Juneteenth (50 page)

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.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
.
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
are full of passionate intensity.”

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.