Reading Redness: Politics and Audience in Ralph Ellison's Early Short Fiction

Reading Redness: Politics and Audience in Ralph Ellison's Early Short Fiction Barbara Foley With the death of Ralph Ellison in April 1994 and the recent publication of his posthumous—and long-awaited—second novel, Juneteenth, the curve of the career of the author of Invisible Man would now appear to be complete . Although the version of Juneteenth produced by John Callahan, Ellison 's literary executor, promises to be the topic of continuing controversy —particularly when the entire Ellison archive becomes available to the public—the novelist's oeuvre now exists in its totality, ready to provide grist for many a critical mill.1 Much of the coming wave of revisionary scholarship will no doubt consider Juneteenth as the endpoint of a lifelong trajectory. What should not be overlooked, however, is the new light that the opening archive sheds on the early stages of Ellison's writerly— and, I shall argue, political—experience. Most of those who have written on Ellison have assumed that the novelist's apprenticeship occurred within the seven years during which he was working on Invisible Man. Among those relatively few critics who have bothered to read any of Ellison's early fiction, the near-unanimous opinion has been that, even though the quasi-surrealist tales "King of the Bingo Game" and "Flying Home" and some of the early Buster and Riley stories manifested Ellison's predilecJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 29.3 (Fall 1999): 323-339. Copyright © 1999 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 324 JNT tion for riffing in the vernacular, the novelist of the pre-Invisible Man years was for the most part patiently awaiting emergence from the chrysalis of his own genius. Such overtly leftist tales as "Slick Gonna Learn," published in Direction in 1939, and "The Birthmark," published in the New Masses in 1940, have generally been passed over in silence or treated as embarrassing testaments to Ellison's youthful—but, thankfully, short-lived—flirtation with leftist politics. With the exception of a few pieces on Richard Wright and other black writers, moreover, Ellison's journalism of the late 1930s and early 1940s—much of it expressly proCommunist —has been, again, either ignored or explained away as "propaganda " that Ellison wrote largely for money. Ellison's own comments on his early work did little to dispel these notions (1). Callahan's discovery beneath the deceased writer's dining room table of a folder marked "Early Stories," however, and his subsequent 1996 publication of several of these stories, require that we reimagine the early Ellison, as both writer and political being.2 In addition, several letters released by Callahan for publication in the April 1999 New Republic, especially when coupled with some of Ellison's late 1930 letters to Wright, reveal that the young Ellison was quite forthright in his advocacy of communism. He was "disgusted . . . with the whole system [that] offers a poor person practically nothing but work for a low wage from birth to death," Ellison wrote to his mother in August 1937. "I wish we could live [in Russia]," where the people "got tired of seeing the rich have everything and the poor nothing and are building a new system" (Callahan "American" 36). Moreover, the drafts of Invisible Man—currently the only part of the Ellison archive open without restriction to the public— suggest that Ellison's original conception of the Brotherhood (unmistakeably the Communist Party of the United States [CPUSA], despite Ellison's later demurrals) was considerably less hostile than the portrait of red perfidy appearing in the published version of the novel. The Brotherhood characters are much less stereotypical; the hero has a love affair with a young white woman in the brotherhood; and Mary Rambo's kitchen, rather than figuring as a zone of migrant consciousness unreachable by the presumably arid theorizing of of the Brotherhood, is a site of discussion and debate over the politics of multiracial proletarian unity (and even Picasso -esque cubism) (see especially "Brotherhood," "Louise," and "Leroy's Journal," Box 49, Ellison Papers). Although Ellison himself was Reading Redness 325 apparently complicit in the McCarthy-era project of portraying the author of Invisible Man as a largely self-generated being, with few...