Content provided in partnership with
Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction
College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A
While the young narrator experiences only an inarticulate revulsion against lynching, "A Party Down at the Square" provides a thorough critique of lynching and the attitudes that enabled it. My students are sometimes put off by the story's repeated use of the word "nigger," which occurs forty-six times in a text that is only around 2800 words long. The repeated use of the N-word serves to heighten awareness of the casual way in which the black man is dehumanized in the cultural ideology that the boy has unquestioningly adopted from his elders. However, the black man who is tortured is not merely a passive victim. The narrator repeatedly admires his toughness and, implicitly, recognizes something of his shared humanity The man's movement after the mob "thought he was dead" (Ellison, 1996, 9) underlines the length of the agony and torture, as the narrator observes that
- More Articles of Interest
- Flying Home and Other Stories. - Review - book reviews
- The critical response to Ralph Ellison. - book review
- Flying Home and Other Stories. - book reviews
- John F. Callahan, ed. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Casebook
- Invisible Man and African American radicalism in World War II
the fire had burned the ropes they had tied him with, and he started jumping and kicking around like he was blind, and you could smell his skin burning. He kicked so hard that the platform, which was burning too, fell in, and he rolled out of the fire at my feet. I jumped back so he wouldn't get on me. I'll never forget it. Every time I eat barbecue I'll remember that nigger. His back was just like a barbecued hog. I could see the prints from his ribs where they start around from his backbone and curve down and around. (Ellison 1996, 11)
In addition to providing graphic detail, Ellison's story emphasizes the way racist violence was justified by a kind of fascist version of American patriotism.When the man being burned alive asks, "`Will somebody please cut my throat like a Christian,"' one of the leaders of the mob replies, "`Sorry, but ain't no Christians around tonight. Ain't no Jew-boys neither. We're just one hundred percent Americans"' (8).
Ellison provides some of the now familiar details about lynching that underline its brutality: the boy observes at least thirty-five women in the mob, and one of them scratches his face at the end as she crowds close to see. After the "party" is over, one of the most active members of the mob, who "they plan to run for sheriff" (Ellison, 1996, 9), shows the boy pieces of the dead man's finger bones and laughs. But Ellison also emphasizes the irony of the lynching by interrupting the action. About one fourth into the story, the boy announces: "Then it happened" (5). An airplane appears overhead, "like the roar of a cyclone blowing up from the gulf" (5), and captures the attention of everyone but the tortured victim.The plane, confused by the light of the fire in the town's square and lost in the storm, almost crashes and scrapes the electric wires with its landing gear. The live wires are blown about in the wind and a large part of the crowd runs in terror. One woman is electrocuted and some women, so eager to see a black man burned alive, faint at the sight of one of their own fatally burned by electricity. The sheriff and his men, obviously on hand to sanction the illegal killing of the death squad, turn the people back from the body of the woman who was burned "almost as black as the nigger" (7). This interruption of the action turns the reader's attention from the torture and suggests a momentary hope that the man might be saved. Characteristically, Ellison chooses an aircraft and flight as a symbol of escape, echoing the folk tales in which slaves fly back to freedom and prefiguring his own use of flight as a symbol in the well-known story with which Callahan ends the volume, "Flying Home."(Interestingly, the annoyingly omnipresent word "nigger" is absent for more than 700 words, or about one fourth of the story, as the reader's attention is shifted away from the ritual torture and toward possible hope, or at least toward the poetic justice in which one member of the mob dies.)
