Only twice during the day did the gathering appear to be racially homogeneous – a half hour midafternoon when everyone looked pretty white, and two hours later when a visitor might have said all readers were black but me. The diversity Ellison so loved in American voices was perfect for a story meant to be spoken. We heard accents ranging from Midwest middle-class to Hindi-American, from Oxonian to Ozark, from highly cultivated to halting. We heard down-home country and down-home street voices, oratorical musicality rivaling that of God’s Trombone, and radio-quality dramatics in the crystalline tones of a ten-year-old Japanese-American girl. We heard each other’s laughter, mphs of recognition, amens, tell-it-brothers, ahs, m-hms, no-sirs, and that's-rights -- coming from more than one ethnic group, and not just during the sermons but throughout the narrative. Reading with each other, we learned that the voices in the pages of Ellison’s Juneteenth are speaking aloud to people who are listening, and not alone.
And we learned that to know the full worth of Juneteenth, one has to hear it. Ellison's book is a meditation, fable, sermon, shaggy-dog tale, rhapsody, rap, and riff -- like no book born here before. So grass-roots Juneteenth celebrations should be held throughout the nation every Juneteenth to celebrate THE American literary event of the twentieth century's latter days.
Such an event is easy to organize. Ours was open to everyone in the city who wanted to come read passages from Juneteenth aloud, or to hear others read from the book as it was passed around. People were free to come and go -- to stay the whole time (as I did) or just drop in for half an hour. Many visitors from nearby Juneteenth celebrations, which went on all day and into the evening, drifted in and out during the course of the marathon.
Local public and literary figures presided as emcees throughout the day on a rotating basis, hour by hour. Presiders participated in the reading and helped readers along as necessary. In keeping with Ellison’s vision of an America that is a cultural blend of black and white and other races, the group of presiders was diverse.
Random House donated advance copies of Juneteenth for the marathon. In the room were posters containing chapter-by-chapter outlines of the plot, with movable markers to indicate at any time the events being read from the book. This helped orient people who arrived in the middle and suggested how the present reading moment fit into the whole narrative. I'm willing to send anyone a copy of my outline of the novel.
Me: I 'm just an English teacher who loves African American literature and is committed to excellence in teaching it. I'm also a sometime reviewer of poetry books and am currently honored to have written two articles on Juneteenth for the June 3 Seattle Weekly. These articles will be reprinted in the November 1999 issue of the Columbia Journal of American Studies.
I hope you'll consider starting or joining a celebration of Ellison's Juneteenth in your area. Even if there were only time to read the Juneteenth festival chapters (7 and 8), a readaround would be a success.
I hope, too, that a community readaround of a major African American classic can become an annual Juneteenth event in cities everywhere -- for example, in Seattle next year I hope there will be a readaround of Ellison's Invisible Man. In any case, even if you can't organize a public readaround of Ellison's new novel this Juneteenth, please pass the concept on to other people and give them my web site and e-mail addresses in case they'd like to talk about it.
Sincerely,
Judy Lightfoot
June 30,1999