Juneteenth
A boy raised by a black man has transformed into the most racist Senator in Congress. A conversation with the man who raised him provides insight into just how much he has changed himself when he is even moved to inquire whether Juneteenth is even commemorated anymore:
“Words of the Emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of the Juneteenth celebration, his mind on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”
Once a Jazzman
The black man who raised Bliss underwent a transformation of his own, albeit not one quite as radical. Alonzo Zuber Hickman was a trombone-playing jazz musician until he felt the call of god and became a preacher. Still, the jazzman never quite leaves and so he took on a metaphorical nickname:
“Tall and broad and of an easy dignity, this was the Reverend A.Z. Hickman—better known, as one of the old ladies proudly informed the Senator’s secretary, as `God’s Trombone.’”
Memories of Daddy Hickman
The novel is very stylistic, featuring passages that run in and out of the consciousness of characters. The past and present shift uneasily back and forth, made more treacherous by the malleable identities of its two main characters:
“Yes, the Senator, though, that was how it began, and that was Hickman. When he laughed his belly shook like a Santa Claus. A great kettledrum of deep laughter. Huge, tall, slow-moving. Like a carriage of state in ceremonial parade on the platform, then a man of words evoking action.”
Density
This can be tough-going for the novice. The language is at times very dense and reaches an almost hallucinatory intensity as the author penetrates deeply into the consciousness of his characters:
“And I had sat dizzy with he vastness of the action and the scale of the characters and the dimensions of the emotions and responses, had seen laughs so large and villainous with such rotting tombstone teeth in mouths so broad and cavernous that they seemed to yawn wellhole-wide and threaten to gulp the whole audience into their traps of hilarious maliciousness.”
Simplicity
Of course, not all the use of metaphor is quite as dazzling and complex. Authors love the metaphor because they can make complicated description so much simpler. Especially when used to reveal the complexities of emotion:
“Suddenly the Senator’s expression was that of a small boy caught in mischief.”
