"The Birthmark" … displays, I think, enough of Wright's influence—as well as Hemingway's—to justify some concern on Wright's part that Ellison might be able to steal his thunder, in time. In the story, a black man and his sister have been brought to the scene of an alleged auto accident to identify the body of their brother; they discover, when they attempt to find an identifying birthmark below the navel, that he has been lynched and castrated. Outraged but helpless, they must return home and accept the lie that Willie was hit by a car, because, as the white policeman puts it, "We don't allow no lynching round here no more."

Like a Hemingway story, "The Birthmark" is immediate and dramatic; it begins with Matt and Clara emerging from the police car to approach Willie's body. Its power is developed through the cumulative effect of the dialog, rather than through the sparse interpretive commentary of the narrator. But the dialog is dialectal rather than idiomatic; the particularities of black Southern speech are indicated orthographically. This is, of course, Wright's style and not Hemingway's—or Ellison's as we have become familiar with it in later work.

Like Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home," Ellison's story draws a strong contrast between the summer calm of nature—"the green stretch of field fringed with pine trees" and "the pine needle covered ground" where Willie's body lies—and the human violence and hatred which brings brother and sister, white man and black man to this place. But Ellison's is a very brief tale, without the extensiveness of one of Wright's long tales. And Ellison's hero is frustrated, entirely stalemated by the cynical insistence of the white police that Willie was not lynched because lynchings don't happen there anymore. (p. 147)

Ellison's insight into the social conditions that block Matt's impulse to wrench the gun from the white man's hand is more cynical than Wright's. In the stories of Uncle Tom's Children, as well as in "Silt," white economic power is an important aspect of the characters' sense of frustration. Nature is indifferent. The flood in "Silt" has ruined all the land; it is Tom's economic servitude to Burgess that makes the flood almost "too hard" to bear. But in Ellison's story, as Matt and Clara alight from the police car, nature gives the reader a foresight of its complicity: "two large birds circled slowly, black shapes against the still blue sky." And it is the white policeman who interprets the sign, giving it its proper name: "'Them damned buzzards,' he said." The narrator and the reader are thus let in on the tragic complexity of the experience in store for Matt and Clara. (pp. 147-48)

The rapid development in the direction that has since become characteristic of his work—a style and structural habits closely related to patterns of speech and behavior—can be traced in the three stories which followed these earliest efforts.

["Afternoon"] is almost without formal structure. It follows the two young boys, Buster and Riley, through what seems a typical pre-adolescent day…. The story, for all the effectiveness of its rhetoric, has no dramatic center, nor organizing narrative idea. Its movement is manipulated, rhetorically, by the narrator, who otherwise does not have a presence in the story. Despite the references to Jack Johnson and to other, more general folkloristic elements, Ellison does not shape the narration so as to transcend the typicalness of the boys' daily experience. "Afternoon" is a rhetorically sophisticated "slice-of-life" fiction, and has a lot in common with the pastoral opening of Wright's "Big Boy Leaves Home." But Wright's adolescent's idyll is a contrast to the stark reality of racial violence, while Ellison's seems nostalgic, self-contained, rather pointless.

["Mister Toussan"] is a brilliant exercise in brevity. Buster and Riley demonstrate the uses of the imagination as each tells his creative version of Mr. Toussan—Toussaint L'Ouverture utterly transformed by hearsay, ignorance and projection—and his rejection of Napoleon. The boys quite consciously create Mr. Toussan's dismissal of the oppressive whites, building narrative details in the dialogical manner of formulaic sermonizing or teaching. After Buster has told his version, with Riley chorusing good lines, asking questions and adding details, he begins his version with "Come on, watch me do it now." The imagination in the act of performance is what matters; the boys are left at the end of their flight of fancy wondering why such "good stories" are not "in the books." The story as performance event, which seems to be Ellison's main point here, is structurally underlined by Ellison's virtuosic closure…. Riley closes the story-telling with a formulaic closure to which Buster cannot object, for it is part of the rules of performance events that they not be artificially prolonged. When the rhythm and spirit are exhausted, the story-telling ends.

      "Aw come on man," interrupted Buster.
      "Let's go play in the alley…."
                       And that's the way …
      "Maybe we can slip around and get some
      cherries," Buster went on.
                       … the story ends, chanted
      Riley.

Thus both the boys' and the author's performances end simultaneously. Ellison structurally reiterates his theme. In this story he found his voice and struck a balance between an expressive narrative presence and a dramatic narrative structure. The narration contains an example of storytelling which is in itself a commentary on the "truth," the validity and usefulness of narration. In affirming the meaning of narration as an act of the imagination in its own right, Ellison took a major step away from Wright's ideological aesthetic.

The third Buster and Riley story, "That I Had the Wings,"… is a more thoroughly developed but more conventional fiction than "Mr. Toussan." Here the boys' imaginative play gets them into trouble while revealing to the reader their real yearning for escape from the confining supervision of the adult world. Riley is scolded by his Aunt Kate for singing a song about being "President of these United States" and swinging on the White House gates, for not only does the boy's song take the Lord's name in vain, it also voices dangerous ambitions…. Though Riley apologizes, he angers Aunt Kate by refusing to sing an alternative song—"That I Had the Wings of a Dove" to satisfy her that the day's dangerously secular vision has been expunged. For it has not. Riley has his eye on the birds, all right, but not with a view toward heaven. Their symbolic value for him is in their freedom to fly…. He and Buster make parachutes for the chicks and toss them off the roof of the barn. Aunt Kate interrupts them, the chicks land hard and are killed. Worse than the failure of the parachute plan is the shame Riley feels at Aunt Kate's scolding. (pp. 150-52)

"That I Had the Wings" is a sensitive and dramatic perception of the emotions of childhood. Like something from the hand of Mark Twain, it reaches out from a firm grounding in the world of the child to comment on the human desire for freedom from limiting discipline, be it loving and protective or not. Riley's desire to see the birds fly is a projection of his own rebellion against "his place" both as a child and as a Negro. Riley is a kind of Bigger Thomas, the black child who has not accepted the rationale of the black community concerning ambition, self-assertion and other aspects of the individualist ethic. But the narrator puts no large interpretations on the action of the story; there is no suggestion that Riley will become a rebel like Bigger. Ellison is satisfied to present the boy facing a boy's version of a universal human problem, the battle with family and authority. (pp. 152-53)

[These] three stories demonstrate not only a broadening of literary models to include more distant—i.e., less proximate—figures like Twain, but also a successful effort to draw upon more personal, more intimate data. The change from the public themes and representative figures of the earlier work to the private and closely observed world of the boys involved a reintroduction of the self and marked the achievement of control over the narrator-effacing techniques of Hemingway and Joyce. Ellison has acknowledged in an interview that the central incident of "That I Had the Wings," the business with the chicks and the toy parachutes, was drawn from memories of his own childhood. "Mister Toussan" and "That I Had the Wings" are, furthermore, finished and polished manipulations of "the simple structural unities of beginning, middle and end" which had eluded Ellison's control in his earliest work. (p. 153)