"The Little Man at Chehaw Station" Today

It would not be an exaggeration to say that I have known something about the "little man at Chehaw Station" virtually all my life. When I first heard Ellison's title, some years ago now, the faintest tremor of recognition came home in the sound of "Chehaw" as that of some ancient feel of a place that I could not grasp with any degree of accuracy. But the very uncanniness of it, the obscurely veiled identity that would not come clear unless dredged up from the bottom, said to me that memory might, in fact, believe before knowing. It turns out that sometime after my third birthday, my eldest sibling, my sister Theaster, went away to college at Tuskegee Institute (as it was called then), and the train she boarded—which event marks my first trauma—the "City of New Orleans" out of Memphis's Union Station, had, among its stops, Chehaw, from which terminus she would travel by car to the campus. If the loss of my sister to adulthood registers as a first memory, as the dawning consciousness of apartness, then the lesion that inscribes it will be forever linked in my mind to travel and the radical transition that sharpens the distance between "home" and "the world." Perhaps I could say, then, that Ellison's "little man," by way of Chehaw, demarcates the border between the known and the unknown, the familiar and the distant, or the near and far, and, consequently, the intimate and the antipathetic. I would learn, precisely in time, that these apparent differences could not only coexist on parallel planes but belong to the at-oneness of any simultaneous contradictory moment. There is, then, a narrative accompaniment to my reception of Ellison's conceptual itinerary so powerfully pursued in "The Little Man at Chehaw Station," and whatever wisdom might be engendered by the former might help us to remap the stakes that are involved today in considerations of the latter—in other words, the work of Ellison's essay improves our understanding of what is now called the "identitarian." How it does so provides the work of this one.

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Fittingly, this classic essay begins with its own narrative of disappointment, youth, and the riddle of the tall tale aptly put up by the mentor to an uninitiated. ¹ To that extent, it is recalled, years later, on two counts—first, three years after the source event, when Ellison the youth is collecting signatures for his assignment with the Federal Writers' Project during the 1930s, then again, four decades later, when Ellison the elder is advancing a degree of possession concerning his destiny. As an icon of division between two temporal stops, one of them marked before Chehaw Station, the other one, after Chehaw, so that the telos of the latter date becomes, in fact, the 1977 essay, which I first read in the pages of the American Scholar, "The Little Man" participates in a degree of optimism about American democracy that is far more difficult to sustain at present. Published less than twenty years before his death in 1994, this essay may be thought of as signatural Ellison—the high moral seriousness, conceptual elegance, and, above all, the staunch conviction of American "exceptionalism." It may seem frivolous to note that Ellison uses America throughout the essay rather than the United States, but it is crucial, I believe, to the ideological context of all his essays to understand the import of America, because America, for Ellison, is quite a lot more than the nation-state entity called the United States. To get the right emphasis, we would need to recall the Democratic sublime of Whitman and Emerson and the sweeping "architectonics" of Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, for Ellison is working this awesome ground as late as 1977 and in the aftermath of the genuine crisis of leadership that breaks over the republic of the United States in the heartrending misstep of...