An Integrative Vernacular: Ellison, Dante, and Social Cohesion in the Post-Civil Rights Era

This article considers Ralph Ellison’s “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” in the context of his other post-Civil Rights Era writings. “Little Man,” is generally read as an optimistic assessment of the “integrative, vernacular note” of American experience, but in fact it is a more complex record of Ellison’s thinking. The aesthetic and political stakes of Ellison’s Cold-War-influenced assessment of Black Nationalism and social cohesion in the 1970s, I argue, are crystallized in the Inferno-esque coal-heavers’ vignette that concludes “Little Man.” By invoking Dante’s tenth canto, Ellison’s essay connects the melancholic present with the problematic ideological legacies of the Cold War.