Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A

Having taught "A Party Down at the Square" in five classes over the past several years, I can attest that it still has a powerful impact upon many readers. However, its quality underlines the question, why did Ellison refrain from publishing this story? Several explanations suggest themselves, including Ellison's well-known perfectionism and aesthetic views. As Jerry Watts has suggested, Ellison eventually developed an aesthetic philosophy that emphasized the heroic work of the individual artist struggling with craft, a point of view that made him reluctant to present African-Americans as victims (1994). This emphasis on the heroic individual may have contributed to his reluctance to publish a lynching story (although the black victim of"A Party Down at the Square" is not entirely passive). However, another possibility is that this story was too deeply embedded in the radicalism he had rejected by the early 1950s for his taste. Having left the story unpublished, for whatever reason, in the 1940s, Ellison may have hesitated to publish a story that reflected his radical commitments by the time the McCarthy era had gotten into full swing and he seemed eager to de-emphasize his radical past. Callahan dates the unpublished stories as having been written from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. This would indicate that they were written during the years when Ellison was a frequent contributor to the New Masses and (briefly) managing editor of the Negro Quarterly. "A Party Down at the Square" may have been left unpublished because its suggestion of a radical analysis of race and class no longer fit Ellison's ideas in the early years of the Cold War. Indeed, the suggestion that working-class whites as well as blacks lose power in the process of scapegoating blacks through lynching is remarkable in a story so brutally explicit about lynching's horrors.

"Boy on a Train," which follows "A Party Down at the Square," is also about the initiation of a child to racism. In this case, it is a black child of perhaps five or six years who is traveling on a train with his mother and baby brother after the father has died and the family needs to move. The family is uncomfortable in the baggage car reserved for African-Americans, where the soot from the engine makes it impossible to open the windows. The car is cluttered with baggage, a casket that is being transported, and the candy, fruit, and magazines that the butcher sells to white passengers. Each time he comes back for more merchandise, "the little boy hoped he would give them a piece of candy; after all, he had so much, and Mama didn't have any nickels to give them. But he never did" (Ellison, 1996, 13). Meanwhile, the mother is feeling outraged that the man had tried to molest her when they first boarded the train. But her son is unaware of the butcher's actions. He looks with envy at a little white boy "dressed like the little kids you see in moving pictures" (15) who boards the train holding a little dog and wonders if he had a bicycle. Here, and when the train stops and some white men get on to remove the casket, the boy shows the beginnings of an awareness of racial difference: "Why, he wondered, did white folks stare at you that way" (16)?