Upon publication of Invisible Man, critical comment encompassed, indeed often centered upon, Ellison's treatment of African-American experience. The general reaction can be summarized by Harvey Breit's comment: “What is exciting about it is that it hasn't really been written about except in a sociological way. That which for the sociologist presents itself as racial conflict becomes for the novelist the American form of the human drama.”¹ Since then, the relationship of African-American experience to art has frequently been the focal point of critical discussion, and Ellison, in both essays and interviews, has amply clarified his views on this question.

On the specific literary responsibility of the novelist, he has stated that a writer who insists that his personal suffering is of special interest in itself reveals a sad misunderstanding of the relationship between suffering and art. “Thomas Mann and André Gide have told us much of this and there are critics, like Edmund Wilson, who have told of the connection between the wound and the bow.”² Ellison amplifies this in his essay, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”:

In literature the great social clashes of history no less than the painful experience of the individual are secondary to the meaning which they take on through the skill, the talent, the imagination and personal vision of the writer who transforms them into art. Here they are reduced to more manageable proportions; here they are imbued with humane values; here, injustice and catastrophe become less important in themselves than what the writer makes of them.³

Ellison's statements are retrospective, the mature reflections of the accomplished artist; they also are indications of the problems he faced during more than a decade of wrestling with his chosen material and with the craft of fiction.

For Ellison, committing himself to fiction meant taking on the responsibility of describing that fragment of American experience which he knew best. This involved a twofold obligation, a twofold possibility: to contribute to both the growth of literature and to the shaping of the culture as he would like it to be.⁴ He pointed out that in serious American fiction that deals with the moral core of society, black people, and their status have always been used to express moral concern about the contradiction between professed ideals and actual conduct.⁵ To this he added his belief that the primary social role of fiction “is that of seizing from the flux and flow of our daily lives those abiding patterns of experience which … help to form our sense of reality and from which emerge our sense of humanity and our conception of human value.”⁶ Ellison's decision in 1937 to become a writer meant striving to discover and articulate these values, to squeeze them from the life that he knew best. The fundamental problem was to develop adequate and appropriate forms through which to express the African-American experience.

Ellison has called this process of development, the struggle to become a writer, a mazelike route; at almost the first step of the “passionate involvement” necessary to master a bit of technique, the writer “learns—and this is most discouraging—that he is involved with values which turn in their own way, and not in the ways of politics, upon the central issues affecting his nation and his time.”⁷ The basis for this discovery is evident in two stories that Ellison published in 1939 and 1940; these first stories founder because of the conflicting impulses of art and politics. The problems of art could not be solved by, or within, the context of ideology. Ellison made a false start, leaving unresolved the question of what in his specific background embodied the humanity of his people, a question of both form and content.

But he found his solution almost immediately with his third story, also published in 1940. Taking his clue from world literature and art—he cites Dostoyevsky and Picasso—he found the answer in folklore. Folklore, Ellison has since said, “describes those boundaries of feeling, thought and action which that particular group has found to be the limitation of the human condition. It projects this wisdom in symbols which express the group's will to survive; it embodies those values by which the group lives and dies. … [It] represent[s] the group's attempt to humanize the world.”⁸ African-American folklore he found an especially courageous expression, evolving as it did within a larger culture that regarded black people as inferior; it “announced the Negro's willingness to trust his own experience, his own sensibilities as to the definition of reality, rather than allow his masters to define these crucial matters for him.”⁹ Thus Ellison's exploration of folklore, part of his struggle for “technique,” was also inseparable from his involvement with the theme of identity.

Ellison found that the resources of folklore also offered an answer to a specific difficulty faced by the African-American writer: the problem of revealing what he truly felt rather than serving up what blacks were supposed to feel and were encouraged to feel. Ellison linked this to

the difficulty, based upon our long habit of deception and evasion, of depicting what really happened within our areas of American life, and putting down with honesty and without bowing to ideological expediencies the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness and which render it bearable and human and, when measured by our own terms, desirable.¹⁰

The use of folklore, moreover, offered a specifically literary enrichment. The new possibilities of language, the resources of African-American speech and idiom would allow Ellison's fiction “to retain that flexibility and fidelity to the common speech which has been its glory since Mark Twain.”¹¹ The forms: rhyming games and chants, proverbs and jokes, sermons and stories, slave songs and blues—forms based on a positive vision—offered a new vitality for the growth of American literature. Thus, from the first, Ellison's use of folklore was a response to his “twofold” obligation, literary and social; even more, it announced the affirmation that remains at the center of his fiction.

Even after his recognition of the possibilities that the use of folklore opened up for him, it took Ellison a long time to learn to adapt its materials to his own writing, to raise them to the level of conscious art.¹² In his three Buster and Riley stories, published in 1940, 1941, and 1943, we have concrete evidence of his attempt to work with folk forms. His earliest experiment, in the initial story, resembles the first step of a collector: the materials presented for their own sake, inserted where they add a bit of color and emphasis. His next story indicates a further step; Ellison presents his own material in a folk form, a rollicking and joyous antiphonal chant. The vigor and rhythm, assertion, and imagination show his complete control of the particular form, but the relationship between the chant and the story is inadequately articulated. Ellison has still barely mined the resources of folklore.

In his third Buster and Riley story, two years later, Ellison's adaptation of the materials of folklore results in an enrichment of his art. In an interview more than a decade later, Ellison referred to the discovery that led to this crucial change. He stated that his living folk tradition became “especially precious” when he realized that myth and ritual could be used not only as in The Wasteland and Ulysses, to “give form and significance” to the material but also to carry and present the psychological strata of human relationships, those irrational and chaotic aspects of human behavior resistant to rational representation. Because social forms, myth and ritual are the folkways of everyday lives and function as unconscious rationalizations of a painful condition, they are used when objectionable situations cannot be acknowledged or dealt with.¹³ Evidence of his discovery can be seen in this story; Ellison's invented situation takes the foreground, and the folkloric materials, as in Invisible Man, serve to comment covertly on the surface action. The form of the story, for example, is an adaptation of the blues. Thus the outcome, the boy's failure to differentiate between appearance and reality, is not simply a defeat; though his aim is frustrated, it is an initiation. Here, in miniature, is an adumbration of the structure that informs Invisible Man, which, for most of its length, is an exhaustingly explored series of frustrated climaxes. Invisible Man is a comic novel; it copes with these otherwise unbearable frustrations by using the mechanism of humor; this we first see in this story. The humor, essentially that of the human comedy, is more than just a structural device; it embodies the universal theme: the adversity endemic to the human condition produces not only suffering but the possibility of transcendence—a possibility wholly dependent on vision and on the acceptance of responsibility for one's actions.

By now, we can see the importance of Ellison's early short stories; they were the arena for his discovery of the appropriate forms to express the African-American experience and for working out the meaning of the experience for himself. They provided the experimental laboratory where he could test the possibilities of those forms already created by the Black community, extend their range, and adapt them to the aims of his own fiction. The remainder of this chapter will examine Ellison's first five stories in detail. The examination will trace the route of his determined struggle to become a writer: the false start, the new beginnings, and the emergence of his mature voice.

The next chapter will examine the three stories Ellison published just before beginning work on Invisible Man. They appeared the year after the last Buster and Riley story, within a few months of each other. All three, though products of a mature talent, still provide the “laboratory” for continuing experimentation with form and theme. Ellison extends the range of his folk forms and of those devices of modern fiction present in his stories from the first, so that they directly anticipate the artistic techniques of the novel. Even more important, these stories place his explorations of the identity theme in the world of grown men. Each story presents a situation that demands that the protagonist know who he is, that he see himself in a new way, that he see in a new way. This demand needs more than simple recognition or initiation; each of the situations requires a mature consciousness, an exercise of choice, and an act of will. This reorganizing of reality is not just a necessity; it is a moral responsibility as well. Each of the stories can be seen as a trial run for an aspect of Invisible Man. Taken together, they anticipate the scope of the novel. They have therefore been reserved for a separate chapter.

Though examining Ellison's early stories sequentially to see the growth of fictional method and theme lends itself to separating the stories into convenient groups, all the stories have a basic theme and form in common. Their essential theme, as Robert Bone observes, is “the bursting forth of Negro personality from the fixed boundaries of Southern life.” Ellison's heroes “are not victims but adventurers. They journey toward the possible in all ignorance of accepted limits. In the course of their travels, they shed their illusions and come to terms with reality. They are, in short, picaresque heroes, full of ‘rash efforts, quixotic gestures, hopeful testings of the complexity of the known and the given.’”¹⁴ As for their form, the stories are all a learning process: the conflict is the encounter with reality, the resolution a new awareness, a new way of seeing. From the initial story, based on a comparatively simple social problem, through the changing focus and growing complexity of the subsequent stories, the need to recognize the discrepancy between appearance and reality provides the tension. Turning now to the earliest stories, we shall find this immediately apparent.

Ellison's first two stories are based on the type of journalism that records an instance of injustice in somewhat simplistic terms, the better to show the pressing need—and sometimes the means—for redress. The stories present the effects of shocking and reprehensible social conditions that, with proper understanding and good will, can be remedied. Despite their primary social thrust, both stories insist on the necessity of recognizing Black identity in all its complexity. Despite Ellison's initial impulse toward the depiction of a political solution, the stories display a concern with character and craft usually absent from their genre, fictionalized social reporting. This concern creates a vitality in the characters and a sense of life in the situations that subvert the purpose of the proletarian plot.

“Slick Gonna Learn,” a chapter from an unfinished novel, was published as a short story in 1939, almost at the outset of Ellison's career as a writer.¹⁵ The story is concerned with the dual problem of unemployment and discrimination, and it presents an implicit remedy, a remedy that is to come, like a deus ex machina, from a world as yet beyond Slick's experience. From this one chapter, the unfinished novel would seem to be a prime example of proletarian fiction of the thirties, except that Slick is not the usual faceless sociological type but a psychologically complex individual. There is an involvement with a problem of character and subculture that is the province of the writer, not of the propagandist.

“Slick Gonna Learn” is comprised of three short episodes, each with the same pattern and the same “lesson.” Three times Slick expects fearful physical abuse because he is a “nigguh,” yet each time the expected beating is deflected. He is left puzzled; he does not know that in each instance he has been saved by the actions of union men. Implicit in each episode is the lesson that Slick is “gonna learn”: Union men are his natural allies, and his salvation lies in the class struggle. Nevertheless, the focus of the story is not on what Slick is going to learn but on Slick himself, or more specifically, on the reorganization of his conception of reality.

The first episode opens with Slick in a court room facing the heinous charge of striking a white man. He is surrounded by “nigguh-haters”; there is not the slightest difference in attitude between the judge and the police. Counterpointing Slick's internal monologue of worry about his long absence from his family is the judge's verbal abuse that runs the gamut of stereotypes from shiftlessness, fighting, drinking, gambling to sexual promiscuity. Knowing that this is the usual prelude to physical abuse, Slick reacts with fear. But his fear is not a simple response to immediate circumstance; it is a complex psychological reaction. His body is “tensed as though to fight: yet something inside him [is] surrendering to the violence he [knows] he [will] receive.”¹⁶ He is not preparing to counter or deflect the brutality but rather to absorb it.

The story is preceded by the author's synopsis of the earlier chapters; in this flashback also, the central point is Slick's psychological reaction. Because his wife, Callie, is seriously ill, Slick, in an effort to obtain money for a doctor, “finds himself in a stereotyped situation of a ‘crap’ game.” He loses his last two dollars and, in a fight that ensues, is knocked senseless. In the stupor of coming to, Slick knocks out a policeman who has just arrived. The synopsis concludes, “Realizing that he has broken one of the locality's most rigidly enforced taboos—under no situation must a Negro strike a white man—Slick … cannot overcome the psychological barrier and loses his power to act. He remains in the room to have the policeman recover and cart him off to jail.”¹⁷ The problem posed is not so much the conditions of Slick's existence as his reaction to them. In the court room scene that follows, there is another instance of this internal process. This is not just a human touch to lighten a social tract; it is the pivot of the story. His paralysis is not caused by the immediate danger, but comes from his sense of himself or, more accurately, from his lack of it.

But the expected physical violence does not follow the judge's abuse. Slick is released because “there's too many reporters in town on account of the shut-downs out to the plants.” Though Slick hears the judge's reason for releasing him, he fails to understand its clear implication: The striking workers are his natural allies. He is startled and struggles to understand the unprecedented fact that he has beaten a white man and gotten away with it. But even without understanding, something seems to “surge in his mind,” and once outside the station house, without fear, Slick challenges a policeman to remove his badge and fight, and learn to leave colored folks alone.

The second episode repeats the political lesson. Slick, on his way home, is followed by a police car and forced inside it; the police have decided to “punish” him themselves. But just as they reach a secluded place, a radio call—an emergency situation at the plant—forces the police to abandon their plan after only a few blows. Slick, though he still doesn't know it, has once again been saved by the strikers.

In the third episode, Slick, stiff from the aborted beating, drags himself along the highway, through pelting rain. A truck driver stops because he sees Slick staggering. Slick, at first, is afraid to accept a ride from a white man. He finally climbs in because he is very far from town, but he keeps a suspicious distance, parrying the man's questions.

The driver has “a row of buttons on his cap”—the insignia of the militant union man. And this well-buttoned worker is color-blind. His concern about Slick's injuries is genuine. Slick, his mind still full of “them white dawgs,” is puzzled because he had always seen his difficulties in terms of race. He studies the face of the man bent over the steering wheel and tries to “connect him with the experiences of the day.” But Slick cannot explain the day's events; they can only be explained in terms of the class struggle in which the white union man is his natural ally in the fight against racism. To understand this, Slick must first learn to distinguish among whites.

Though economic determinism would have it that the difference is impersonal, that it lies in the role of policemen and of truck drivers, Slick's first learning step is taken on a human level. Because the driver has treated him as a man, Slick, in his turn, recognizes an individual. Now, as the truck nears home, “the light of the city [breaks] the blackness in a million shimmering glints, throwing a soft glow to meet the rainswept sky.” Symbolically, Slick is moving toward understanding. His learning cannot be restricted merely to a political alliance; this encounter between Slick and the truck driver that has begun as the recognition of each other's individuality, necessarily involves the complexity of human relationship. The further development of character is dramatically necessary. Also, Slick's mind does not function on a theoretical level; he can only recognize the concrete. Thus the crux of the story, despite its thesis, is its human dimension.

The novel was never published, or even completed, and one might easily suppose that it was because of Ellison's subsequent rejection of the idea of the class struggle. But a statement Ellison made many years later, while discussing Invisible Man, tends to reinforce the need to differentiate between the standards Ellison set for his expository writing and his fiction, even at the time when he was most influenced by Marxism:

In my first attempt at a novel—which I was unable to complete—I began by trying to manipulate the simple structural unities of beginning, middle and end, but when I attempted to deal with the psychological strata—the images, symbols and emotional configurations—of the experience at hand, I discovered that the unities were simply cool points of stability on which one could suspend the narrative line—but beneath the surface of apparently rational human relationships there seethed a chaos before which I was helpless.¹⁸

It would seem we lost Slick on artistic, not political, grounds.

In “The Birthmark,”¹⁹ Ellison's second story, there is a similar contradiction between lifelike characterization and propagandistic plot, and it is even more marked than in the first story. The plot of “The Birthmark” is simple. A policeman and coroner take Matt and Clara to a place in the woods; Matt is to identify the body of Willie, their younger brother who was “hit by a car.” Despite everyone's opposition, Clara insists on seeing the body too. The corpse that is uncovered is not the victim of an automobile accident, but the castrated remains of a lynching. Clara's grief bursts out of control, yet in the midst of her anguished tears, she bitterly turns on Matt and cries, “They asked us last month to sign a piece of paper saying we wanted things like this to stop and you was afraid.”²⁰ The reader's sensibilities are jarred, less by the implausibility of the solution than by its flatness, the reduction to social formula of an effective situation. Yet, as Marcus Klein notes, despite its being “marred by the smudge of left-wing politics,” “The Birthmark” is a powerful story in that it goes far enough into its occasion that it “moves swiftly beyond the fact of a lynching to a violent apprehension of the guilt, the historical determinations, the fear, and the corrupt sexuality that have their issue in the crime.”²¹

Though the occasion is political, the characters in “The Birthmark” are fully realized. The story is really about human beings in the aftermath of a lynching; its emotional power is generated less by the grief of the victim's family than by the depth of the social, cultural, and psychological problems that are revealed in the reactions of the characters to the lynching. The coroner and the patrolman, unlike “the law” in “Slick Gonna Learn,” are individually drawn: the policeman is brutal, the coroner guilty. The coroner tries to limit the patrolman's extreme brutality, but his attempt is essentially ineffectual. The brutality also makes Matt powerless; in effect, both brothers, as well as the coroner, are castrated. Fear destroys Matt as a man and a brother. He is forced to deny the evidence of his own senses, to agree with the patrolman's “We don't allow no lynching round here no more.”²² Though Clara cries for redress, he is unable even to comfort her. His effort is spent trying to hide her anger and shield her from the consequences of exposing her real feelings. Thus Clara's explicit solution is not merely paltry; it is imposed and dissonant. It does not resolve the story presented. Characterization actually works against the story's effectiveness: Propaganda and art are at war. As in “Slick Gonna Learn,” the plot exposes brutalizing conditions and tries to point out how to change them; yet the focus—the effectiveness of the story—is the complex psychological pressure on individual human beings.

Those elements of craft for which Invisible Man is notable—irony, double entendre, and symbolism—are already evident and generate much of the power of the story. Matt, to check for Willie's identifying birthmark just below the navel, removes the newspaper cover and, in a terrible ironic play on the word “birthmark,” uncovers the castration. The newspapers covering the mutilated body are “colored comic sheets,” the ever-grinning mask of the happy “darky” that provides entertainment by denying his humanity. This is a macabre version of what has been called the American joke, the difference between appearance and actuality, between traditional ideals and social reality. The world of Jim Crow is symbolized by buzzards hovering above the body, “two large birds … black shapes against the still, blue air.”²³ The birds of death, used here as symbols of a specific evil, will be used again by Ellison. As his canvas broadens, so does the significance of birds; as part of the landscape they become the ever-present limitations of the human condition. A similar development from the specific to the general seems true of the color blue. Here, as in “Slick Gonna Learn,” blue is a specific evil; it is the color of the policeman's shirt and the judge's eyes, but it quickly takes on a larger meaning in the color of the sky. Color symbolism is used for the conditions of existence against which the drama of the human mind, from ignorance to vision, is played in the symbolism of dark and light.

Despite the sense of life and the evidence of craft, both “Slick Gonna Learn” and “The Birthmark” are failures. The plots are social protest, constructed with the purpose of showing how to change an intolerable circumstance. They fail in just this purpose. But the failure in each story is not political; it is artistic. In “Slick Gonna Learn,” the solution seems merely inadequate; in “The Birthmark,” it is strikingly incongruous and emotionally unacceptable. “Slick Gonna Learn” has a well-made plot, with an interesting pattern and an implicit solution. The story is unsatisfying partly because it is tendentious, but mainly because it is simplified. The plot of circumstance—at least in serious fiction—is essentially uninteresting. The real complexity, or interesting part, is the character of Slick, which is only introduced; it remains an undeveloped potential. For “The Birthmark,” the converse is true: Because the characters are developed and the story is based on their interactions, the solution in a political slogan is less than satisfactory because it is reductive.

As social protest, these stories are based on the assumption that circumstances can be changed—by a change in the protagonists. Concerned with the necessity of a growth in their understanding, the stories foreshadow, if only distantly, Invisible Man's affirmative stance that “the world is possibility if only you'll discover it.”²⁴ The characters confront adversity with the mind, for only by its growth will they be able to see that circumstances are not immutable. And crucially, before the mind can “see,” as with Slick when he is unclouded by fear, there must be a sense of self. The Marxist solution is only incidental, not decisive. Ellison soon discards it, although he continues writing propaganda for a few more years. Thus the inference would seem to be that Ellison's primary concern in his fiction was with its artistic quality.

The next three stories, though imbedded in the African-American experience, reach far beyond it. The weight of the plot rests on the characters' need to define themselves, not simply because of the impositions of the outer world but also because of their complex inner world, that is, the world as they have internalized it. This latter problem, central to Invisible Man, was first broached by Ellison when Slick, having knocked out a white policeman, finds himself paralyzed and waits to be arrested. The complex psychological barrier that is of potential interest in “Slick Gonna Learn” is fully explored by the third of these succeeding stories, “That I Had the Wings.” Here the thematic development adumbrates the novel's conclusion: a person creates his own reality, and this encompasses not only personal freedom but individual moral responsibility as well.

“Afternoon” (1940), “Mr. Toussan” (1941), and “That I Had the Wings” (1943) are all concerned with two young boys, Buster and Riley.²⁵ Artistically, Ellison has found more adequate figures to carry his theme of learning, the learning to see; it is natural to youngsters. The focus has radically shifted. White American values and attitudes retreat to the background, providing only the given condition of the world in which the boys live. Encounters are not overtly between Blacks and whites. Seemingly they are between the generations, but Buster and Riley come into conflict with adults because of their differing responses to the onerous restrictions of the white world. The telling of essentially the same story three times in succession provides an exceptional opportunity for us to see the development of Ellison's fictional techniques, not just the narrow area of method and skill, but, as Ellison defines fictional techniques, “a way of feeling, of seeing and of expressing one's sense of life.”²⁶

In “Afternoon,” Buster and Riley while away a summer afternoon. Seemingly nothing happens, but a great deal is expressed by their actions and conversation. Though awed by the height of a telephone pole, Buster takes a pitching stance worthy of his hero, Lou Gehrig, and aims for the top most insulator. As he hits his target, a nearby rooster crows. Riley, too, knows his own strength and tells Buster about an incident that shows he has lost his childish fears—he is no longer afraid of “the devil.” Happily, they chant a rhyme in celebration. Continuing to amble through the alley where “white folks moved out when [colored] … moved in,” the boys look up into the trees and see the sun break through the leaves and shine on the apples hanging bright and green, the potential, sweet fruit of “dull black branches.” Once again, with his well-practiced pitching technique, Buster aims for and reaches the highest point.

The boys stop at Buster's house for something to eat, but Buster's mother is in a bad temper, as she always is “when something went wrong with her and the white folks.” Her voice is like “a slap in the face.” Though he's hungry, Buster will not stay around when she's like this. Stepping out of the house, he breaks a sprig of milkweed and lets the white sap drip onto the brown earth. With his toe, he rubs the white drops into the brown earth and watches it turn to mud. He is, symbolically, showing the resentment he feels at being harassed, second-hand, by white society.

Alone again, the boys recount several incidents of folks who are always angry after an encounter with whites. Riley's pa is “so mean he hates hisself”; in the reader's ear the cliché acquires a new and literal meaning. One night his mother saved Riley from a beating with the warning to his father, “Don't you come treating no chile of mine like no slave. Your Ma mighta raised you like a slave, but I aint raising him like that.”²⁷ Riley intends when he grows up to be like “Jack Johnson, first colored heavyweight champion of the world,” and beat his father up. The boys celebrate Johnson's prowess by another rhyme—used again in Invisible Man's riot scene—“If it hadn't a been / for the referee / Jack Johnson woulda killed / Jim Jefferie.”²⁸ The end of the day—and the end of the story—finds the boys, unlike their parents, quietly at ease with themselves. As they lean back drowsily, they hear the contented hum of a black and yellow wasp as it makes its way back to its nest.

In this story, Ellison again raises that aspect of the complex question of African-American identity that he has yet to come to terms with, the internalization of a slave psychology. Here, the solution is still simple and easy. The new generation, that has shed its childish fear of the devil and is constantly transcending its limitations by testing and expanding its skill and strength, will place the punches where they belong. The boys are proud of themselves; this is signaled by their folk heroes, both black and white. Their pride in being Black, the sense of themselves is expressed in their rhymes, in the language and forms of their subculture. In their innocence the boys see no limits—but innocence carried further must become experience. End-stopped, the story is joyous; in context it is foreboding.

The two boys are still growing up, and their innocence is as yet unspoiled; they indifferently choose black or white heroes to emulate. Nevertheless, the specific background of black-white relations of the story reminds us that these are personalities emerging into “a world they never made.” A situation of no small complexity seems easily remediable: a simple matter of recognition, leading to the natural and correct course. But the solution is unconvincing; the story presents a realistic problem, yet concludes with the romantic assumption that the boys can grow up and retain their innocence and transform it into adult assertive power. This conclusion is haunted by Joyce's “Counterparts”; more likely, in the realistic situation, the children will grow up to be like their parents. Ellison is to tell the story twice more before it goes beyond the narrow confines of a political and sociological simplicity that assumes that recognition of an unjust situation automatically supplies its solution.

“Mr. Toussan,” published a year later, in 1941, adds a complex historical dimension by exploring the heritage from slavery times. It is a dual, even contradictory, heritage, a source of both submission and resistance. The story is preceded by a rhyme that, we are told, was used as a prologue to slave stories. Rogan, the boys' white neighbor, is sitting outside on his rocking chair to prevent the “little nigguhs” from even picking up the cherries from his trees that have fallen on the ground. Resentful at having been chased from his yard, the boys sit on Riley's front porch and watch the pecking birds spoil the cherries hanging heavy on the trees double-lined against the “neat and white” house. The birds are unmolested; they can't be stopped because they have wings. That they are mocking birds underlines the boys' opinion that “white folks ain't got no sense.”²⁹ The stupidity of Rogan's refusal to share the cherries is evident in the resulting waste: The cherries are being destroyed, and, therefore, will benefit no one. The boys' opinion is, on its own scale, a forerunner of the Invisible Man's realization that the white man's refusal to share the “fruit” of democracy is not merely a denial to others but that it is essentially and ultimately self-destructive. Rogan's refusal is the “slave story” of the twentieth century.

In the room behind the porch Riley's mother is sewing for the white folks. Above the clatter of the sewing machine, the boys hear her singing a spiritual.

I got wings, you got wings,
All God's chillun got a-wings,
When I git to heaven gonna put on my wings
Gonna shout all ovah God's heaven.
Heab'n, Heab'n
Everybody talkin' 'bout heab'n ain't going there
Heab'n, heab'n, Ah'm gonna fly all ovah God's heab'n.

She brings into the machine age the hope of heavenly reward—wings in a future life—as recompense for bondage on earth. The spiritual that once served to make the condition of forced submission bearable is now part of the social pattern of voluntary submission. Riley, though proud of his mother's singing, cannot accept its precepts. When Buster praises her singing, Riley stares blankly. Her voice trails off, and Riley suddenly focuses on the wings of a flitting butterfly; his imagination takes over. He poses the question, “What would you do if you had wings?” The boys, in a spontaneous word play, quickly “zoom” to Chicago, New York, Detroit, and to Africa—all places where “colored is free.” Then seeing a pigeon easily skim the top of a car and rise unimpeded by the taut telephone wires, they are inspired to further efforts. It would seem their version of “wings” better fits the conditions of the machine age.

In a brief pause, Buster tells Riley about Toussaint L'Ouverture, a tale that does not appear in their school books—a fact that is repeatedly emphasized. And the boys give themselves up to the sheer joy that comes with telling a story “right,” like “real old folks like grandma.” The account that ensues is what Ellison has called “a verbal jam session,” which happens when

bunches of Negroes … sit around and marvel at what a damnable marvelous human being, what a confounding human type the Negro American really is. … We exchange accounts of what happened to someone … each participant joining in. … In the process the individual is enlarged. It's as though a transparent overlay of archetypal myth is being placed over the life of an individual, and through him we see ourselves. This, of course, is what literature does with life; these verbal jam sessions are indeed a form of folk literature and they help us to define our own experience.³⁰

In rhythmic chant and response, the boys joyfully beat out the story of Papa Toussan, the African who defeated Napoleon because he realized that the white general was “nothing but a man.” As Buster chants a line-by-line exchange between Toussan at the top of his African mountain in “Hayti” and Napoleon at its foot, Riley responds in the spontaneous rhythm of a fervent and believing congregation. At the conclusion of the chant, Napoleon's soldiers are chased down to the river water and drowned with their boats. Then after a “wistful” pause, Riley takes over the brag while Buster's fervent responses push Riley to embroider the tale further, to enhance its rhythm, and to heighten their joy. It does not matter that he has not heard of Toussan before. The importance of the antiphonal chant, as in its church form, is not accuracy of fact but expression of faith.

Their word play is suddenly interrupted by Riley's mother. Like Rogan, she chases the “little nigguhs” away. She complains they are “keeping up too much fuss,” and “white folks says we tear up a neighborhood when we move in it.” The chastised boys move slowly toward the backyard. After a few moments, Riley recovers his spirits. He has quickly and reflectively resolved that the next day he will ask the teacher more about this Mr. Toussan who “didn't stand for no foolishness.” Happy again, he closes the story chanting the rhyme, “Iron is iron, / And tin is tin, / And that's the way / The story … ends.”

The matter-of-factness of the closing rhyme contrasts sharply with the epigraph, “Once upon a time / The goose drink wine / Monkey chew tobacco / And he spit white lime.” In this opening rhyme, nothing is as it really is, and there is an implicit and plaintive wish for that other or magical time. It is immediately followed with the boys being treated as “little nigguhs,” and the implicit wish is heard again in the mother's rhyme, in her spiritual. But the boys counter it with their own rhyme summarizing their understanding of Toussan's accomplishment.

“Oh, he was a hard man!”

“He was mean. …”

“Toussan was clean. …”

“… He was a good, clean mean,” said Riley.

“Aw, man, he was sooo-preme,” said Buster.

Though they must leave the front porch because of their noise, Riley leaves chanting. The sharply realistic evaluations of the closing rhyme are linked to the boys' confidence that they will learn how Toussan won a real victory.

The use of wings as the central symbol of the story lends it an underlying irony. It is embodied in the mother's song: the truth is that she does not have wings, and her method for attaining them guarantees their denial. By accepting her situation as though it were God-given, extending into eternity, she has clipped her wings herself. She is bound to the machine, and she is bound to her myth; more accurately, she binds herself. The real wings in the story—birds aside—are the wings of imagination. Like the birds, both mocking birds and pigeons that follow their own nature, the boys go off on their flight of imagination, and, thus like the birds, soar beyond the reach of Rogan on his rocker.

The boys' jam session is delightful. But though it is more than three-quarters of the story, “Mr. Toussan” is not satisfying as a whole. It would seem that the chant is intended to carry the burden of the story—to convey the meaning, the conflict, the resolution—but it is not integrated into a plot. Like the preceding story, there is not a real plot but rather a sociological situation or condition. The chant supplies the thematic opposition to the mother's spirit of self-abnegation, but it does not develop the given situation of the story itself; on the contrary, it leaves nothing more for the boys, or the reader, to learn. It is even occasionally awkward in itself; Chicago, Detroit, and Africa hardly need explanation as symbols of places where “colored is free,” but the lapse is small enough to hardly matter. The theme is complete, but the story itself is unsatisfying because a dramatic connection to the surface fable, to Rogan and his cherries, is required.

Though dramatically incomplete, the structure of the story is an important artistic development because of the thematic implications. The antithesis of the spiritual and the jam session is an opposition of God and man, or more specifically, implies that the nature of reality is not an imposed absolute but is man-made. Here we have an early version of a basic theme of Invisible Man. The boys, in their jam session, create a story that humanizes the world, that brings it down to man's size. Toussan can control his circumstances because he recognizes that the supposedly invincible Napoleon “ain't nothing but a man.” In making a hero of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the boys create a familiar, even grandfatherly, figure—“Sweet Papa Toussan”—the antithesis of the white man's concept of the hero as an untouchable distant repository of abstract virtues. Further, the jam session can be seen not only as an early presentation of this theme but also as one of Ellison's experiments, presenting in a folktale a complex comment on a surface situation, a technique that becomes characteristic and that reaches artistic virtuosity in the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man.

With “That I Had the Wings,” the third Buster and Riley story, it is evident that Ellison has mastered his craft. The surface fable is complete in itself, the characters individually realized, and the resolution of the story flows from the invented situation. The materials of myth and folklore are integral parts of the structure of the story, as are the characteristic literary strategies, already noted: irony, double-entendre, and symbolism. And, like Invisible Man and all the stories succeeding this one, the story and its structure are inseparable from theme. An examination of this and of Ellison's subsequent fiction will thus require an extended reading rather than a summary discussion.

The dramatic tension of “That I Had the Wings” is no longer a simple conflict of opposites, the right and wrong way to oppose white society's constrictions, self-annihilation or self-assertion. The conflicting aspects of the slave heritage are not antithetical or even separable; they are intertwined. The historical and cultural background that informs the story, that has formed Aunt Kate's values, are Riley's values too. They have a common heritage, and he has internalized her values and rules of conduct. In opposing Aunt Kate, Riley suffers conflicting emotions. The story is not just Riley's determined opposition to his aunt, to that aspect of his subculture he finds a hindrance; it is the growth of a boy's understanding, of his learning the difference between real and imposed limitations.

Though the sociological and historical dimensions are specific to the African-American experience, they are, at bottom, the background of complex human beings and the complications of the human condition. And the story, though triggered by the conflict between the generations, is an internal or psychological drama of an individual youth. The significance goes far beyond the immediate circumstances. It is the drama of initiation into manhood, a conflict between imagination and reality, and an obvious step toward Invisible Man.

The story opens with the boys on Riley's porch where Riley is confined because of the previous day's misconduct. Buster is napping while Riley is watching a “mama” robin trying to make her fledgling fly. She keeps trying to force it from its perch. But as long as she keeps hovering over it, the little robin doesn't budge from the branch. As soon as the mother flies away, the little robin tentatively flutters its wings several times; then hopping off the branch, it flies away. Riley is elated. “Yuh wun't really a-scaird,” he says. “Yuh just didn't want no ole folks messin with yuh.” This opening scene is the keynote of the story; Riley sees the limitations only as parental. Riley will achieve maturity only by using his own “wings” and testing the limits himself.

Buster wakes, and to keep him from leaving, Riley starts a word game, parodying a familiar rhyme, “When I am president.” Aunt Kate, her wrinkled face quivering with rage, stalks out of the house and “puts her mouth on” him for his “sinful verse.” “Whut yuh think would happen to yo po ma if the white folks wuz to hear she wuz raisin up a black chile whuts got no better sense than to talk bout being President? … Yuh chillun havta learn how to live right while yuh young, sos yuh kin have some peace when yuh gits grown. Else yuh be buttin yo head ginst a col' white wall all yo born days.”³¹ Aunt Kate tries to get Riley to sing a church song with her, but her version of “wings” makes Riley's throat go dry. As in the two preceding stories, the admonition that the boys must learn to “know their place” seems to be only the restrictions of white society given second-hand by those who willingly accept them. Riley remains as still as the little robin while its mother hovered over it.

He and Buster slink around to the backyard, Buster saying, “Man, they say ole folks like that kin put a terrible jinx on yuh!” But the jinx is already on them: Buster turns on Riley as he composes a comic parody of Aunt Kate's church song and warns him to stop his sin and blasphemy. Riley wavers, too. Though they have escaped from Aunt Kate's sight, her admonitions are part of themselves, have become internal fears.

Riley, to divert Buster from his repeated threat to leave, reminds him of the joyful part of the previous day's misadventure. He tries to explain to the uncomprehending Buster that their failing to get some squabs and Riley's falling on his head weren't important. What counted was trying to get them; falling through the air was exhilarating even though he ended up crying. “Hones' man,” says Riley, “Thass how come them white guys like to jump outa them airplanes in them parachutes.” Buster is unconvinced and counters that Riley had no parachute. But Riley has sounded the theme of the story. He knows that the real joy of adventure is the attempt, not the success—pushing beyond boundaries known or assumed, testing the limits of his strength, risking defeat and a broken head.

This is Riley's story; Buster is his earthbound foil. The characters of the two boys are clearly differentiated. They are no longer simply personifications of youth and new ideas but distinctly individual. Buster, though an adventurous boy, keeps his feet on the ground. The real conflict takes place within Riley, who has yet to learn what his “wings” are, and how far they will carry him. He has yet to learn the limitations of reality and what his own parachute may be.

In the backyard the boys watch the chickens and are vociferous in their admiration of Ole Bill, “the fightin'est, crowin'est rooster in the whole wide world! … the Louie Armstrong of the chickens!”³² Riley is inspired to supply the only attribute he finds lacking in this champion; he is going to teach Ole Bill to fly. But Ole Bill refuses to be taught and fights Riley off with his spurs. Ole Bill knows who he is and keeps within the bounds of the chicken yard, his own reality. Fighting and crowing are the components of his identity, not flying.

Riley snatches up two baby chicks in order to teach them instead. Buster, having been drawn in by Riley's enthusiasm, climbs to the chicken house roof to toss the chicks from there. The boys have improvised a parachute with rag and string, and Riley stands ready to catch the chicks in case the parachute doesn't work. But Aunt Kate appears just as Buster lets them go, and her angry shout paralyzes Riley. Though he tries to run and catch the chicks, he finds himself standing still, and the chicks are killed.

Riley's attempt to teach the newly-hatched chicks to fly is a testing of the boundaries of given reality; domesticated fowl are not supposed to fly. But in challenging the rules, Riley fails to realize that such a challenge must come from within. The little robin had to determine its strength for itself before it could decide to fly. And even more important, Ole Bill has shown that given the circumstances of the chicken yard, self-assertion can take different forms. Riley, in the incident with the chicks, has played the role of Aunt Kate and attempted to impose on someone else his personal form—or symbol—of identity. Though he was seeking to free the chicks from limitation, he was actually constraining them; imposition, by definition, denies identity.

But the attempt to teach the chicks to fly is, symbolically, Riley's own challenge to imposed “domestic” reality. In challenging its limitations, his “parachute” has failed; his challenge has been defeated by his failure of courage, by a succumbing to the Aunt Kate within himself. Even more, as he stands and stares vacantly at the dead chicks for a long time and hears the mother hen “pleading noisily for her children,” he sees boundaries that are not merely rules handed down by grown-ups; he sees those limitations of the chicken yard that are real. His venture has brought him to a confrontation with the facts of life and death. Then, despite a sense of loathing, he lifts the chicks, removes the parachute strings, and lays the chicks down again. He accepts the failure as his own; he takes responsibility for what he has done.

Then as if to cap Riley's initiation with a blood rite, Ole Bill charges. And so great is Riley's anguish that he does not hear “the swift rush of feathers nor see the brilliant flash of outspread wings.” The blow staggers him, and, looking down, he sees with tear-filled eyes the bright red stream against the brown where the spur has torn his leg.³³ Ole Bill is the initiate, like the knowing audience of the poor-plucked-robin-blues in Invisible Man. And like Invisible Man in his robin episode, Riley is left in bewildered tears.

The story is an adaptation of the blues form, the blues that Ellison tells us “at once express both the agony of life and the possibility of conquering it through sheer toughness of spirit. They fall short of tragedy only in that they provide no solution, offer no scapegoat but the self.”³⁴ With this blues adaptation, Ellison has written a story that is both subtle and satisfying. Also, he has worked out on a small scale the basic form of Invisible Man, both its picaresque episodes that are a series of blues episodes and its overall plan that culminates in the bewildered blues singer becoming the initiate.

In this story, there is no solution; the extent of Riley's learning experience can only be inferred. The focus of the story has shifted from social or sociological to human values. The folklore is not an analogue or frame used to give significance to the material but is integrated into the story. The homey, folkloric figure of the rooster is central to both the surface fable and the thematic implications; it carries the weight of the psychological aspect of human behavior, and it symbolizes significant components of identity: pride and self-knowledge. The rhymes and songs provide more than the vitality of new language and the resonance of historical background; subordinated to the surface action, they serve to move it forward.

Further, subordination of symbol and allusion lends the ambiguity that universalizes the story. Flying or wings, for instance, grow from their first use in the title, a sentiment from the “Prisoner's Song,” until they become symbolic of the human aspiration and the struggle to realize oneself, one's capacities, and understand the meaning of life. This self-realization is embodied in the figure of the cock; within the real or adult world, a world with limitations, there is still possibility, and it is contained within the self.

Though this story ends with Riley in tears, like Invisible Man, its underlying affirmation tells a comic story; it dips into the inner reaches of life and finds that the difference between appearance and reality is a huge joke. At the climactic moment of the story, when Riley fails to catch the chicks and they are killed, the treatment accorded the immediate failure and apparent tragedy is comic. Aunt Kate's presence is announced in the biblical tone of impending judgment and doom: “A shadow fell across the earth and grew.” This is immediately undercut by Ellison's sly, ironic humor: “Looking around he [Riley] saw two huge bunion shaped shoes.”³⁵ The surface playfulness is an inseparable part of the serious matter; it is the theme: reality is not God-sent but man-made.

In this last Buster and Riley story, Ellison's relationship to his craft has changed from apprenticeship to mastery, and he has touched upon all the implications of his identity theme. In the next stories, the identity theme moves from the chicken yard to the adult world, from a boy's discovery of its components to adult awareness of its implications. Reality is not just handed down but is the creative province of the protagonist; with self-conscious awareness, he must be the doer, the maker. Fittingly, Ellison's next stories have, as their protagonists, men.

Notes

1. Harvey Breit, “Ralph Ellison” (interview), in The Writer Observed (New York: World Publishing Company, 1956), p. 24.

2. S & A [Shadow and Act], p. 150.

3. “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” in ibid., pp. 148-49.

4. S & A, p. 183.

5. Ibid., p. 182.

6. Ralph Ellison, “Society, Morality, and the Novel,” The Living Novel, ed. by Granville Hicks (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 69. (Reprinted in Ralph Ellison, Going to the Territory.)

7. S & A, p. 165.

8. Ibid., p. 172.

9. Ibid., p. 173.

10. Ibid., p. xviii.

11. Ibid., p. 166.

12. Ibid., p. 174.

13. Ibid., pp. 174-75.

14. Bone, “Ralph Ellison [and the Uses of the Imagination],” pp. 92, 95. [In Hill, Herbert, ed. Anger and Beyond.]

15. “Slick Gonna Learn,” Direction (September 1939), pp. 10-11, 14, 16.

16. Ibid., p. 10.

17. Ibid., p. 10.

18. S & A, pp. 174-75.

19. Ralph Ellison, “The Birthmark,” New Masses, XXXI (July 2, 1940), pp. 16-17.

20. Ibid., p. 17.

21. Klein, “Ralph Ellison,” p. 88. [In Klein, Marcus. After Alienation.]

22. “The Birthmark,” p. 17.

23. Ibid., p. 16.

24. Invisible Man, p. 139.

25. “Afternoon,” American Writing, ed. by Hans Otto Storm et al. (Prairie City, Ill.: The Press of James A. Decker, 1940), pp. 28-37; “Mister Toussan,” New Masses, XLI (November 4, 1941), pp. 19-20; “That I Had the Wings,” Common Ground, III (Summer 1943), pp. 30-37.

26. S & A, p. 164.

27. “Afternoon,” p. 36.

28. Ibid., pp. 36-37.

29. “Mr. Toussan,” p. 19.

30. Thompson et al., “A Very Stern Discipline,” p. 90. [Harper's Magazine (March 1967), 76-95.]

31. “That I Had the Wings,” p. 31.

32. Ibid., p. 33.

33. Ibid., p. 37.

34. S & A, p. 104.

35. “Wings,” p. 37.