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  • Opening Commentsfrom a video address to those attending Ralph Ellison at 100: A Centennial Symposium, March 8, 2014, Oklahoma City, OK
  • John F. Callahan (bio)

Okla humma: Choctaw for red people.

Sooner State, named in honor of those non-Native settlers, many from states of the former Confederacy, who staked their claims to the choicest parcels of land before the date stipulated by law yet kept the land in violation of the U.S. Congress’s Appropriations Act of 1889.

November 16, 1907: Oklahoma became the 46th state in the Union. Its residents were nicknamed Okies, their lives subject to the severe weather of the Interior Highlands—from savage blizzards to raging floods to parching drought.

April 1910: Lewis Ellison and Ida Milsap Ellison, newly married, moved from Abbeville, South Carolina, where the Alfred Ellison clan had been slaves, to Oklahoma City.

March 1, 1913: The Ellisons’ first-born entered the world named Ralph Waldo Ellison by his proud father . . .

My name is John Callahan. I am Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, recording these remarks in October, several months before this MELUS conference, with its important sessions on Ralph Ellison and his work, will have been called to [End Page 153] order here at Oklahoma City University. Even in absentia and before the fact it is an honor to welcome you and wish you Godspeed, particularly during your time in Oklahoma.

As Ralph’s friend for the last seventeen years of his life, I learned—over the dinner table with him and Fanny at 730 Riverside Drive, on the edge of Harlem—of the fierce pride he took in being an Oklahoman. Close behind his inviolable identity as an American and an African American was his allegiance to his experience as a boy and a young man in this complex place. He called Oklahoma a dream world, and he wasn’t kidding. As a boy in the 1920s, Ellison and his young black pals dreamed of becoming Renaissance men. Their models, he was quick to point out, were not “judges and ministers, legislators and governors” in Jim Crow Oklahoma; they were jazzmen. “Like Huck,” he recounts, “we observed, we judged, we imitated and evaded as we could the dullness, corruption and blindness of ‘civilization.’” And “it was no more incongruous,” he wrote later, “in this land of incongruities, for young Negro Oklahomans to project themselves as Renaissance men than for white Mississippians to see themselves as ancient Greeks or noblemen out of Sir Walter Scott.”1

Ellison’s fluid, contingent ideal resembles his developing idea of the Territory as “an ideal place, ever to be sought, ever to be missed but always there” (from Ellison’s inscription in my copy of Going to the Territory). After the success of Invisible Man, he returned to Oklahoma City in 1953 for the first time since the summer of ‘35, and from there wrote Albert Murray that the old territory’s “still a town where the eyes have space in which to travel, and those freights still making up in the yard sound as good to me as ever they did when I lay on a pallet in the moon-drenched kitchen door and listened and dreamed of the time when I would leave and see the world.”2 On that pallet in the long gone neighborhood of Deep Deuce four blocks from Slaughter’s dance hall, young Ralph Ellison heard Jimmy Rushing sing the blues and Oran “Hot Lips” Page, Lester Young, and Count Basie “upset the entire Negro section of the town” as they played and blew their horns into the night.3

Deep Deuce is long gone—“redeveloped” is the word city fathers use—but if you wander through it tonight at twilight, you may hear Ralph’s ghost communing with the sighing horns of jazzmen and the rusty wheels of an old freight shrieking to a stop in the yards.

Being in Oklahoma earlier in this year of the Ellison centennial and imagining you there now, I want to say a few words about the way that Ralph Ellison’s life and achievement have become more and more important in the twenty years that have intervened since...

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