Juneteenth

Assembled posthumously from decades of Ralph Ellison's manuscript pages, Juneteenth follows Senator Adam Sunraider, shot on the Senate floor, who calls in his final hours for Alonzo Hickman, an aging Black minister from his past. As the two men trade memories in the hospital, a hidden history of racial passing, identity, and inheritance emerges beneath Sunraider's public persona.

Ellison, author of Invisible Man, uses the full range of American vernacular — sermon, political rhetoric, jazz rhythm — to build a meditation on race and self-invention that took him decades to write and was left unfinished at his death.