Word: hickman
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...most significant voices are those dedicated to memory and to the preservation and interpretation of experience—whether through reporting, storytelling, preaching, or even prophecy. McIntyre’s proclamation stands as a challenge to an entire nation to, in the words of jazzman-turned-preacher Alonzo Hickman, “give melodic coherence to a progression of dissonant chords...
From these many voices, two primary characters emerge to drive the dialogue. Reverend Hickman is “God’s Trombone,” a powerful preacher who discovers the same joy in the vigor and spirituality of his preaching as he had in making “heartfelt patterns of soul-felt sound” on his trombone. Unlike the well-defined character of Hickman, white senator Adam Sunraider—originally named “Bliss” by Hickman, his former foster parent—eludes definition. Little of what Ellison left behind provides...
...contains many story lines, characters, and flashbacks, the plot can often lack cohesion, especially without the connections Ellison would presumably have made between characters and episodes. Trippy visions of talking buzzards and hitching-post men have startling force but seem disconnected from the central story line, and some of Hickman and Sunraider’s extended flashback sequences stall without a strong narrative arc to support them. Nevertheless, the intrigue of these two characters and the vividness of their stories—however disjointed they may be—is more than enough to make “Three Days?...
...particularly memorable episode, Hickman leads his church group to the Lincoln Memorial. Looking up into Lincoln’s eyes with “their sad revelation of what it means to be a man of vulnerable heart and floundering mind who found clinging to an elusive ideal more desirable than all the pride and glory of great wealth and great armies,” Hickman exclaims to himself, ”Yes! And with all I know about the things you had to do to be you and remain yourself?...
...final sequences of Ellison’s narrative, which occur early on in his manuscript, leave Sunraider facing not hopelessness but uncertainty. Bliss lies in critical condition but is still alive, with Hickman helping him finally retrace the complexity of his muddled experience. Hickman’s advice to Bliss is equally applicable to Ellison’s unfinished novel: “Somewhere through all the falseness and the forgetting,” Hickman urges, “there is something solid and good...