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Writer on the left: Class and race in Ellison's early fiction
College Literature, Fall 2002 by Mazurek, Raymond A
But the introduction by Callahan to the group of six letters published in The New Republic (where the above appeared) says nothing about Ellison's radical roots in the 1930s, only mentioning his "earnest, unguarded sense of the injustice of racism in the new universe of NewYork" (Calahan, 1999, 34). It is as if Ellison finds these ideas on his own in the 1930s, outside a social context. As Foley also suggests, Callahan has read the early stories from the ideological perspective of the later Ellison, ignoring their original context (1999, 336). And the review article by Shelby Steele that accompanies these letters discusses Ellison's work as one that consistently runs counter to the protest tradition. Steele observes his own initial reluctance to read Invisible Man in the 1960s because the novel was not accepted by young militants; nevertheless, Steele notes that Ellison's work, which he initially read "in the late 60s a little on the sly ... brought me the fullest understanding that I was ever given of the black world around me" (1999, 28). Steele offers a sharp dichotomy between the protest tradition represented by Richard Wright and some novels by James Baldwin (Another Country) and Toni Morrison (Beloved), and Ellison's work, which focuses not on the oppressive facts of racism but on the abilities of blacks, as individuals and possessors of a rich cultural tradition, to survive and rise above racism. While this attack on the protest tradition is not new, what is surprising is that Flying Home is presented as evidence that Ellison was outside that tradition from the beginning in his focus on strong individuals for whom racism was not an absolute determinism in their lives. Steele notes: "now that a collection of his apprentice stories, Flying Home, has been released, it seems clear that for many he [Ellison] still represents the wrong kind of militancy" (27). In Steele's reading, the union in "The Black Ball" is an example of"relief from Racist contingencies in America's ideal of democratic brotherhood" (32)-but there is no discussion of the popular front context of this story. Although the Depression is briefly mentioned in Steele's discussion of "I Did Not Know Their Names," this story too is one in which "democracy prevails" (32). Steele gives the greatest focus to the "Blues Resolution" of"The King of the Bingo Game" and "Flying Home," stories which are not posthumously published and which prefigure Ellison's later work, and he leaves out any discussion of"A Party Down at the Square," which would most directly challenge his discussion of the protest tradition.
Perhaps the strongest of the previously unpublished stories in Flying Home, "A Party Down at the Square" is the lynching story Ellison never published in his lifetime, and it illustrates Ellison's adeptness at writing in the protest traditions of the thirties. As Denning notes, the movement against lynching and labor repression was a central part of popular front political culture; in fact, he claims that the International Labor Defense, founded in 1925 to defend Sacco and Vanzetti and most famous for its actions on behalf of the Scottsboro Nine, is "the earliest popular front political organization" (1998, 13). In Ellison's Popular Front criticism of the 1930s and early 1940s, there are a number of references to lynching. In "A Congress That Jim Crow Did Not Attend," Ellison notes the prominence of anti-lynching buttons at the Negro Congress, and in a review of Theodore Ward's play Big White Fog published in New Masses in 1940, Ellison makes clear that he considers the resistance against lynching formative of black struggle. He notes that the period Ward's play covers, from World War One to the early 1930s, "was a time when, out of the lynching and rioting which proceeded and ended the war, the Negro people were seeking to devise new means of struggle" (1940,22). Those new means of struggle the young Ellison has in mind are, first, the impractical but significant nationalism of the Garvey movement and second, the "unity of black and white forces" (22) in the Communist led resistance to eviction, both of which Ward dramatizes.
