Juneteenth (53 page)

Ellison’s entire manuscript has numerous space breaks, but within Book II he did not designate chapters as such. As editor, I have respected Ellison’s breaks; in addition, keeping the reader in mind, I have divided
Juneteenth
into chapters at appropriate points in the manuscript and the action. At times, divergence between manuscript pagination and certain of Ellison’s rather definitive notes indicates that he had not reached a state of certainty about the sequence of the action. Inevitably, in such matters much depends upon an editor’s taste and sense of the writer’s intentions. For my part, I have arranged
Chapters 9
through 11 according to the sequence Ellison mapped out in an undated note outlining the narrative action from the time of the attempted kidnapping of Bliss to the point when Hickman “takes Bliss to see movie and it is here that Bliss begins to have fantasy that his mother is one of the movie stars.” Ellison also provided an important clue, this one silent, about how to end
Juneteenth
. In this instance he added a key passage in different, larger typeface to
this page
of the most recent manuscript of Book II. In a few words he brings the episode in question to climax
and closure. The passage projects what Ellison called “that aura of a summing up, that pause for contemplation of the moral significance of the history we’ve been through,” and, therefore, it strengthened my impression of this scene as the most logical and emotional place to end the narrative that I think Ellison might have called
Juneteenth
.

Finally, there is the matter of editorial corrections to passages in the manuscripts that are the copy texts for this edition of
Juneteenth
. I have silently corrected matters of accidence, e.g., spelling “deification” for the typescript’s “diefication.” Occasionally, I have also made silent corrections on matters of substance, such as correcting erroneous quotation (“Full fathom five” for “Four fathom five”). For clarity’s sake and to avoid a redundancy I believe Ellison would have addressed before publication, I have slightly pruned several passages in
Chapter 2
. In
Chapter 3
I deleted two brief passages referring to a different speech than the one the Senator gives in
Chapter 2
. Lastly, I have not included an intriguing but clearly unfinished, unrevised episode Ellison seems tentatively to have tacked on to the end of the typescript of Book II. Because this edition of
Juneteenth
is a reader’s edition, I have not encumbered its pages with lists of changes made for reasons of accidence or substance. A subsequent scholar’s edition will document my corrections and include sufficient manuscripts and drafts to enable scholars and readers alike to follow Ellison’s some forty years of work on his novel-in-progress. Upon publication of the scholarly edition, the notes and manuscripts in the Ellison papers at the Library of Congress will be available to those interested in working with them.

John F. Callahan
February 1999