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Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction
College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A
As Ellison claims in "The Great Migration," black trade unionism was developed by those who "pursu[ed] their vision despite the antipathy of some white unionists and bosses alike" (1941a, 24). "The Black Ball" dramatizes the awakening of a union vision that develops despite the heritage of racism within the union movement because some organizers and workers were able to see beyond racial division. One of the central themes of the stories of Flying Home is cross-racial identification, and in this respect, the collection reflects the politics of the popular front, which was the only widespread movement of both whites and blacks against racism between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement of the postwar years. However, "The Black Ball" also prefigures Ellison's later belief in the American dream despite the realities of racism, realities which he could describe in militant tones as late as 1953, when he said: "You might fight with a land, but you come to respect it and to love it. Simply because certain groups in this country tell me, `Well, you don't belong here; you are just being tolerated" I say, `To hell with you"'(Qtd. in Girson 1953, 49). These words, from an interview not often quoted, indicate the complexity of Ellison's response to America, which has too often been stereotyped as a politics of accommodation.
The letters from the 1950s between Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray-- recently published as Trading Twelves-contain a number of similar examples that reveal the extent of Ellison's outrage at racial segregation. However, those letters contain no examples of the earlier working class militancy demonstrated by "The Black Ball" and the other unpublished stories. By the 1950s, Ellison's anger was directed at racial issues, in the years in which a new movement for racial justice emerged in an America where a radical class analysis had become taboo.
However, class is not ignored in Ellison's later fiction-it remains part of the latent content of Ellison's fiction. The story "Flying Home" introduces the theme of the young, ignorant, and educated African-American (Todd) who considers himself above the wise, knowing, but apparently ignorant older working class man (Jefferson), whose knowledge comes from familiarity with life as interpreted in the African-American vernacular. This theme is a familiar one to readers of Invisible Man, as the Invisible Man's youthful, educated ignorance is repeatedly contrasted to the knowledge of older individuals such as the grandfather, Trueblood, the Vet at the Golden Day, Brother Tarp, Mary, or the man with the blueprints who identifies himself as "Peter Wheatstraw" (for an explanation of the vernacular connotations of the name, see Sundquist 1995, 123-24 ). In each of these instances, it is an AfricanAmerican working class individual who possesses knowledge (the Vet, who was once a physician, would be an exception but he has fallen in social class).
Similarly, even Ellison's well-known essay, "The Little Man at Chelaw Station," which suggests the importance of the artist performing the best allowed by his or her craft in every instance, is a declaration of the democratic equality of art across boundaries of race and class as well as of the importance of artistic craft. For the essay indicates that even in the most obscure, rundown setting inhabited by the rural poor, the artist might encounter someone who knows the rules of art, and the difference between a good performance and a poor one. The essay ends with a description of the young Ellison's astonishment, when circulating a petition during the Depression, at an encounter with four Black workers in arguing noisily behind the door of a ghetto tenement: "Impossible as it seemed, these foulmouthed black workingmen were locked in verbal combat over which of two Metropolitan Opera divas was the superior soprano" (1995, 516). Significantly, they are skeptical of the young Ellison's politics, but sign his petition anyway, saying: "`signing this piece of paper won't do no good, but since Home here is a musician, it won't do no harm to help him out. Let's go along with him.'" (518).
