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

College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A

In his reading of Ellison's work in terms of the African-American vernacular, Baker has articulated what is perhaps the dominant trend in contemporary Ellison criticism. However, it is worth emphasizing that for Baker, the vernacular is thoroughly embedded in issues of class, although the relationship of those issues to political conflict is less overt than is the case with much Marxist criticism. With Baker, I would argue that class politics are part of the ideological subtext of Ellison's later work, even while his explicit position rejected the working class militancy of the popular front and became a celebration of American democracy. Like Denning and Foley, Baker provides a reading of Ellison's work that associates it with working-class traditions, traditions that are downplayed by Ellison's literary executor, John F Callahan.

Flying Home and Other Stories

In his "Introduction" to Flying Home and Other Stories, Callahan described how the destitute young Ralph Ellison started to write seriously in Dayton, Ohio, in 1937, after the death of his mother. Yet although Callahan notes that Ellison was a "self-described young radical" (1996, xiii), the story he tells of the Ralph Ellison of the Depression years is the familiar one of the "apprentice slowly mastering his craft" (xv).There is more emphasis on the anomaly of Ellison's important friendship with the black attorney William 0. Stokes, a black Republican who aids Ellison in allowing him to sleep and work in his law office, than there is on Ellison's connection with thirties' radicalism. And Callahan's reading of the stories is similarly formalistic. He notes the influence of Hemingway in Ellison's lynching story, "A Party Down at The Square," which Ellison narrates from the point of view of a young white boy who tells the story "from the perspective of someone without a moral point of view" (xxvi). But Callahan does not explore the question of why this story, which had already become widely known a few short years after being discovered, remained unpublished for so long, or how it connects with the radical traditions of the thirties. When he discusses the social ideas of Ellison's early stories, he characteristically describes them in terms of "Ellison's (and his characters') hunger for democratic equality" (xxviii), using the language that the later Ellison would choose, rather than teasing out the stories' references to an earlier ideological context.

The order in which Callahan has placed the stories implies the gradual development of Ellison's style and the way the stories prefigure Invisible Man. The volume opens with "A Party Down at the Square" and closes with the previously published "King of the Bingo Game,""In a Strange Country," and "Flying Home"-two of which ("Bingo Game" and "Flying Home") are well-known stories which suggest the outrageousness and symbolic complexity of Invisible Man. The theme of development is further emphasized by the emphasis on childhood and youth in the early stories. "A Party Down at the Square," a white boy's initiation into racist violence, is followed by the previously unpublished "Boy on a Train," a short autobiographical story in which a young boy encounters racism when traveling with his little brother and his recently widowed mother. These are followed by four previously published stories about the young black boys Buster and Riley, two of which ("Mr. Toussaint" and "Afternoon") contain political celebrations of black culture and indictments of racism. Themes of childhood and young adolescence in a racist society, and the independence and toughness through which black youth survive, are thus woven through the first half of Flying Home. These are followed by four previously unpublished stories of young African-American adults in the 1930s: "Hymie's Bull,""I Did Not Learn Their Names," "A Hard Time Keeping Up," and "The Black Ball."Along with "A Party Down at the Square" and the relatively unknown "In A Strange Country," these stories might be counted among the best proletarian fiction of their era. All of them sound a more radical political note than is usually associated with Ellison. Two of them, "Hymie's Bull" and "I Did Not Learn Their Names," present the violence, racism, and moments of interracial bonding found among the destitute black and white hobos riding the rails. "A Hard Time Keeping Up," a story in which humor interrupts the threat of violence, recounts the everyday racism encountered by railroad porters in Chicago. Finally, "The Black Ball," one of the most complex of the early stories, presents union solidarity as a viable hope despite the distrust brought on by years of racism.