when he impregnates Severen’s mother; which, in a sense, returns him to and compounds the mystery of his own identity.

It is important to remember that Bliss’s denial of Hickman is a denial of himself. It is a denial which grants him a certain freedom, but it is a chaotic freedom and leads to an uncertain psychological balance. He becomes compulsive on the subject of race, Negroes and racial mixing. Thus his denial of Severen and his refusal to see him or to accept his role of father. (The old American refusal to recognize its racial diversity.)

If his flight is a night-journey, it is one through blazing lights wherein he remains in part unseen—Except to the Negroes who monitor his activities.

Bliss suffers because, as Hickman tells him, he has tried to be a total individual. In doing so, he runs away from those who have provided him with completion. By becoming “white” he tried to make himself part of a whole which rejects his essence, and in doing this he poisons his spirit. Bliss the Senator, remains incomplete, Hickman and the others are his missing part. He seeks power but he has detached himself from his true source of power and by doing so he has turned himself into a political demon.

When Bliss moves among Northerners he’s constantly surprised that he is aware of possibilities of which they seem unconscious—even though he realizes that they cannot see his background. Yet knows that this is also a matter of historical consciousness and that they have forgotten or have never known the real issues of American life. This is one reason that he enters politics. This is why he joins the Southerners; he realizes that they never stop playing their knowledge against the ignorance and disinterest of the Northerners. The strategy of the guerilla fighter transposed to the world of politics.

Account of how Bliss disciplines himself for the use of power. To master his facial expressions, to steel himself so as to hide any trace of his Negro past, his southernness except when he can use it to confuse. His adaptation of religious rhetoric for political ends. Perhaps this could delineate differences in attitude imposed by race. And draw out cultural traits that make for a shared cultural identity.

Sunraider knows that the question of his having Negro blood isn’t important, it is the fact that he himself can’t be sure whether he has or not. Because he knows that many who think they don’t, do. It is a matter flowing from the way society has been arranged, the power that flows from that arrangement. There is danger to his position because his own power depends upon his manipulation of race. As does the power of all politicians of any importance. That was the joke of it. The power was not biological or genetic, but man-made and political, economic … and immoral as far as the American ideal has a religious component.

Hickman asks Bliss, “Boy, why didn’t you stick to religion? You could have hustled people in the name of the Lord who has always been looking at you? But instead you go into politics—where people don’t ever know who you are! They don’t even care, as long as you tell them the lies they want to dream by. So you went into politics! You dared to trick the people in the one area that is where they really want to believe.”

Bliss, since you had to go the way you did, why didn’t you pattern after Abraham Lincoln?

That time is dead, he’s dead and they whipped him in the end.

But they had to kill him in order to stop him, Bliss. He had heart, boy. That was the man for you to follow. He was a big man, who had the mud between his toes. He knew pain and how to hold it and ride it out. He wasn’t simple, Bliss. He was one of the most complicated of all the great men. He had been baptized in many streams.

The Running of the Sun.… A summer day’s dying. Not long enough. The running of Sunraider is something else.

Hickman is “Jim” and Bliss is “Huck” who cut out for the Territory.

The Mississippi is not a “white” river, nor is it a Lady as Mark Twain knew, it is a muddy masculine son-of-a-bitch and marvelous.

C.L.R. James makes the point that it was slavery which helped release the eloquence of Abe Lincoln, which is true. It also released the eloquence of many who believed in the institution—but best of all, it was the source of Negro American art. This is not as paradoxical as it might first appear. Slavery has always been an institution which brought out the best as well as the worst in the human. It also produces some of that which was noblest in Northerners.

Nota Bene! This is not what I intended to write when I started. Therefore, there is something else to explore, to remember.

Albert and Anatole’s objections to proliferation of dreams misses their function of revelations of psychic states, just as they miss the nature of my characters. Incompletion of form allows the reader to impose his own imagination upon the material with too little control from the author. Thus I don’t like to show my work until it is near completion.