Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison Read Free Book Online

one shall be denied. An enormous task, some might say, a rash dream. Yet ours is no facile vision. Each day we suffer its anguish and its cost. It requires effort of an order to which only a great and unified nation, a nation conditioned to riding out the chaos of history as the eagle rides out the whirlwind, can arise. Therefore it is our duty to confront it with subtle understanding. Confront it with democratic passion. Confront it with tragic insight, with love and with endless good humor. We must confront it with faith and in the awareness of that age-old knowledgewhich holds that it is in the nature of the human enterprise that great nations shall not, must not, dare not evade their own mysteries but must grapple with them and live them out. They must solve their innermost dilemmas through the expenditure of great physical and spiritual effort. Yes, for great nations evolve and grow ever young in the conscious acceptance and penetration of their own most intimate secrets.
    “Thus it is that we must will to remember our defeats and divisions as we remember our triumphs and unities so that we may transcend and forget them. Thus we must forget the past. Indeed, our history records an undying, unyielding quest for youthful sages, for a newfound wisdom fired by a vibrant physicality. Thus again we must forget the past by way of freeing ourselves so that we can reassemble its untidy remnants in the interest of a more human order.
    “Oh, yes; I understand: To some this goal appears too difficult. To others, too optimistic, too unworldly—even though they would agree that we are indeed a futuristic people. Ah, but in the face of this bright and inescapable intuition, dark doubts afflict them. Dark realities inhibit their powers of decision. They succumb to the shallow, somber materiality of our bountiful power and pursue it blindly, selfishly for itself. They yearn for a debilitating and self-defeating tranquillity. They falter before the harsher necessities of action, whether that action calls for the exercise of force or charity, charity or force. And before those ever-present dilemmas requiring the exercise of charity supported by force they oscillate pathetically between olive branch and arrows. They lose their way and in their stumbling indecision they reward aggression and justify indolence. In their hands charity becomes a force of cancerous malignancy, and power a self-destructive agency that destroys themselves, their children and their neighbors.
    “Nevertheless, we must accept forthrightly that arduous wisdomwhich holds that those who reject the lessons of history, or who allow themselves to be intimidated by its rigors, are doomed to repeat its disasters. Therefore I call upon them to remember that societies are artifacts of human design and that they are man- determined. Human societies float like great spaceships between earth and sky, dependent upon both but enjoying the anguish of human will and initiative. Man is born to act, to make mistakes, and to die. This all men know. But in the graceful acceptance of his fate, and in his protracted and creative dying, man builds his monument, he structures and makes manifest his accusation of the universe. He secures his earthly gains, sets the course of the ever-receding future and makes art of his yearning.
    “So again, my friends, we become victims of history only if we fail to evolve ways of life that are more free, more youthful, more human. We are defeated only if we fail in the task of creating a total way of life which will allow each and every one of us to rise high above the site of his origins, and to soar released and ever reinvigorated in human space!”
    The Senator smiled.
    “I need not remind you that I am neither seer nor prophet,” he went on, “but history has put to us three fatal questions, has written them across our sky in accents of accusation. They are, How can the many be as one? How can the future deny the Past? And How can the light deny