A Grammar of Little Manhood: Ralph Ellison and the Queer Little Man at Chehaw Station

Introduction

“It was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove,” writes Ralph Ellison in the enigmatic sentence that sets in motion the final signature essay of his career, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience.” Like much of Ellison’s writing, the autobiographical anecdote that opens his 1978 essay represents a moment of cultural collision and synthesis, this time in the form of a confounding experience that follows the young Ellison’s disappointing trumpet recitation at his audition for Tuskegee’s Dawson’s School of Music. Still stinging from the harsh criticism of his “outraged” teachers, who judged his performance as “substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion,” Ellison sought solace in the basement studio of Professor Hazel Harrison, a former student of Ferruccio Busoni and a close friend of the composer Sergey Prokofiev. Rather than receiving the words of comfort that he expected from the cosmopolitan piano teacher who regularly called him “baby,” the young Ellison was met with a rejoinder concerning the inevitable intertwining of classical and vernacular influences that produce the distinctive characteristics of American artistic expression.

A study in pedagogical patience in which the teacher responds to what Ellison calls “my rather adolescent complaint,” the oft-cited passage unfolds as follows:

“But, baby,” she said, “in this country you must always prepare yourself to play your very best wherever you are, and on all occasions.”

“But everybody tells you that,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, “but there’s more to it than you’re usually told. Of course you’ve always been taught to do your best, look your best, be your best. You’ve been told such things all your life. But now you’re becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there’s something more involved.”

Watching me closely, she paused. “Are you ready to listen?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be the little man behind the stove.”

“A what?”

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”

(Ellison 4)

At first, the young Ellison is confused by Harrison’s highly allusive introduction of the figure of the little man: “So, I thought, you ask for sympathy and you get a riddle” (5). Moreover, Harrison’s emphasis on the “classics” and “tradition” appeared to Ellison to redouble the critique leveled at him at his audition, where his improvisational performance was viewed as an exercise in musical showmanship rather than a diligent and learned execution of the music as it was written. But as the years passed by, Ellison began to understand that by situating the little man at the crossroads of nearby Chehaw Station—an out-of-the-way whistlestop that functions as a point of arrival and departure for a “motley mixture of people” with “a wide variety of tastes and styles of living” (15)—Harrison was subtly schooling him in the rigorous demands involved in mastering both vernacular and classical forms that she deemed necessary for a mature performance and interpretation of the complexity of American artistic practices. Furthermore, Ellison suggests, Harrison’s words of wisdom eventually allowed him to understand the ways in which an aspiring artist must learn to appreciate the heterogeneity of the American audience and what he calls the “electrifying and creative collaboration between a work of art and its audience” that produces the peculiarly American resonance of a given work of art. It is only by reaching an understanding of these lessons that the little man ultimately comes to symbolize, for Ellison, “nothing less than the enigma of aesthetic communication in...