This Mammy-Made Nation Born in Blood: The Family as Nation in Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Three Days Before the Shooting … The Unfinished Second Novel

About suffering they were never wrong The Old Masters …

—W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

The editors of Ralph Ellison’s unfinished second novel, Three Days Before the Shooting…, admit, “With the mystery that has surrounded the second novel over the years, it seems only natural that public discussion has centered almost exclusively upon why Ellison never published the book.” Instead of creating the glue that would hold the novel together, Ellison “drafted multiple versions of the same handful of scenes, sometimes with subtle, sometimes with striking differences, while seeming never to have composed the necessary connective episodes that could have made his fiction whole.” Nevertheless, despite the admonition that one should “deny the impulse to complete and correct” (xvi) Ellison’s second novel, one feels the urgency to consider what it could have become. Ellison left us good clues. He painted a complex family portrait, one with all the breaks and heartbreaks only possible in America. Welborn McIntyre, the narrator of Book I, asks, “And isn’t a nation a larger, more intricate form of the family and thus, like most families, thronged with dark, mysterious yearnings?” (Ellison, Three Days 74). I argue that the materials published in Three Days complement, advance, and complete Ellison’s earlier theme of family, in particular the relationship between parents and their children, whose origins, histories, and ambitions mirror the state of the nation. The nation is the family writ large.

This essay regards Three Days Before the Shooting… not only as an enrichment for the enjoyment of Juneteenth (1999), erroneously labeled by some as the “second novel,” and not only as a compendium of Ellison’s first drafts and last words, but also as a work of extraordinary art, in its own right. In turn, let us accept Adam Bradley’s invitation for “collaborative readership” that this volume compels (Bradley, “Book Discussion”). We can mostly dismiss any suggestion that Ellison’s “failure to finish his sequel to Invisible Man (1947) remains one of the great mysteries—and disappointments—in the history of American Literature” (Parrish, Ralph Ellison and the Genius 423). Nor is the book “a resolution of a work that is itself unresolved” (Deahl 6). Rather, Three Days is a fulfillment of Ellison’s life work, the quest for freedom and personal identity, not only for black Americans but also for all those whose national culture has marginalized or oppressed them. If Invisible Man is a portrait of the journey of an individual seeking to know who he is, then Three Days illustrates the complexities of that identity. The familial and political identity of the tragic character, Senator Adam “Bliss” Sunraider, rests less on his genetic heredity than on the nurture of his family and the culture of his country.

Three Days tells a complex story and has a credible plot. It reveals the small beauty of Juneteenth but confirms the truth of Albert Murray’s belief that “Juneteenth … does not show the scope or the ambition of what Ralph was doing. The man was trying to write something as big as Moby-Dick!” (40). Ellison’s work concerns his deepest convictions that Americans and America are both black and white, and neither. His monument, Invisible Man, stands for all American immigrants and all second sons and daughters of America. Three Days demonstrates that fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters are neither limited nor freed by their genes in a democracy, nor are they free to be free at the expense of others’ freedoms. Ellison writes to Murray, in 1958 while writing his second novel, that “Civil rights are only the beginning” and that he was trying in “this damn book” to go beyond activism (Trading Twelves 196). He writes in his essay, “We must be aware of what is going on, because only through this will we be able to reassume that optimism so necessary for living and dealing with the many problems of this diverse pluralistic society. Democracy is a collectivity of individuals” (“Perspective of Literature” 780...