Ralph Ellison, Finished and Unfinished: Aesthetic Achievements and Political Legacies

On May 14, 1951, Ralph Ellison wrote his friend, Albert Murray, to alert him that a prodigious literary harvest had been sowed and would soon be reaped. "You are hereby warned," Ellison jibed, "that I have dropped the shuck."¹ "The shuck" was Invisible Man, which Ellison had turned over to his publisher after seven years of labor. As recent critical work on Ellison attests, more than fifty years later its yield remains bountiful. A few months earlier, when he hoped but was not sure that he was close to finishing, Ellison identified for Murray one of his intentions as a writer. Referring to a review he had written of recent movies, Ellison thanked Murray for sharing it with the students he was then teaching at Tuskegee: "Thanks very much for seeing to it that a few Negroes read my reviews; I get the feeling that most times the stuff is seen only by whites and that, I'm afraid, doesn't mean much in the long run" (7). A little over a year later, after Invisible Man had become the toast of the publishing industry and had been named the winner of the National Book Award, Ellison shared with Murray an especially perceptive critical response he received from one he identifies only as "ole Eubanks," a friend, Tuskegee graduate, and manager of the food service at the Harlem YMCA where Ellison had stayed when he first came to New York in 1936. "I'm not lying, I swear," Ellison assures Murray, "Eubanks says to me, 'Ellison, you know you're a hell of a nigguh? This goddamn stuff is History, man. It's history! You read this shit one time and you get to thinking about it and you go back, and damn if you don't find something else. You got to dig that stuff man, 'cause it's loaded!'" (40).

In 1998, when the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Leon F. Litwack published his history of the Jim Crow era, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, he substantiated the claim of "ole Eubanks" by situating Ellison's work as the paradigm for understanding what happened to African Americans during the period between the Civil War and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), or the legal end to segregation. "Nowhere is the paradox of black life in the U.S. more graphically revealed," Litwack states at his book's outset, "than in Ralph Ellison's portrayal of the black odyssey in Invisible Man."² The progress that Ellison's protagonist suffers obligates him at "every step" to "perform the rituals expected of him and play the roles defined by whites, all of them equally dehumanizing, equally degrading, equally unrewarding. For thousands and thousands of Southern black men and women, this odyssey summed up the entirety of their lives" (xiii). Early in Invisible Man, Ellison's narrator-protagonist confides to the uncertain reader that he is "no freak of nature, nor of history," but that "I was in cards, other things having been equal (or unequal) eighty-five years ago."³ Ellison's narrator is, in a sense, the end point of Litwack's history, just as Litwack's history is a version of Ellison's novel. Each of them, novelist and historian, presumes to tell the story of history's "transitory ones," as Invisible Man names them, "birds of passage who were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of sound; of nature too ambiguous for the most ambiguous of words, and too distant from the centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical documents" (432). Such a transitory one is "ole Eubanks," and to...