In Washington, D.C., in the 1950s, Adam Sunraider, a race-baiting senator from New England, is mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet while making a speech on the Senate floor. To the shock of all who think they know him, Sunraider calls out from his deathbed for Alonzo Hickman, an old Black minister, to be brought to his side. The reverend is summoned; the two are left alone. "Tell me what happened while there's still time," demands the dying Sunraider. Out of their conversation, and the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been borne in silence for many long years, a story emerges. Senator Sunraider, once known as Bliss, was raised by Reverend Hickman in a Black community steeped in religion and music (not unlike Ralph Ellison's own childhood home) and was brought up to be a preaching prodigy in a joyful Black Baptist ministry that traveled throughout the South and the Southwest. Together one last time, the two men retrace the course of their shared life in an "anguished attempt," Ellison once put it, "to arrive at the true shape and substance of a sundered past and its meaning." In the end, the two men confront their most painful memories, memories that hold the key to understanding the mysteries of kinship and race that bind them, and to the senator's confronting how deeply estranged he had become from his true identity.