The problem that Ralph Ellison would seek to render in terms of depth and resonance over the second half of his career was firmly in place before he met Nathan Scott, and in many ways it outlives him. In the immediate wake of the US Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, Ellison wrote to his friend and former teacher Morteza Sprague, reflecting upon the momentous ruling: “Well, so now the judges have found and Negroes must be individuals and that is hopeful and good. What a wonderful world of possibilities are unfolded for the children! For me there is still the problem of making meaning out of the past and I guess I’m lucky I described Bledsoe [the president of the protagonist’s Negro college] before he was checked out. Now I’m writing about the evasion of identity which is another characteristically American problem which must be about to change. I hope so, it’s giving me enough trouble.”1 Ellison expresses relief, of course. The broader implications of an in-road to the legal end of Jim Crow laws, supported broadly by the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 that Brown overturned, spoke to Ellison as an integrationist, a novelist and critic who sought ambitiously to situate African American culture firmly within the traditions and canons of the West. Yet Ellison exhibited anxieties about what integration would come to mean for a historically marginalized segment of the American population that had devised systematic networks and mores designed specifically to facilitate survival, endurance, and the defiant expression of humanity in the face of dehumanizing conditions imposed upon African Americans by Plessy’s “separate but equal” mandate. Relieved that he had published Invisible Man (1952) just prior to this social metamorphosis, Ellison understood that, within this new racial dispensation, parts of his novel—if not the book itself—would become relics of a former age.
Kenneth Warren makes the compelling case that what we know as “African American literature” (in a broad, historical sense), belongs to this former age. Indeed, it was dismantled amid the exigencies of Brown and its judicial facilitation of a legal end to Jim Crow.2 According to Warren, “African American literature took shape in the context of . . . racial subordination and exploitation represented by Jim Crow. Accordingly, . . . with the demise of Jim Crow, the coherence of African American literature has been correspondingly . . . eroded as well.”3 Intrinsic to this sea change is a sense of unmooring from a system that, for all of the injustice it propagated, also held together out of necessity a relatively stable sense of African American identity. Resistance, endurance, and survival simultaneously relied upon and forged a complex and multivalent cosmos that fractured in the wake of Brown, leaving African Americans and the broader American public grasping for new ways to order social relationships and their political organizations, turning to larger questions of anthropology, citizenship, and civil religion.
This chapter explores how Ellison’s second novel reflects the erosion of coherence that Warren locates in the post-Brown era—a period of vertiginous social upheaval in American and African American public life. Given that the second novel remained unfinished over the last four decades of Ellison’s life, how might it address propositions that were infeasible or unimaginable prior to 1954? To what extent does Brown, as a line of demarcation, inaugurate a new occasion in the literary representation of race? In what specific ways does Ellison’s second novel reflect the tenor of this new occasion, wrangling over theologies and ideologies of racial identity, and thereby characterizing resonances between readers and a nation “in progress”?4 Finally, given Ellison’s stated desire to resurrect a sense of “depth and resonance” inspired by his understanding of Nathan Scott’s “sacramental vision,” how do such aims play out in a novel about the vagaries of American political identity? This chapter deploys as a critical lens a specifically historicized understanding of American civil religion that dovetailed with certain social, political, and cultural exigencies in the wake of Brown. In the process we shall chart the relationship between civil rights and civil religion in the era of Ellison’s second novel’s composition, marking convergences of race, nation, and religion in Ellison’s Sisyphean literary struggle to reduce experience to symbolic action in his second novel. Attention to Ellison’s coherences with the figure and vision of Martin Luther King Jr., paired with his involvement in the 1970s and 1980s with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, offer fresh insight into Ellison’s responses to the vagaries of race and nation that he navigated as he sought to complete his second novel.
During this era, Ellison was not the only author of color to express anxiety about Brown’s implications. Zora Neale Hurston vociferously opposed the decision, ascribing African American support for integration to what Andrew Delbanco characterizes as “a form of race embarrassment.”5 In a letter to the editor of the Orlando Sentinel, Hurston asks, “How much satisfaction can I get from a court order for somebody to associate with me who does not wish me near them?”6 For Hurston integration stemmed from the assumption among whites (and many blacks) that African Americans aspired to be white—a position that “insult[ed] rather than honor[ed] [her] race” and disparaged black institutions.7 Beyond other somewhat paranoid extrapolations, Hurston registers defiance against the institutional legitimacy of white domination, a mindset doubtlessly nurtured by her rearing in all-black Eatonville, Florida—itself an interesting subversion of the white supremacist paradigm.8 Thus, by insisting, “I see no tragedy in being too dark to be invited to a white school social affair,” Hurston effectively defies the logic of Jim Crow.9 Brown “sought to bring about change in the wrong way.” It “assumed the inferiority of black culture and life, imposing a supposedly more developed white culture on black people.”10 Indeed, Hurston’s perpetual return to Eatonville’s example represents in some respects the deliberate inversion of the segregation model, responding to imposed exclusion with agency of ambivalent dissociation.
Ellison’s correspondence with Sprague lacks Hurston’s outright opposition to integration. Rather, it presupposes two related outcomes. First, Negroes would become individuals, liberated from group identity and presumably free to function according to their own agency. Second, this individuality would stem from Brown’s inevitable fracturing of the relatively stable modes of identity established through slavery and both the customary and legal forms of Jim Crow. Such systems enforced official limits of black identity and managed the diurnal realities of segregated life. They were determinations not necessarily assimilated by their victims to be true, but the consequences of failing to abide within them were violent, final, and real. And so they abided. In this way Ellison understood African Americans to improvise, manipulating law and social custom to facilitate endurance and self-sufficiency where—within the vacuum of the Jim Crow order—none was supposed to exist.11
Segregated communities developed their own domestic, social, and political institutions, including newspapers, businesses, churches, and civic organizations. Accordingly, limitations imposed upon black identity in the United States fostered a creative response that asserted humanity in the face of enforced dehumanization. Hurston’s dismay and Ellison’s anxiety toward Brown concerned the potential cost and long-term implications of losing such segregated institutions and affirmative orientations to the vagaries of integration. The older modes were far from perfect, but certainly for Ellison and others the prospect of equal rights and responsibilities of free citizenship for African Americans made the gamble hopeful, one worth wagering.
One month after Ellison composed his letter to Sprague, he traveled to Tuskegee to teach a summer seminar for the English department. He delivered a public address on June 23, 1954, speaking on “The Role of the Negro Teacher in Preparing for a Non-Segregated Way of Life in the United States.” This talk enumerated—in the pulpit of the very college for Negroes that Ellison attended—implications for a post-Brown America. It will become necessary, he argues, for southern blacks to shift to a more cosmopolitan cultural and social outlook than Jim Crow has heretofore permitted. African American educators, long the standard-bearers of “respectable” black culture, authority, and social standing (consider Ellison’s reverence later in his life for Inman Page and Zelia Breaux at Oklahoma City’s Douglass High School), would necessarily occupy the integrating vanguard: “The Negro teacher is responsible to and for the total American society, not to any one small section of it.” In the midst of “transition,” “the Negro teacher’s responsibility . . . is to consciously explore those areas of American life which have been denied Negroes and evaluate them for the younger generation which will inherit an unsegregated way of American life.”12 As Ellison’s integrationist rhetoric reflects, the tenor of this new existence remained uncertain, his prescriptions impressionistic. Vexing questions remained: What would it mean ultimately to abandon these institutions and mores, these authority figures who had proved invaluable to shoring up and affirming a collective identity confronted with radical exclusion (by custom and law) for more than three centuries? What would, or should, it mean “to live in a world in which peoples of diverse cultural and racial backgrounds are being thrown into increasingly close contact”?13
Answers to this question have yet to find consensus. On the one hand, Charles M. Payne marked Brown’s fiftieth anniversary by pointing to the broader infeasibility of substantial integration, suggesting that the decision “is becoming a milestone in search of something to signify.” He is not alone in his estimation.14 Danielle Allen, on the other hand, speaks of Brown as the impetus for the desegregation of Little Rock’s Central High School, which “rendered visible democracy’s ‘public sphere,’ as it existed in 1957.”15 Thus, she argues, Brown reconstituted American social order by seeking “to articulate new accounts of democratic citizenship,” a citizenship characterized by new rights and responsibilities inaugurated by a newly requisite sphere of public interactions.16 In this way Allen’s reconstitution (riffing on both the documentary and corporeal valences of “constitution”), much like Warren’s denomination of Brown as a “sea change,” speaks to a broader sense of uncertainty in the wake of Brown, a perilous course that required imaginative and intrepid navigation simply because no one knew, in the interim, where it would lead. Significantly, Allen locates this period of reconstitution, the renegotiation of the terms of American citizenship in the public sphere, as falling between 1954 and 1965—a decade extending from Brown to the Voting Rights Act, spanning the era of targeted activism in the American South by a number of organizations we now refer to collectively as the civil rights movement.
Payne and others are correct to warn against overprivileging Brown and its legacy in the civil rights era.17 Nevertheless, Brown drove the golden spike that ended federally sanctioned, legal segregation of public schools in the United States. Brown ignited Hurston’s ire and rendered Ellison reflective upon his own experiences with Jim Crow. Brown ended, as C. Vann Woodward notes, the longest period of racial status quo in the history of the American South (if not the United States).18 Brown, using Allen’s term, “reconstituted” conceptions of citizenship and the public sphere. Brown galvanized black frustrations across the South and the United States that empowered a freedom movement dedicated to the establishment and enforcement of new, and more just, laws. Brown, as Payne contends, might not live up to the hopes that Americans have historically invested in its symbolism. It did not usher in utopia. It necessitated the destruction of powerful structures of support and affirmation among African Americans and in their communities. Yet it remains for many—and tangibly so—the best, most profound and poignant statement of what the United States might yet become, and it established an uncertain, messy future that required vociferous, even bloody struggles to decide a forward course that yet remains unclear.
In this way Brown marks a significant cultural and ontological unmooring for African Americans and, indeed, the nation at large. Ironically, though a moral stain, Jim Crow held together diverse factions of African American politics, society, and culture as a relatively unified front against radical and systematic oppression. The move toward legal integration fractured this tenuous unity and, in an unprecedented way, rendered the authoritative definitions and stakes of blackness and its identity negotiable, open to debate. In the decades during which this process took place, any number of interpretations of blackness would enter the fray: nonviolence versus black power, Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King—indeed, 1955 King versus 1967 King and 1961 Malcolm versus 1965 Malcolm.19 The drive of African Americans toward acknowledgment of their integral place in American society and cultural canons, the unique identity politics of African American arts and culture as somehow distinct, even unconcerned with “traditional” (read: “white”) creative modes and methods of aesthetic judgment, and the emergence of social movements and structures that mirrored and even challenged the viability and authority of black churches and other religious organizations all marked the signal tension of this identity crisis. For Ralph Ellison, digging into his second novel at this cultural moment, the problem became one of corralling the diversities and complexities of race in the United States—which had always been in play but were newly awash in vertiginous change in the wake of Brown—into a coherent narrative concerning “the evasion of identity.” While Payne’s skepticism toward Brown proves valuable, the signal problem of Ellison’s second novel is occupied with Allen’s task of reconstitution, of imagining new connections between racial and national identities amid the frequently disorienting contradictions of the post-Brown era.
Ellison’s second novel, still in its nascent stages when the Brown decision was handed down, would remain unfinished. Excerpts did appear in literary journals, an edition of it would find posthumous publication as Juneteenth in 1999, and an unexpurgated edition of the manuscript appeared in 2010 under the title Three Days Before the Shooting . . . . For more than four decades—between 1952 and his death in 199420—Ellison labored to complete a project that became insurmountable. Through the mid-1960s, during a timeframe roughly commensurate with Allen’s reconstitution (1954–65), Ellison plausibly projected the book’s completion to be on the horizon. A fire at his Berkshires summer home in 1967 gave him a serviceable excuse for the novel’s delay, a myth that survived until very recently when Arnold Rampersad hypothesized that the fire likely contributed only a minor setback to his progress.21 For some reason Ellison simply could not finish the book.
A number of plausible explanations may characterize Ellison’s difficulty. First, producing a sophomore effort after Invisible Man must have proven daunting. Even if, as Warren suggests, we understand Invisible Man to be a novel grounded in its historical era, it remains a stunningly good novel within this (or any) era.22 Second, whereas the pressure to live up to or even to surpass Invisible Man might constrict some authors’ creativity, this clearly was not the case for Ellison. His more vexing problem lay in his inability to stop writing. According to one commentator, “He was a man drowning in his own words.”23 Ellison’s truly difficult task became to give final and coherent shape to the manuscript at the very moment a world of possibilities for revision opened to him. Such new latitude rendered it nearly impossible to overcome the uncertainty that Ellison felt toward his narrative even until his final days.24
The foregoing explanations, however, remain primarily psychological in nature, reflecting Ellison’s anxieties in managing creativity, ambition, and pride. A third explanation derives from an intellectual historical problem: Ellison’s inability to complete the second novel stemmed from his acute sensitivity to the dynamic trajectory of postwar African American history and culture at the time he wrote. Begun in 1952 amid stirrings that augured the Brown decision, and unfinished at the time of Ellison’s death in 1994, the writing process spans a remarkable survey of African American history in the second half of the twentieth century: Montgomery, Little Rock, Birmingham, the March on Washington, Selma, and Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s respective assassinations. It continues through the 1970s and the 1980s and on to 1994—just after the Los Angeles riots of 1992, and just before 1995’s Million Man March. Unlike the relative stability that Woodward ascribes to the long Jim Crow era, the occasions of Ellison’s second novel exhibit remarkable fluidity. History would not sit still for Ellison, an author engaged in “the seemingly impossible task of rendering in fiction the American experience in the second half of the twentieth century.”25 “Why did I have to be a writer,” he asks Morteza Sprague in his letter written upon learning of Brown, “at a time when events sneer at your efforts?”26 As Bradley notes, “This sense of writing on the verge of dramatic change, or perhaps even contributing to that change, freighted Ellison’s second novel with the heavy burden of history.”27 Timothy Parrish moves it to the present tense: “Ellison was forever addressing an America that is still unrealized.”28 Finally, as discussed in the last chapter, by the mid-1960s the novel carried added burdens of depth and resonance amid a literary context that Ellison believed no longer valued such properties. To appropriate an image from Barbara Foley, with the second novel Ellison wrestled with Proteus until time expired.29
The second novel offers a morality tale, told in subtle and ironic strokes that subvert the pieties of racial determination. It opens in Washington, DC, with Alonzo Hickman, a black preacher visiting from Georgia with his congregation, seeking an audience with the race-baiting New England senator, Adam Sunraider. Sunraider, who avoids his visitors, is subsequently shot and mortally wounded while speaking on the Senate floor. Hickman visits Sunraider while the senator is on his deathbed, and through the course of the novel—much of which consists of their conversations and individual memories delivered in a rich, frequently stunning stream-of-consciousness—we learn that Sunraider, the white supremacist, was once Bliss—a five-year-old child preacher of indeterminate racial origins (though he clearly can pass for white) who was adopted and raised by Reverend Hickman and his congregation, steeped in the rhetoric and semiotics of black preaching. Such semiotics, rhetoric, and homiletics have led many critics to address religious dimensions of the second novel with recourse to black churches or even, as in Laura Saunders’s essay, subtitled “The Gospel according to Ralph,” “the Black Church.” The text is rich, and significant work on its religious and theological dimensions remains to be done—especially in terms of Ellison’s own deployment of preacherly voices as a kind of “homiletics of literature.” However, this volume remains concerned less with matters ecclesial and more with religious intellectual relationships between Ellison’s work and his concept of race as an invisible theology. Thus we focus on the second novel’s civil religious dimensions as they correspond to wranglings over racial identity at the height of the civil rights movements of the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.
Through Bliss/Sunraider, Ellison achieves a domestic intimacy between black and white, a connection that he calls “some cord of kinship stronger than blood, hate or heartbreak.”30 Bliss eventually leaves Hickman and the congregation, lighting out for the West to find his mother and to pursue a career in movies, recasting his identity in the process. In doing so he draws upon the tools entrusted to him by the community who loved and harbored him as a child. He transforms these tools into implements of betrayal, beats his plowshares into a sword through his self-invention as Sunraider, whose race-baiting rhetorical skill derives directly from Bliss’s childhood training as a black preacher in Hickman’s church. The substance of his rhetoric weds an idiomatic appeal to American idealism with religious fervor, as studied as it is effective. This is Ellison’s ironic kinship between black and white Americans, a nascent love that Hickman accuses the white supremacist Sunraider (whom he calls by his childhood name, Bliss), on his deathbed, of betraying:
[White folk] just don’t recognize no continuance of anything after [childhood, when many are loved and watched after by black caregivers]: not love, not remembrance, not understanding, sacrifice, compassion, nothing. . . . So self-castrated of their love they pass us by, boy, they pass us by. Then as far as we’re concerned it’s “Put your heart on ice, put your conscience in pawn.” Even their beloved black tit becomes an empty bag to laugh at and they grow deaf to their mammy’s lullabyes. What’s wrong with these folks, Bliss, is they can’t stand continuity, not the true kind that binds man to man and Jesus to God. . . . They can’t stand continuity because if they could everything would have to be changed; there’d be more love among us, boy. But the first step in their growing up is to learn how to spurn love. They have to deny it by law, boy. Then begins the season of hate and SHAMEFACEDNESS. Confusion leaps like a fire in the bowels and false faces bloom like jimsonweed. They put on a mask, boy, and life’s turned plumb upside down.31
Such love (and its betrayal) is not an unbridgeable separation but a difficult, ambivalent intimacy that defies facile categories. Brown does not seek to integrate but to reintegrate what political and social custom, fear, and hate have driven apart.
As an African American author working in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, Ellison strives to reconstitute the concept of race in African American literature—the terms of which became irrevocably altered by the 1954 ruling—according to this new dispensation. Whereas Invisible Man explores race as the signal American literary tension par excellence, in the second novel Ellison engages American social, political, religious, and cultural customs and institutions as they undergo radical transformations during a time of strenuous change.32 The integrations of such customs and institutions require an ironic, democratic acknowledgment of intimacy at the heart of Ellison’s second novel.
Such an integrated, yet problematic vision of democratic racial identity becomes more auspicious in an age that witnessed the rise to international prominence of an African American preacher from Georgia such as Martin Luther King, who finds an analogue in Hickman (himself an African American preacher from Georgia). Even more radically, Ellison reverses the moral trajectory that King embodies. Here, through Hickman and the homiletical lessons of Bliss/Sunraider’s youth, the voice of the black preacher also forms the rhetorical and substantive basis for the political discourse and performance of Bliss/Sunraider’s white supremacy, his symbolic betrayal of the past. The Ellisonian cord of common kinship frequently strangles with its embrace.
Ellison’s plot navigates vacillations of love and betrayal that reside at the core of the southern campaign pursued by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) during the height of the modern civil rights movement. While King is never named specifically, his legacy remains inextricable to the second novel’s narrative even as it becomes one that Nathan Scott draws parallel to Ellison’s own cultural aspirations.33 Despite Ellison’s givenness to ambivalence about protest, his own conspicuous absence (unlike Scott) from the front lines of the freedom movement, and a measure of consternation about King’s tactics, Ellison and King also hold a great deal in common through their respective understandings of “America,” its founding documents, and the central integrity of African Americans to American culture and society.34 Both men were integrationists, ambitious strivers of a certain African American social class, erudite and proud of it—yet deriving meaning and inspiration from African American vernacular traditions (black preaching for King, folklore and the blues idiom for Ellison).35 Furthermore, on certain levels they remain commonly misunderstood—and, at times, co-opted—for their willingness to entertain more broadly inclusive conceptions of American identity in the face of an increasingly fractured consensus.36 Ellison and King’s respective attempts to grapple with the exigencies of a post-Brown world for African American culture and society bear a striking, if undertreated, coherence.37
The most intriguing correspondence between Ellison and King resides in their semiotics—their respective understandings of dramatic symbolic action, its capacity for creative tension, and such tension’s essential function for generating meaning in literary, religious, and social contexts. King discusses his tactics explicitly in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” (1963):
Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word tension. I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. . . . So the purpose of the direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.38
In Ellisonian terms we might call King’s “constructive tension” by the name “antagonistic cooperation.”39 Nonviolent direct action relies upon an antagonist to cooperate with its goal to establish a dramatic crisis that offers a symbolic ritualization of social dynamics, projecting diurnal reality in terms of confrontational performances designed strategically to represent in broad, mythological (and therefore universal and translatable) terms the particular or local realities endured by ordinary citizens. King, deemed an outsider, assumes the epistolary mantle of the Apostle Paul (himself, as King notes, “an extremist of the Gospel of Jesus Christ”) to reinforce the urgency of the Birmingham situation.40 He maps present issues onto a series of biblical and historical antecedents.
Ellison, who understood race to constitute the central tension of “the American human conflict,” drew upon then-canonical literary sources to represent this central tension in broader terms, according to forms that carry a wider appeal than race might otherwise have attained.41 For King, in 1963 Birmingham, strategic public protest elicited an antagonistic response from Bull Connor and the Birmingham police force that served King’s broader aims: the construction of a public drama encapsulating Birmingham’s racial dynamics. With dogs and fire hoses, the police actions offered compelling imagery, with symbolism rooted in biblical and other religious sources (such as Deutero-Isaiah’s suffering servant or the massacre of the innocents in Matthew 2:16–18), that dramatized the reality of African Americans’ lives under Birmingham’s especially vicious segregated social order. This performance amplified the urgency by which such reality might be understood, broadcasting it on television to stir outrage in the nation and the world.
Ellison’s resonance with King is not simply structural. His second novel’s quest for viability mirrors King’s own career and echoes not only the expansive scope of King’s civil rights campaign, but more specific incidents along the way.42 One of the more stirring episodes in Ellison’s unfinished and imperfect (yet frequently gorgeous) second novel, finds Hickman—like King in the March on Washington—at the Lincoln Memorial, in Lincoln’s shadow, contemplating Bliss’s perfidy, ruminating upon a representative white man’s promise and the sense of hope that Hickman remains unwilling to yield even in the face of Bliss’s betrayal as Sunraider. Hickman locates such a promise in Lincoln and, by extension, in the founding documents of the United States (to which Lincoln frequently referred) that offer liberty and citizenship continually promised, yet consistently denied: “He’s one of us,” says Hickman, speaking simultaneously of Lincoln’s visage and Bliss’s betrayal.43
Parrish suggests that a central question of the second novel asks whether “whites can merit the love and forgiveness of blacks.”44 Hickman’s meditations on Lincoln imply that it is indeed possible. With his reverie interrupted by members of his own congregation, Hickman affirms their queries of the statue’s identity: “Ain’t that him, Revern’? Ain’t that Father Abraham?” His response captures the thrust of Ellison’s ambition to narrate the ambivalence of identity: “Yes, with all I know about him and his contradictions, yes. And with all I know about men and the world, yes. And with all I know about white men and politicians of all colors and guises and intentions, yes. And with all I know about the things you had to do to be you and stay yourself—yes!”45 Lincoln’s contradictions and his humanity suggest democratic fluidity while retaining a fidelity to the mission that Hickman admires (and Ellison strives to narrate). He is, at once and evasively, Negro and American.
In 1984 James Alan McPherson recounted to the first Langston Hughes festival at the City College of New York an occasion in 1969 when, one evening, his friend Ralph Ellison read aloud to him from his eagerly anticipated novel in progress:
The prose was unlike anything I had ever heard before, a combination of Count Basie’s sense of time and early American minstrelsy and Negro Baptist preaching. . . . I have been thinking about those five or ten minutes for many years now, and what I think is that, in his novel, Ellison was trying to solve the central problem of American literature. He was trying to find forms invested with enough familiarity to reinvent a broader and much more diverse world for those who take their provisional identities from groups. I think he was trying to Negro-Americanize the novel form, at the same time he was attempting to move beyond it.46
McPherson’s description is apt, and his final denomination of Ellison’s second novel as “Negro-Americanize[d]” proves telling not only for exposing Ellison’s ambitions, but for diagnosing a signal problematic aspect that well could have hindered Ellison’s, and the second novel’s, progress—even as King struggled to find coherence in the widening gyre of his religiously grounded campaign for civil justice.
According to Ellison, King “embodied a tradition of eloquence from the mainstream of American literature. In him we have no difficulty in discerning the intricate ways in which his thinking, his acting and his ways of expressing himself were simultaneously Negro American in idiom and yet a living part of what is fashionable [sic] refered [sic] to as the mainstream.”47 The coherence of McPherson’s term for Ellison’s second-novel aspirations with Ellison’s term for King—“Negro American” and its verbal form “Negro-Americanize”—offer a compelling proximity for King and Ellison and especially for the rhetoric of their respective contributions to the broader freedom movements of their day. Clearly Ellison recognizes something of King’s performance in his own literary attempts to revivify what he calls “courageous and self-sacrificial individualism” and his longing for coherence and meaning within a chaotic era of social strife.48
By 1969, according to Danielle Allen’s model, the period of reconstitution was over. But recent legislative victories including the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) augured no Pax Afro-Americana. With tangible goals achieved, other questions, newer problems, and vexing realities emerged. King turned to poverty, labor, and Vietnam, and found his older nonviolent methods, generally effective in the South, of limited use in northern cities such as Chicago. “Where Do We Go from Here?” he asked in his final presidential address to the SCLC in 1967—a question posed constructively, yet rhetorically significant of the uncertainty confronting his movement and its forward trajectory.49 King’s assassination in 1968 dealt a decisive blow that completed a transition, in progress since the mid-1960s, away from nonviolence for the sake of integration and toward a more militant expression of black power and racial particularity that gained momentum and began to vex Ellison in his public appearances—particularly at colleges and universities. Ellison and King’s modes and methods of civil engagement, galling to a younger generation of artists and activists (as were Nathan Scott’s), lost traction and efficacy in the late 1960s.
Interestingly, it is precisely this moment of transition, close on the heels of reconstitution’s demise yet also in the wake of more than a decade of rich contingency that fostered the central tension of an American racial narrative, when Ellison’s second novel came closest to a final, coherent shape. According to Bradley, in the aftermath of the 1967 fire Ellison pushed forward with revisions, completing typescripts of Books I and II, and—by 1972—“was talking about publishing the novel.”50 If Ellison’s goal for the second novel was, in McPherson’s phrase, to Negro-Americanize the novel form (and we also hear echoes of Nathan Scott here), he had begun by inflecting the unstable nature of African American identity post-Brown against what he understood to be a stable and abiding sense of American identity. Doing so echoed King’s strategy. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in August 1963, King speaks of cashing a check that the nation had written:
When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.” We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity in this nation. And so we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.51
Significantly, the United States still possesses currency in King’s metaphor; it remains, despite centuries of evidence to the contrary (and the violence of its own reluctant protestations), morally solvent by virtue of its founding documents, a bulwark-never-failing upon which King reconstitutes African American identity.
Ellison brings Hickman to this same monument, investing his minister’s ruminations upon American racial symbiosis with the strong civil-religious orientation that augments King’s use of the setting.52 In his working notes for the second novel, Ellison suggests that Hickman and his congregation’s aim was nothing less than to raise Bliss to be a second Lincoln: “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.”53 Bliss, as the passably white visage of African American locution, embodies an American ideal, a democratic promise invested by Ellison’s Georgia minister with a similarly religious valence to King’s dream, as proclaimed in his “Sermon on the Mall.” The civil rights era, implicitly embodied by King through Ellison’s use of the Lincoln Memorial, seeks the reconstitution that was promised in the wake of the Civil War, yet betrayed by the failures of Reconstruction. Hickman says to Lincoln’s marble visage: “Yes, that’s right, it’s you; just sitting and waiting while taking your well-earned ease. Just getting your second wind before arising up to do all over again that which has been undone throughout all the long betrayed years.”54 Such promises rarely accord with the grandeur of expectations. The betrayal is political, yet it is also personal. It is born of the democratic intimacy that Bliss/Sunraider embodies. He is the dream and the nightmare, the promise and its revocation.
In a broader sense, according to the same theoretical trajectory ranging from Schleiermacher to Geertz outlined in this volume’s introduction (and that we have traced throughout Ellison’s career), the very nature of negotiating the relationship of one’s particular identity to a greater, more universalizing sense of belonging is, by definition, religious. When this so-called universal involves nationalism it becomes civil religion. Robert Bellah first codified the concept of American civil religion in 1967 (the same year that Ellison’s novel, according to Bradley, came the closest it ever would to publication before spiraling out of control) as “a genuine apprehension of universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or . . . as revealed through the experience of the American people.”55 Bellah suggests that, whereas all countries tend to conflate nation with a sense of transcendence, the United States represents a unique example because the ontology of its very origins reflects a transcendentally redemptive mission. John Winthrop spoke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, even before disembarking the Arbella, as “A City Upon a Hill.” Presidents and prominent figures of all political persuasions have invoked this sense of America as beacon for the world ever since. Furthermore, Abraham Lincoln (so vital to Ellison’s second novel) has become the patron saint of American civil religion, and speeches such as the Gettysburg Address and his second inaugural address (which one commentator has denominated “the American Sermon on the Mount”) have entered the national litany.56 Through such instances one already encounters strong and well-developed connections between this historicized conception of American civil religion and Ellison’s literary worldview—especially in the “progress” of his second novel.
Bliss, the erstwhile second Lincoln, clearly took this lesson to heart, for despite (or perhaps because of) Sunraider’s benighted racial attitudes, his language fairly drips with American civil religious rhetoric. Before he is shot on the Senate floor, Sunraider ruminates:
So let us not falter before our complexity. Nor become confused by the mighty, reciprocal, enginelike stroking of our national ambiguities. We are by no means a perfect people—nor do we desire to be so. . . . We seek not perfection, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative momentum. Ours is a youthful nation. . . . It was designed to solve those vast problems before which all other nations have been proved wanting. Born in diversity and fired by determination, our society was endowed with a flexibility designed to contain the most fractious contentions of an ambitious, individualistic, and adventurous breed. Therefore, as we go about confronting our national ambiguities let us remember the purposes of our built-in checks and balances. . . .
“E pluribus unum,” the Senator shouted.57
Sunraider, drawing upon his homiletical training in the performance of a civil sermon from the pulpit of one of the nation’s most powerful and influential sanctuaries, invokes the mystery of faith for American democracy and civil religion: the one and the many.
This paradox of e pluribus unum—“one out of many”—was not a new concept for Ellison in the second novel. The formulation appears in Ellison’s lecture notes for teaching and speaking engagements.58 He also explored its significance through Invisible Man’s definitive tensions between individuals and the groups to which they both bear responsibility and risk losing their integrity as autonomous agents.59 The unnamed protagonist navigates his own ambitions and a sense of cultural tradition and responsibility that he ostensibly must both choose and have chosen for him. The Brotherhood, as an erstwhile Communist Party, seeks to submerge the invisible man’s individuality to the will of the collective. They rebuke him for exercising autonomy, for speaking of himself (as a representative of the Brotherhood) in the first-person singular as opposed to reflecting the collective will of the group—sloganeering, Scott might call it—through the first-person plural.60 Later, Rinehart, “both rind and heart,” serves as a protean character through whom one man becomes all things to all people: “Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the reverend. . . . What is real, anyway?”61 Rinehart’s full name? Proteus Bliss Rinehart.62
Finally, in Invisible Man’s epilogue, the protagonist arrives at this epiphany:
It’s “winner take nothing” that is the great truth of our country or of any country. Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat. Our fate is to become one, and yet many—This is not prophecy, but description. Thus one of the greatest jokes in the world is the spectacle of the whites busy escaping blackness and becoming blacker every day, and the blacks striving toward whiteness, becoming quite dull and gray. None of us seems to know who he is or where he’s going.63
Such ambiguity fuels the protagonist’s descent underground, into invisibility. The struggle of invisibility—particularly for one who recognizes the condition in himself—becomes the treacherous navigation of an ironic position between nihilism and naïve hope. For Ellison the one and the many bear a mysterious, paradoxical relationship that effectively models his own understanding of how race functions in American society and culture—within the antagonistically cooperative negotiations of a particular sense of identity that both complicates and augments a singular, unified, integrated understanding of nation.
In the introduction to Shadow and Act (1964), Ellison, as McPherson would do two decades later, denominates one aspect of his own critical project to concern “the complex relationship between the Negro American subculture and North American culture as a whole.”64 This complexity (one of Ellison’s favorite words) facilitates recognition of the simultaneity of “Negro” and “American” identities, an acknowledgment of DuBoisian double consciousness that Ellison’s integrating self synthesizes: “I consider myself both and I don’t see a dichotomy.”65 In this way Ellison codifies the emerging location of African Americans in American society and culture in the wake of Brown and its requisite reorientations: “What part of Negro life has been foisted on us by Jim Crow and must be gotten rid of; what part of Negro life, expression, culture, do we want to keep? We will need more true self-consciousness. I don’t know what values, what new tragic sense must emerge. . . . Up to now it has been a matter of throwing things off. But now we have to get conscious of what we do not want to throw off.”66 Ellison’s literary and critical “complexity” refers to the post-Brown conundrum of African American identity in the United States—in its many social, political, and religious valences. The process of discerning what should be cast off and what should remain mirrors Ellison’s writing process for the belabored second novel. He felt compelled to exercise at once a disciplined restraint and a discerning willingness to cast things into the discard pile, struggling with precisely who Bliss—a protean Rinehart unleashed in a post-Brown world—may come to be.
Unfortunately for Ellison, and especially for the completion of the second novel, even as he sought to articulate this emerging understanding of race and the relationship of one and many in narrative fiction, two shifts took place—one in the pluribus, the other in the unum. First, by the late 1960s the Black Power and Black Arts movements codified their own vision of blackness—one rooted in a particular identity politics; one which in many ways reestablished and enforced a hard line of racial determinism not out of keeping with pre-Brown separatism, grounded not in exclusion but dissociation. This cohesive understanding of race became a majority report among intellectual commentators and political actors who proved antagonistic toward Ellison (who certainly gave as good as he got). One black studies librarian, you may remember, answered a patron query for Invisible Man with the pronouncement that “Ralph Ellison is not a black writer.”67 King’s perceived accommodationism found echoes in Ellison’s aesthetics. Black Power sought to cash no promissory note. It knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that the nation was morally bankrupt.68
The second major transformation Ellison confronted in the composition of his second novel is that at roughly the same time he sought refuge from the instability of racial identity in a fortified sense of unum, these unified conceptions and their relatively stable understanding of America fractured. By the late 1960s, any sense of postwar cohesion—real or imagined—had dissipated.69 Social upheaval precipitated by changing mores, political dissent against a controversial war, rioting over race and class inequalities, substantial religious discord, shifting gender roles, and the devastating assassinations of dynamic leaders shredded what national cohesion emerged from World War II and the postwar prosperity.
It is not accidental that Bellah codifies his specific version of American civil religion in the manner, and at the moment, that he does. In fact, Martin Marty suggests that it became a relic in the wake of this turmoil, a historical concept no longer tenable in the present tense.70 While American civil religion continues to evolve, Marty’s historicization frames significant questions emerging in this postwar era that find interesting resonance in an overlooked (or otherwise maligned) aspect of the second half of Ellison’s life: his involvement with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF), which Ellison served as a trustee from 1971 (at the end of Allen’s “reconstitution”) to 1984.71 Rampersad approaches Ellison’s participation in CWF with suspicion, suggesting that Ellison was simply gratified by his inclusion among “wealthy, powerful, educated whites” despite contributing little toward the diversification of the foundation and its leadership.72 While such criticism may be fair, it also oversimplifies matters. Ellison’s participation in CWF reflects an abiding interest in reconstitution as we observed it in Ellison’s civil rights–era work, and as it runs headlong into transitions in public-historical pedagogy and historiography during the 1970s, when the approaching bicentennial celebration (another public cause with which Ellison involved himself) met the rise of social history, focusing less upon singular, heroic, ideological understandings of nation and history and more upon aspects of race, class, and gender.
Rampersad uses Ellison’s participation in CWF to spotlight certain foibles of his character.73 Nevertheless, there remains more to Ellison’s involvement than Rampersad acknowledges. Specifically, the Williamsburg project itself offers a compelling model for the civil religious problems that confronted the completion of his second novel. To understand the significance of this connection, it helps to reflect upon Colonial Williamsburg’s own history, the context into which (and because of which) Ellison became involved, and possible motivations (beyond Rampersad’s characteristic diagnosis of Ellison’s fragile ego) for his continued participation during this period in his career.
The transformation of Williamsburg, Virginia, from a backwater former colonial capital into a “living museum” of eighteenth-century Americana began in 1926 as a pet project of John D. Rockefeller Jr., his son John D. Rockefeller III, and W. A. R. Goodwin, former rector of Williamsburg’s Bruton Parish Church. Intended to hearken to a glorious past that modernization and industrialization had undercut, Williamsburg symbolized “the cornerstones of American values that promoted a respect for the past in an ever-changing world.”74 These values shored up national identity and sentiment during the perceived threats to the American way of life presented by World War II and the Cold War era. Things changed, however. By the 1960s and certainly the 1970s, when Ellison became a trustee, Colonial Williamsburg faced scrutiny and condemnation for obscuring social history, ignoring the roughly half of its historical population that would have been African American, rendering women largely invisible, and focusing on matters of state and war at the expense of the domos.75 Such trends reflected broader social and cultural shifts, of course, and the disputes registered against CWF and its timeline mirror controversies in other institutions—academic and otherwise. Thus Ellison’s time with CWF provides a specific historiographical moment of Ellison’s involvement with American civil religion: “In its role as a shrine that was conceived by a cleric and the heir to the nation’s great industrial fortune and that has become one of the nation’s leading centers for the study of colonial life, the restoration [of Colonial Williamsburg] serves as a useful conduit for understanding the changing nature of twentieth-century American society.”76 The implications of this changing American nature, as we have observed in detail, occupied the second half of Ellison’s life and career as he struggled to represent and contain them with depth and resonance in novel form.
In seeking to highlight the roles of African Americans (both free and enslaved), women, and others who had been historically (and historiographically) excluded, the problem became one of reconciling conflicting narratives on “America” and the emphases placed upon diverse aspects of national identity.77 This was the challenge confronting CWF during Ellison’s tenure as a trustee. While he was ahead of the curve in understanding pluribus and unum and was an advocate of the old “Negro-American” vision that James Alan McPherson discussed, the issues that Colonial Williamsburg presented, and the myriad controversies it raised, remained civil religious in nature and occupied Ellison as primary concerns in the later stages of his life. Indeed, the issues reflected the more stable unum that the broader American scene denied to Ellison during this time. In 1986 he reflected on his involvement in a letter to Robert C. Birney, the foundation’s head of education: “My main interest in CW (and whatever contribution I might have made as a trustee) has always found focus in its potential for dramatizing the cultural, industrial, and political processes through which this nation was formed and gradually became, through dream, struggle, and self-assessment, even more conscious of the mystery and challenge of its ‘Americanness.’”78 Part of Colonial Williamsburg’s educational value resides in its dramatic impact, its capacity to mythologize (not unlike King did—notice the King-like rhetoric of “dream,” “struggle,” and “self-assessment” that Ellison wields above) the mundane and thereby to transcend it. This sense of American “mystery” is pointedly civil religious. Whatever propensity or responsibility Ellison may have felt toward the advancement of social historical learning, his foundational understanding of particular identity always pointed toward a cooperative-antagonistic relationship of such particularity with universals, which are “reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance.”79 Absent stable unum, Ellison’s sense of pluribus became obscure.
According to Marty’s historicization, the pluribus and the unum—once understood as antagonistically cooperative co-conspirators—divided into factions during the late twentieth century. One faction accused the other of “impos[ing] a single national identity,” the other decried a tendency toward “promoting . . . mutually exclusive subcultures at the expense of the common weal.”80 This impasse inaugurated a changing paradigm in the concept of America. By codifying American civil religion as he did in 1967, Bellah described it, as Ellison did with Bledsoe, “before [it] was checked out,” just before it receded into the past. Furthermore, he did so at the very moment that Ellison’s second novel, according to Bradley, came the closest it ever would to publication before spiraling irrevocably out of control. In Williamsburg the problem became how to balance the curricular and historiographical demands of emerging social history with the market demands for popular, more outmoded history.
Marty characterizes such an ontological shift as moving from a “centripetal” understanding of pluribus (which means that all outlying properties are thrust toward a central point of identity) to a “centrifugal” one (wherein a central point of identification is fractured, thrusting common elements toward the periphery, multivalent).81 He marks a transition from emphasis upon oneness to emphasis upon multiplicity. Thus, on a centripetal reading of American culture, the emphasis on diverse communities, identities, and influences moves toward a unified whole, a totalizing American identity rooted in what common elements may pertain. Conversely, a centrifugal reading of American identity privileges the multiplicity of voices, acknowledges the diverse communities and influences that constitute a national character and, indeed, imposes a common good only insofar as there may be concord in the validity of American pluralism.
The result of these “contrasting motions” is a “shock to the civil body, a trauma in the cultural system, and a paralysis in the neural web of social interactions.”82 It is precisely in the midst of this shock, trauma, and paralysis that Ellison encountered problems containing his second novel. Having historically relied upon the antagonistic cooperation of one-and-many, pluribus and unum, to drive his ironic conception of African American identity as a function of a broader, stable American identity, cultural transformations from the late 1960s forward undercut the vital sense of cooperation in which the Ellisonian worldview was grounded.83 Absent an authoritative racial autonomy in this new dispensation—unmoored by Brown—Ellison sought to relate his specific pluralistic identity to a unified, integrated American sensibility, to a centripetal unum. Yet this unum proved unstable, moving toward centrifugal pluralism that afforded no steadfast intellectual or conceptual antagonist. As an author who generated symbolic action through such tension, the result was crippling. The subversion of this tension so inherent to a healthy sense of civil religion contributed inextricably to Ellison’s failure to complete his second novel. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s famous observation of the late-twentieth-century United States held true for Ellison’s struggle: pluribus abounded while unum grew scarce. For authors working in the Black Arts tradition, the concept of race had become relatively stabilized. Thus the fracturing of America (for which most representatives of this tradition held little faith in the first place) simply did not matter. For Ellison, however, things fell apart. Both race and nation were compromised, offering stability on neither side against which he could inflect the other in his writing, nothing firm upon which tension between the two might become “constructive,” as Martin Luther King would have it; no cooperative stability useful for grounding the antagonism between race and nation as modes of identity; little concern for the depth and resonance reinforced by Nathan Scott that civil religion accords Ellison’s political vision.
What remains fascinating about Ellison’s involvement with CWF is the manner in which it offered a strong unum for which Ellison supplied (and embodied) the pluribus in an era when reliable intellectual formulations of an American unum (aside from late–Cold War jingoism) grew increasingly rare. Perhaps Ellison recognized that his second novel, long imagined to represent a kind of definitive statement on America’s integrated nature, a sense of “Negro Americanness,” was slipping irretrievably beyond both his creative grasp and the very occasion—begun two or three decades earlier—during which it was conceived. In this context his involvement with CWF both reflected the transitions that bedeviled him and, yet, offered him the greater sense of stability that was lacking in the centrifugality of these latter decades.
Around 1981, as he worked on his memoirs—a project that, like his second novel, he would never complete—Ellison scribbled the words to the Pledge of Allegiance in pencil on a one-quarter-filled typescript page: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the USA,” he wrote, “and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God” (this “under God,” a later edition he inserts with a caret, suggesting Ellison never grew accustomed to it) “indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”84 Directly below this official version one finds Ellison’s own rendition of the pledge, written in words that pun in meter and rhyme on the American credo’s pieties: “one nation, . . . indivisible” becomes “one blues invisible, with sorrowful laughter for all.”85 Such a statement—indeed, his own faithful pledge—nicely encapsulates what we might call Ellison’s civil religious orientation. He begins with a simple proclamation of American identity—what we might denominate as the unum—rendered straight (though not unambivalently, as he belatedly remembers the clause “under God,” added by Congress in the 1950s in the attempt to differentiate the United States from, and to stem the spread of, “godless communism”). Next he revises it, restates it, vamping on it and stamping it with his own signature concepts derived from the pluribus that his African American identity represented in the integrated culture and society that was his ideal. The blues, invisibility, the tragicomic (“sorrowful laughter”)—Ellisonian keywords all—plunge this American affirmation of faith into a sense of ambiguity that resides between and effectively unites the unum (“one blues invisible”) with the pluribus (“with sorrowful laughter for all” [emphasis mine]) in the constructive tension of their antagonistic cooperation and civil religious depth.
Ellison’s ideal unity of “one blues invisible,” however ambiguous, grew increasingly impossible as the legacies of the 1960s and 1970s evolved into moral majorities and oppositional factions, solidifying the centrifugal fragmentation of American identity into static postulations that would hold for the remainder of Ellison’s life (and beyond), undermining aspirations toward depth and resonance that had seemed so hopeful only a few years prior. Social and cultural antagonism grew increasingly uncooperative, a common good untenable not simply for its erosion of what illusions of commonality may have persisted but also for an escalating ambivalence regarding the nature and identity of good itself. It would be more than twenty-five years from the day of Ralph Ellison’s “Pledge” until Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008, would invoke Ellisonian ambiguity, negotiating the perilous proximity of the pluribus and the unum in American society and culture, drawing upon Ellisonian conceptions of race in game-saving political speeches and, indeed, campaigning as an invisible candidate en route to becoming the first African American president of the United States.86 In the meantime, Ellison was left virtually alone—nursing one blues, invisible: the America he signified out of his “ancestral” traditions (including Twain, Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, and even Nathan Scott) and their intersections with the historical peculiarity of African American experience—with sorrowful laughter for all.