SOURCE: Mazurek, Raymond A. “Writer on the Left: Class and Race in Ellison's Early Fiction.” College Literature 29, no. 4 (fall 2002): 109-35.

Eight years after his death, Ralph Ellison's work is undergoing a reassessment. Invisible Man, the only volume of fiction Ellison published during his lifetime, has long been recognized as a major novel; indeed, it has been named as the most significant post-1945 U.S. novel in three different surveys published from 1965 to 1990 (“American Fiction,” 1965; Freidman, 1978; Mazurek, 1990). However, the last five years have seen the publication of a posthumous volume of stories, Flying Home and Other Stories, along with the Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, both containing previously unpublished material, as well as the controversial novel Juneteenth, patched together from the copious material Ellison was working on during the last four decades of his life. While Juneteenth and the controversies surrounding its editing by John F. Callahan will provide scholars with plenty to talk about for many years to come (see Feeley, 1999; Kirn, 1999; Menand, 1999), it would be unfortunate if Juneteenth overshadowed the volume of stories that Callahan edited as Flying Home. For while the unfinished Juneteenth raises many questions about Ellison's intentions, the six polished but previously unpublished stories in Flying Home raise to new prominence the issue of Ellison's relationship to his leftist past, a past Ellison suppressed as he became a major U.S. writer during the early years of the Cold War. Ellison's place in literary history as a writer whose formative period occurred in the radical years before the Cold War can now be seen more clearly, despite his ambivalent attitude toward—and even denial of—his deep involvement with the Left. There is an additional irony in the way Ellison will be remembered by actual readers in the future. Flying Home and Other Stories, with its radical, posthumously published stories from the late 1930s and early 1940s, is now the most conveniently teachable volume of Ellison's work. I am surely not alone in frequently choosing to teach Flying Home rather than Invisible Man in undergraduate courses in recent years, and one of the unpublished stories, “Party Down at the Square,” has already appeared in the influential Heath Anthology. It is now likely that Ellison will be remembered by a new generation of readers—who are likely to encounter canonical writers as undergraduates, to the extent that they encounter them at all—at least partly as a writer of the left from the 1930s and 1940s.

If this becomes Ellison's place within the historical memory of many of his readers, however, it will be both ironic and fitting. It is ironic because the harshest criticism of Ellison has come from critics on the left since Invisible Man was first published in 1952, and because of Ellison's later repudiation of his leftist involvement during the 1930s and 1940s. It is fitting because much of Ellison's work grows out of his experience on the left as part of a generation of working class intellectuals for whom the 1930s and 1940s were formative years. As I hope to demonstrate, the posthumously published stories in Callahan's collection suggest Ellison's closeness to the working class movements of the 1930s and 1940s—and perhaps this is one reason why they were not published when Ellison became a prominent writer in the early years of the Cold War. In addition, although a detailed discussion of Invisible Man is beyond the scope of this essay, a reading of the early stories helps illuminate the extent to which the political conflicts of both the thirties and the fifties are inscribed, in complex and ambivalent ways, in Invisible Man and its critical reception.

THE POLITICS OF ELLISON'S RECEPTION

Ellison's emergence as a canonical writer came at a crucial moment in U.S. cultural history, when the Left aesthetic of the 1930s and 1940s was displaced by a triumphant ascendance of what Thomas Schaub has identified as the “new liberalism.” Therefore, it is not surprising that, until recently, Ellison's connection to the working class movements of the 1930s and 1940s has been downplayed. According to Schaub (1991), the new liberalism was a new cultural consensus fashioned by the New York Intellectuals and New Critics, an aesthetic that distrusted the ideological commitments of the 1930s and foregrounded aesthetic complexity and the importance of the individual.¹ From the beginning, Invisible Man received positive reviews as a novel in tune with the new aesthetic. Many of the reviews of Invisible Man stress ideas associated with the new liberalism, such as the universality of Ellison's theme and his concern for the individual (see Barrett, 1952; Bellow, 1952; Cassidy, 1952; Chase, 1952; Lewis, 1952; Mayberry, 1952; Morris, 1952; Rollo, 1952; Delmore Schwartz, 1952; Webster, 1952). Other reviews directly associate Ellison's novel with anti-Communism and identify the Brotherhood, the political organization the Invisible Man joins, as a “euphemism for the Communist Party” (Hedden 1952, 5; “Black and Blue,” 1952, 112; see also Howe 1952; Mayberry 1952). While the new consensus enabled the favorable reception of works like Invisible Man, the cultural shift in the early years of the Cold War also involved suppression. Along with the overt suppression of witch hunts and political attacks on anyone associated with the Left of the McCarthy years, those years suppressed historical memory. The complexity and vitality of the cultural formations of the popular front—in which the young Ralph Ellison participated—were rewritten as an unfortunate interruption in the triumphant story of American modernism.

Although Invisible Man embodies many of the values of the Cold War consensus, it can also be considered Ellison's elegy for the popular front of the 1930s and 1940s, which Michael Denning defines as the “radical social-democratic movement forged around anti-fascism, anti-lynching, and the industrial unionism of the CIO” (1998, xviii). Denning claims that too often, the culture of the 1930s is looked at in terms of the assumptions of the Cold War. Thus, too great an importance is given to the Communist Party, which is placed at the center of the Left. While admitting that the Party was an important institution, Denning suggests that the center/periphery, Party member/fellow traveler interpretation of the cultural front “is misleading; the periphery was in many cases the center, the fellow travelers were the Popular Front” (5). In the 1930s and 1940s, many radicals considered themselves small “c” communists, “the way later or earlier generations thought of themselves as generic ‘socialists,’ ‘feminists,’ or ‘radicals’” (xviii). In Denning's interpretation, the basis of the popular front was not its relation to the Communist Party—one of its most prominent components—but its material basis in the C.I.O. and the resurgent working class struggles of the 1930s.

Denning identifies Ellison as one of those spokespersons who participated in the cultural front, the cultural component of popular front politics. As has often been noted, Ellison wrote his first articles and stories for radical magazines such as the New Masses, and was the coeditor, with the communist intellectual Angelo Herndon, of The Negro Quarterly. Although “like most of the young people drawn to the cultural front, Ellison was not primarily a political activist” (Denning, 1998, 332), Ellison was a participant in the left circles of the 1930s and 1940s, and like other intellectuals who shared this background, he celebrated vernacular art forms (jazz and blues) championed by the cultural front in his essays of the late 1950s (332). In addition, although he only hints at an interpretation of Ellison's major novel, Denning suggests that Invisible Man is one of the many “major writings of the proletarian movement” which “did not appear until well after the proletarian movement was pronounced dead” (228).

In his suggestion that the proletarian movement remains inscribed in Invisible Man even after Ellison rejected Marxism, Denning provides a perspective on Ellison's relation to the Left which is different from that of much Marxist criticism. More typical is the response of Barbara Foley, who has become one of the most significant Marxist critics of twentieth century American literature. Because Foley has become Ellison's harshest contemporary critic on the left, I will examine her arguments in some detail. In “Ralph Ellison as Proletarian Journalist” (1998-99), Foley points out how closely connected the young Ellison was to the Communist Party. Although Ellison and his publisher carefully avoided mention of Ellison's leftist past when Invisible Man appeared, Ellison's journalistic contributions to The New Masses and other leftist publications in the 1930s and 1940s rarely deviated from the Party's official line. However, in “Anticommunism in Invisible Man,” Foley argues that anticommunism is central to the rhetoric of Invisible Man, which distorts the experience of African-Americans in the Communist Party. Throughout Invisible Man, anti-communism appears as “an embedded rhetoric that operates largely on subliminal levels throughout the text” (1997, 530). Thus, despite the negative portrayal of all of the white characters in Ellison's novel, the white reader is located on the same side as the narrator because of Ellison's use of a “powerful binary logic, a logic that pits communism against humanity” (531). Generations of readers have acquiesced to this anticommunist rhetoric, according to Foley, because it is so common within the culture that it is accepted without conscious analysis.

Central to Foley's argument is the claim that Ellison distorted the experience of the Communist Party in Harlem. Based on an analysis of the “archive” of historical accounts and interviews in which former CP members discuss their experience in the Party, Foley concludes that Ellison's account of the Communist Party is inaccurate. Further, she suggests that this distortion was intentional, arguing that “Ellison may have wittingly engaged in some degree of distortion when he wrote his novel” (1997, 532) and that “he may have been deliberately ascending—and helping to steer—the anti-communist bandwagon, possibly to advance his own career” (532). Foley finds that Ellison's novel distorts the CP's methods of recruiting, training, and paying its organizers, who were hardly as randomly recruited and well paid as the novel suggests. More important, she claims that Ellison exaggerates the extent of racism within the CP. While admitting that some racism certainly existed and that there is anecdotal evidence of it found in texts such as Wright's American Hunger, Foley finds Ellison's (and Wright's) representation atypical, based on “a wider survey of memoirs and oral histories from members of the left in the 1930s and 1940s, both white and black” (536). Moreover, “whatever its weaknesses, the Communist Party (CP) forthrightly fought racism” (531). Based on her reading of the archive, Foley concludes that Ellison's characterization of the left “draws less upon any experience of his own during the years represented in the novel (1936-1943) than upon the discourse of the early Cold War” (531).²

Foley's suggestion that in the Brotherhood, Ellison drew some of his material from anticommunist images and sources current during the early Cold War seems convincing. Her argument that Ellison's portrayal of the Brotherhood, drawn largely from the historical CP, must be balanced against other accounts of the CP, is also valuable, as is her warning that students too easily accept anticommunist rhetoric at face value. After reading her essay, I doubt that I will teach Invisible Man without being more careful to delineate these problems in Ellison's portrayal of the CP than I have in the past. Nevertheless, her argument that Invisible Man reflects “anti-communism” (in the sense of “a generalized fear and hatred of the left”) as well as “anti-Communism” (opposition to the CP) seems an oversimplification (1997, 531). All of Foley's examples of Ellison's “distortion” of history are of Ellison's faulty portrayal of the CP through the symbol of the Brotherhood—her essay conflates the Party and the Left. In Ellison's novel, however, there is a generally sympathetic attitude toward the protests against injustices such as police brutality and eviction by masses of black (and some white) working class people. In addition, Foley's focus on specific details (such as the techniques for recruiting and paying members of the Brotherhood) as if they were intended literally is problematic in a novel that uses exaggeration, satire, and surrealism. (And her suggestion that Ellison used anticommunist rhetoric and a distorted history “possibly to advance his own career” seems a gratuitous attack that weakens her argument.)

Moreover, Foley does not examine all of Ellison's implicit criticism of the Communist Party. As she notes, Invisible Man accuses the Brotherhood of “selling out” or “sacrificing” African-Americans, who are manipulated for its own ends. However, equally important is its criticism of Brotherhood “discipline” or of democratic centralism, the insistence that members follow the Party line after a decision had been reached. In Invisible Man, democratic centralism is clearly parodied in the various times when the Invisible Man is asked to submit to Brotherhood discipline and to allow the Brotherhood to do his thinking for him (as it does for all other members of the Brotherhood). Here, Ellison echoes Richard Wright in the full text of Black Boy that includes the sections posthumously published as American Hunger.³

While Foley's argument is that neither Wright nor Ellison is representative of the attitudes of African-American Communists found in the “archive,” she ignores their arguments on democratic centralism and instead focuses on representations of other Party practices and on race within the Party. This focus seems to result from her own political stance, which criticizes the Party as “class collaborationist” (1997, 536)—in other words, for participating in the broad social democratic politics that Denning celebrates. However, it is also possible that, even for those of us who are much more sympathetic to the popular front than the later Ellison was, there is something to be learned from the critique of the Left embodied in Invisible Man. As a democratic socialist who agrees with Ellison that the CP USA was in many ways a disaster for left politics in the U.S., I can find value in Ellison's implicit critique of the Party, even though I am uncomfortable with Ellison's complicity with the anticommunist rhetoric of the McCarthy era and disappointed that he did not support a non-communist left politics in those and subsequent years.

However, for writers such as Ellison, and for others of their generation, the alternative presented by the working class movements of the Left was a hope foreclosed by the realities of Communist suppression. Perhaps Ellison would agree with Arthur Miller, another veteran of the cultural front who moved toward the center, in suggesting that by the mid-1950s, the Left had become so small as to be largely irrelevant to American politics (1987, 397). In the heated conflicts of the 1960s, Ellison would later refer to his involvement with the left as a youthful mistake (see Cannon 1995, 123-27; Corry 1995, 104), and Invisible Man would tell the story of the 1930s as a story of disillusionment. Yet, as Denning suggests, from an implicitly democratic socialist position that differs from Foley's more traditional Marxism, it is possible to argue that Ellison's early commitments left their mark on Invisible Man in more complex ways. Indeed, Ellison's post-popular front fiction continued to be deeply concerned with class—in, for example, its treatment of the vernacular—and implicitly sympathetic to the aspirations of working class people seeking justice, regardless of Ellison's explicit anti-communism in his essays and public pronouncements.

Foley's essay is itself driven by the sort of binary logic she finds in Ellison's novel, an opposition between the positive, radical, early Ellison and the suspect, anticommunist, later Ellison. However, Ellison's work can be read as more dialectically interconnected than this logic suggests. Despite its formidable sophistication, “Anti-communism in Invisible Man” echoes the dominant style of criticism of Ellison from the Left, apparent from the earliest reviews through the Black Arts movement. Her claim that Ellison may have been motivated by a desire to advance his own career echoes the early reviews by African-American Marxists such as John O. Killens (1952), Abner Berry (1952), and Lloyd L. Brown (1970), for whom Ellison's publication of Invisible Man appeared an opportunistic betrayal of the Black race and of the Left. And these reviews were in turn echoed in the harsh criticism of Ellison produced during the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, the criticism of Ellison by the Black Aesthetic critics was short-lived, and continued (at least in print) into the late 1970s and 1980s only in rare instances—most notably Amiri Baraka (1984, 316-26). Moreover, the nationalist critique of Ellison was directed primarily at his criticism rather than his fiction. For example, Ellison was criticized as an assimilationist by Addison Gayle in his important anthology, The Black Aesthetic, nevertheless, Gayle concedes Ellison's achievement in Invisible Man (1971, 413-17). Gayle would praise Ellison's novel more strongly in The Way of the New World (see Gayle, 1975, 204-13), although he frames his initial argument in that work by strongly contesting Ellison's insistence on the dichotomy between sociology and literature (ix-x). Similarly, in the special Black World issue on Ralph Ellison in 1970, only the Marxist critic Ernst Kaiser is unequivocally negative.⁴ Moreover, that issue also contains Larry Neal's famous essay, “Ellison's Zoot Suit,” the only piece from the Black World special issue that has been widely remembered. Neal's essay is not only one of the first extended discussions of the Black vernacular in Invisible Man (see also Kent 1970), it is also an essay that reinforced the division between Ellison and critics from the left. Neal challenges the political attacks on Ellison directly, claiming that “much of the anti-Ellison criticism springs from a specific body of Marxian and Black neo-Marxian thought” (1970, 31). He echoes Harold Cruse's claim that “the radical left wing will never forgive Ellison for writing Invisible Man” (Qtd. in Neal 1970, 34) and expresses his agreement with Cruse's “clear analysis of the detrimental role that the left wing has played in our struggle for self-determination and liberation” (Neal 1970, 34).

Much of the Black Aesthetic criticism either explicitly or implicitly accuses writers such as Ellison of having become alienated from the Black working class. Houston Baker, whose own work is rooted in a critical appropriation and extension of the Black Aesthetic, has suggested that the Black Aesthetic was itself a form of “romantic Marxism” (1984, 81) which substituted race for class and relied on the intuition of the critic who was saturated in “blackness” (83). However, while wishing “to avoid a naive Marxism” (3), Baker has employed the insights of contemporary Marxist criticism, claiming that “there is always a historical, or ideological, subtext in a literary work of art” (191). Baker's own reading of Invisible Man as a “Blues Book Most Excellent” (113) argues that Ellison's black sharecropper and blues singer, Trueblood, is a trickster figure who concocts a story of incest to please his white audience and to obtain payment from them. In the process, Ellison's novel reveals both the blues matrix of African-American vernacular culture, grounded in the experience of unpaid labor, and the ironic position of the African American expressive tradition, which itself becomes a commodity for exchange in capitalist America. However, Baker observes that “in Afro-American culture, exchanging words for safety and profit is scarcely an alienating act. It is, instead, a defining act in expressive culture” (196-97). As a blues artist, Ellison's situation mirrors Trueblood's: Ellison creates his work out of African-American vernacular materials disguised in a Western mask, yet he knows his work, in relying on the vernacular, “derives from the ‘economics of slavery’ that provided conditions of existence for Afro-American folklore” (197). Despite critical pronouncements that suggest he considers folklore a lesser form of art, Ellison both celebrates the vernacular tradition and indirectly reveals its situation in capitalist America.

In his reading of Ellison's work in terms of the African-American vernacular, Baker has articulated what is perhaps the dominant trend in contemporary Ellison criticism. However, it is worth emphasizing that for Baker, the vernacular is thoroughly embedded in issues of class, although the relationship of those issues to political conflict is less overt than is the case with much Marxist criticism. With Baker, I would argue that class politics are part of the ideological subtext of Ellison's later work, even while his explicit position rejected the working class militancy of the popular front and became a celebration of American democracy. Like Denning and Foley, Baker provides a reading of Ellison's work that associates it with working-class traditions, traditions that are downplayed by Ellison's literary executor, John F. Callahan.

FLYING HOME AND OTHER STORIES

In his “Introduction” to Flying Home and Other Stories, Callahan described how the destitute young Ralph Ellison started to write seriously in Dayton, Ohio, in 1937, after the death of his mother. Yet although Callahan notes that Ellison was a “self-described young radical” (1996, xiii), the story he tells of the Ralph Ellison of the Depression years is the familiar one of the “apprentice slowly mastering his craft” (xv). There is more emphasis on the anomaly of Ellison's important friendship with the black attorney William O. Stokes, a black Republican who aids Ellison in allowing him to sleep and work in his law office, than there is on Ellison's connection with thirties' radicalism. And Callahan's reading of the stories is similarly formalistic. He notes the influence of Hemingway in Ellison's lynching story, “A Party Down at the Square,” which Ellison narrates from the point of view of a young white boy who tells the story “from the perspective of someone without a moral point of view” (xxvi). But Callahan does not explore the question of why this story, which had already become widely known a few short years after being discovered, remained unpublished for so long, or how it connects with the radical traditions of the thirties. When he discusses the social ideas of Ellison's early stories, he characteristically describes them in terms of “Ellison's (and his characters') hunger for democratic equality” (xxviii), using the language that the later Ellison would choose, rather than teasing out the stories' references to an earlier ideological context.

The order in which Callahan has placed the stories implies the gradual development of Ellison's style and the way the stories prefigure Invisible Man. The volume opens with “A Party Down at the Square” and closes with the previously published “King of the Bingo Game,” “In a Strange Country,” and “Flying Home”—two of which (“Bingo Game” and “Flying Home”) are well-known stories which suggest the outrageousness and symbolic complexity of Invisible Man. The theme of development is further emphasized by the emphasis on childhood and youth in the early stories. “A Party Down at the Square,” a white boy's initiation into racist violence, is followed by the previously unpublished “Boy on a Train,” a short autobiographical story in which a young boy encounters racism when traveling with his little brother and his recently widowed mother. These are followed by four previously published stories about the young black boys Buster and Riley, two of which (“Mr. Toussan” and “Afternoon”) contain political celebrations of black culture and indictments of racism. Themes of childhood and young adolescence in a racist society, and the independence and toughness through which black youth survive, are thus woven through the first half of Flying Home. These are followed by four previously unpublished stories of young African-American adults in the 1930s: “Hymie's Bull,” “I Did Not Learn Their Names,” “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” and “The Black Ball.” Along with “A Party Down at the Square” and the relatively unknown “In A Strange Country,” these stories might be counted among the best proletarian fiction of their era. All of them sound a more radical political note than is usually associated with Ellison. Two of them, “Hymie's Bull” and “I Did Not Learn Their Names,” present the violence, racism, and moments of interracial bonding found among the destitute black and white hobos riding the rails. “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” a story in which humor interrupts the threat of violence, recounts the everyday racism encountered by railroad porters in Chicago. Finally, “The Black Ball,” one of the most complex of the early stories, presents union solidarity as a viable hope despite the distrust brought on by years of racism.

In his publication of some of Ellison's letters as well as in the publication of Ellison's stories, Callahan has provided some of the evidence of the young writer's political sentiments. Ellison wrote, in a letter to his mother on August 30, 1937:

I am very disgusted with things as they are and the whole system in which we live. This system which offers a poor person practically nothing but work for a low wage from birth to death; and thousands of us are hungry half our lives. I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode so the world would start again from scratch. … The people in Spain are fighting right now because of just this kind of thing, the people of Russia got tired of seeing the rich have everything and the poor nothing and now they are building a new system. I wish we could live there. And these rich bastards here are trying to take the W.P.A. away from us. They would deny a poor man the right to live in this country for which we have fought and died.

(Ellison 1999a, 36)

But the introduction by Callahan to the group of six letters published in The New Republic (where the above appeared) says nothing about Ellison's radical roots in the 1930s, only mentioning his “earnest, unguarded sense of the injustice of racism in the new universe of New York” (Calahan, 1999, 34). It is as if Ellison finds these ideas on his own in the 1930s, outside a social context. As Foley also suggests, Callahan has read the early stories from the ideological perspective of the later Ellison, ignoring their original context (1999, 336). And the review article by Shelby Steele that accompanies these letters discusses Ellison's work as one that consistently runs counter to the protest tradition. Steele observes his own initial reluctance to read Invisible Man in the 1960s because the novel was not accepted by young militants; nevertheless, Steele notes that Ellison's work, which he initially read “in the late 60s a little on the sly … brought me the fullest understanding that I was ever given of the black world around me” (1999, 28). Steele offers a sharp dichotomy between the protest tradition represented by Richard Wright and some novels by James Baldwin (Another Country) and Toni Morrison (Beloved), and Ellison's work, which focuses not on the oppressive facts of racism but on the abilities of blacks, as individuals and possessors of a rich cultural tradition, to survive and rise above racism. While this attack on the protest tradition is not new, what is surprising is that Flying Home is presented as evidence that Ellison was outside that tradition from the beginning in his focus on strong individuals for whom racism was not an absolute determinism in their lives. Steele notes: “now that a collection of his apprentice stories, Flying Home, has been released, it seems clear that for many he [Ellison] still represents the wrong kind of militancy” (27). In Steele's reading, the union in “The Black Ball” is an example of “relief from Racist contingencies in America's ideal of democratic brotherhood” (32)—but there is no discussion of the popular front context of this story. Although the Depression is briefly mentioned in Steele's discussion of “I Did Not Know Their Names,” this story too is one in which “democracy prevails” (32). Steele gives the greatest focus to the “Blues Resolution” of “The King of the Bingo Game” and “Flying Home,” stories which are not posthumously published and which prefigure Ellison's later work, and he leaves out any discussion of “A Party Down at the Square,” which would most directly challenge his discussion of the protest tradition.

Perhaps the strongest of the previously unpublished stories in Flying Home, “A Party Down at the Square” is the lynching story Ellison never published in his lifetime, and it illustrates Ellison's adeptness at writing in the protest traditions of the thirties. As Denning notes, the movement against lynching and labor repression was a central part of popular front political culture; in fact, he claims that the International Labor Defense, founded in 1925 to defend Sacco and Vanzetti and most famous for its actions on behalf of the Scottsboro Nine, is “the earliest popular front political organization” (1998, 13). In Ellison's Popular Front criticism of the 1930s and early 1940s, there are a number of references to lynching. In “A Congress That Jim Crow Did Not Attend,” Ellison notes the prominence of anti-lynching buttons at the Negro Congress, and in a review of Theodore Ward's play Big White Fog published in New Masses in 1940, Ellison makes clear that he considers the resistance against lynching formative of black struggle. He notes that the period Ward's play covers, from World War One to the early 1930s, “was a time when, out of the lynching and rioting which proceeded and ended the war, the Negro people were seeking to devise new means of struggle” (1940, 22). Those new means of struggle the young Ellison has in mind are, first, the impractical but significant nationalism of the Garvey movement and second, the “unity of black and white forces” (22) in the Communist led resistance to eviction, both of which Ward dramatizes.

In “A Party Down at the Square,” Ellison frames the issue of lynching in the context of the forces impoverishing both black and white sharecroppers in the South. At the end of the story, the white boy who serves as narrator observes that “a white cropper said it didn't do no good to kill the niggers ‘cause things don't get no better.’ He looked hungry as hell. Most of the croppers look hungry. You'd be surprised how hungry white folks can look” (1996, 11). Ellison suggests to the reader that the function of racism is to keep poor whites and blacks divided; he also hints at the potential, in the poverty of the Depression, for people like the white sharecropper to acquire the beginnings of a radical analysis and comprehend how racial divisions function to divide the working class (see Foley 1999, 329). In a 1939 New Masses review of Louis Cochran's novel, Boss Man, Ellison criticizes Cochran for not showing the linkage between the exploitation of blacks and whites in the South:

Boss Man contains an incident of a white sharecropper protesting his exploitation; another of a Negro exerting his will in revolt. Had Cochran understood the historical significance of such incidents, and presented it, he would have made a valuable contribution to American writing and democracy.

(Ellison, 1939, 27)

While, as Callahan notes, the choice of narrative point of view is remarkable in this story, it is also true that the story reflects Ellison's radical commitments in the early 1940s. As he indicates in his 1941 New Masses essay, “Recent Negro Fiction,” Ellison appears to have found no contradiction between these commitments and artistic experimentation, “the mastery of life through the mastery of intense ways of thinking and feeling that are artistic techniques” (1941b, 26). In “A Party Down at the Square,” experiments with point of view and understatement help to underscore the political content. The narrator, a white boy from Cincinnati visiting his uncle in Alabama, witnesses his first lynching, and Ellison's choice to tell the story from the point of view of an innocent child who is being initiated into racism allows him to highlight the moral outrage of what is occurring while presenting the facts of the lynching in an understated tone. As Callahan points out, there is a contrast between the neutral tone in which the boy recounts brutal details that he witnesses and the moral point of view of the story. And yet in both his vomiting, which “signif[ies] a resistance to values he has not been taught to question” (1996, xxviii) and his later declaration that this was “his first party and his last” (Ellison, 1996, 11) at the end, the boy does reveal his revulsion to what he has witnessed. Like Huck Finn, he is not able to articulate it as well as he reveals it to the reader. “A Party Down at the Square” echoes Huckleberry Finn and parallels Ellison's later interest in a return to the moral point of view that writers such as Clemens represented to him (See Ellison 1995, 152-53; Nadel 1988, 124-45).

While the young narrator experiences only an inarticulate revulsion against lynching, “A Party Down at the Square” provides a thorough critique of lynching and the attitudes that enabled it. My students are sometimes put off by the story's repeated use of the word “nigger,” which occurs forty-six times in a text that is only around 2800 words long. The repeated use of the N-word serves to heighten awareness of the casual way in which the black man is dehumanized in the cultural ideology that the boy has unquestioningly adopted from his elders. However, the black man who is tortured is not merely a passive victim. The narrator repeatedly admires his toughness and, implicitly, recognizes something of his shared humanity. The man's movement after the mob “thought he was dead” (Ellison, 1996, 9) underlines the length of the agony and torture, as the narrator observes that

the fire had burned the ropes they had tied him with, and he started jumping and kicking around like he was blind, and you could smell his skin burning. He kicked so hard that the platform, which was burning too, fell in, and he rolled out of the fire at my feet. I jumped back so he wouldn't get on me. I'll never forget it. Every time I eat barbecue I'll remember that nigger. His back was just like a barbecued hog. I could see the prints from his ribs where they start around from his backbone and curve down and around.

(Ellison 1996, 11)

In addition to providing graphic detail, Ellison's story emphasizes the way racist violence was justified by a kind of fascist version of American patriotism. When the man being burned alive asks, “‘Will somebody please cut my throat like a Christian,’” one of the leaders of the mob replies, “‘Sorry, but ain't no Christians around tonight. Ain't no Jew-boys neither. We're just one hundred percent Americans’” (8).

Ellison provides some of the now familiar details about lynching that underline its brutality: the boy observes at least thirty-five women in the mob, and one of them scratches his face at the end as she crowds close to see. After the “party” is over, one of the most active members of the mob, who “they plan to run for sheriff” (Ellison, 1996, 9), shows the boy pieces of the dead man's finger bones and laughs. But Ellison also emphasizes the irony of the lynching by interrupting the action. About one fourth into the story, the boy announces: “Then it happened” (5). An airplane appears overhead, “like the roar of a cyclone blowing up from the gulf” (5), and captures the attention of everyone but the tortured victim. The plane, confused by the light of the fire in the town's square and lost in the storm, almost crashes and scrapes the electric wires with its landing gear. The live wires are blown about in the wind and a large part of the crowd runs in terror. One woman is electrocuted and some women, so eager to see a black man burned alive, faint at the sight of one of their own fatally burned by electricity. The sheriff and his men, obviously on hand to sanction the illegal killing of the death squad, turn the people back from the body of the woman who was burned “almost as black as the nigger” (7). This interruption of the action turns the reader's attention from the torture and suggests a momentary hope that the man might be saved. Characteristically, Ellison chooses an aircraft and flight as a symbol of escape, echoing the folk tales in which slaves fly back to freedom and prefiguring his own use of flight as a symbol in the well-known story with which Callahan ends the volume, “Flying Home.” (Interestingly, the annoyingly omnipresent word “nigger” is absent for more than 700 words, or about one fourth of the story, as the reader's attention is shifted away from the ritual torture and toward possible hope, or at least toward the poetic justice in which one member of the mob dies.)

Having taught “A Party Down at the Square” in five classes over the past several years, I can attest that it still has a powerful impact upon many readers. However, its quality underlines the question, why did Ellison refrain from publishing this story? Several explanations suggest themselves, including Ellison's well-known perfectionism and aesthetic views. As Jerry Watts has suggested, Ellison eventually developed an aesthetic philosophy that emphasized the heroic work of the individual artist struggling with craft, a point of view that made him reluctant to present African-Americans as victims (1994). This emphasis on the heroic individual may have contributed to his reluctance to publish a lynching story (although the black victim of “A Party Down at the Square” is not entirely passive). However, another possibility is that this story was too deeply embedded in the radicalism he had rejected by the early 1950s for his taste. Having left the story unpublished, for whatever reason, in the 1940s, Ellison may have hesitated to publish a story that reflected his radical commitments by the time the McCarthy era had gotten into full swing and he seemed eager to de-emphasize his radical past. Callahan dates the unpublished stories as having been written from the late 1930s to the early 1940s. This would indicate that they were written during the years when Ellison was a frequent contributor to the New Masses and (briefly) managing editor of the Negro Quarterly. “A Party Down at the Square” may have been left unpublished because its suggestion of a radical analysis of race and class no longer fit Ellison's ideas in the early years of the Cold War. Indeed, the suggestion that working-class whites as well as blacks lose power in the process of scapegoating blacks through lynching is remarkable in a story so brutally explicit about lynching's horrors.

“Boy on a Train,” which follows “A Party Down at the Square,” is also about the initiation of a child to racism. In this case, it is a black child of perhaps five or six years who is traveling on a train with his mother and baby brother after the father has died and the family needs to move. The family is uncomfortable in the baggage car reserved for African-Americans, where the soot from the engine makes it impossible to open the windows. The car is cluttered with baggage, a casket that is being transported, and the candy, fruit, and magazines that the butcher sells to white passengers. Each time he comes back for more merchandise, “the little boy hoped he would give them a piece of candy; after all, he had so much, and Mama didn't have any nickels to give them. But he never did” (Ellison, 1996, 13). Meanwhile, the mother is feeling outraged that the man had tried to molest her when they first boarded the train. But her son is unaware of the butcher's actions. He looks with envy at a little white boy “dressed like the little kids you see in moving pictures” (15) who boards the train holding a little dog and wonders if he had a bicycle. Here, and when the train stops and some white men get on to remove the casket, the boy shows the beginnings of an awareness of racial difference: “Why, he wondered, did white folks stare at you that way” (16)?

However, the boy is initiated not only to the realities of racism, but also to a militant response to it. The boy's mother prays with her sons: “Things is hard and we have to fight … O Lord, we have to fight!” (Ellison, 1996, 18) The boy, in confused response, thinks to himself that he must kill the “something” (19) that is making his mother cry: “Yes, I'll kill it. I'll make it cry. Even if it's God, I'll make God cry, he thought. I'll kill Him; I'll kill God and not be sorry!” (20) In his realistic rendering of the boy's confusion, in a situation that in some ways parallels that of Ellison's early life (his father died when Ellison was three, and he and his brother were raised by their widowed mother), Ellison metaphorically transforms a militant religious attitude into a secular militancy.

“A Hard Time Keeping Up” also reflects racial division, as two African-American railroad workers must walk many miles in a Chicago snowstorm to reach a rooming house that will take them in. On the way, they are approached by a white panhandler who says, “‘Thank you, gents’” (Ellison, 1996, 100) when they give him a bag of sandwiches they have saved for themselves. However, one of the railroad men says after they leave, “‘That guy will see you tomorrow with two bits in his pocket and call you a black sonuva-bitch’” (101). Later in the story, their fears of violence between black patrons of a Chicago bar and the white mobsters who control the district prove unfounded, as the railroad men have wrongly interpreted the acting out of a playful bet as a scene of real violence. Despite the harsh divisions between black and white in segregated Chicago (and in the narrator's memories of a childhood fight with a gang of white boys), there is the suggestion of greater possibilities of black and white cooperation than the narrator's initial interpretation of reality would indicate.

The other three of the posthumously published stories, “Hymie's Bull,” “I Did Not Know Their Names,” and “The Black Ball,” all depict moments of bonding by working-class people across racial lines. “Hymie's Bull” is the only one of the unpublished stories about which much is known. It was written, at Richard Wright's request, for the journal New Challenge, which folded before Ellison's work could be included. Although Ellison later downplayed Wright's influence upon him and contrasted his own modernist style with Wright's naturalism, in “Recent Negro Fiction,” Ellison praises Wright's literary experimentation and argues that it

is no accident that the two most advanced American Negro writers, Hughes and Wright, have been men who have experienced freedom of association with advanced white writers (not because the men from whom they have learned were unique because of their whiteness, but because in the United States even the possession of Western culture is controlled on the basis of color).

(Ellison, 1941b, 25)

The notion that art and culture know no racial bounds became one of the later Ellison's key ideas. However, in his cultural front stories, black and white unity has an overtly political meaning.

“Hymie's Bull,” like “I Did Not Know Their Names,” appears to be based loosely on Ellison's time riding the rails in order to travel from Oklahoma to college in Alabama. The story begins with a detailed description of the treatment of hobos by railroad detectives (“bulls”). Several descriptive paragraphs detail the brutality of the bulls in beating the “bums,” but both paragraphs end with colorful but exaggerated comparisons typical of Black English Vernacular: “the Chicago bulls hate black bums 'bout as much as Texas Slim,’ who'll kill a Negro as quick as he'll crack down on a blackbird sitting on a fence. … They can hit you on your head and bust your shoes” (Ellison, 1996, 83). The story foreshadows the bloody end of Hymie's bull (the detective Hymie kills) when describing Hymie's vomit, which descends past the open boxcar door as Hymie rides atop the car: “Once it was very red like a cardinal flying past in the green fields along the tracks” (84). But the narrator suggests, in the next sentence, that this last gory detail might be exaggerated: “Come to think of it, it might have been a cardinal flying past” (84).

Despite Ellison's playful prose description at the beginning of “Hymie's Bull,” the story's most striking feature is its connection to the violence along the railroad in the 1930s. The violence the narrator observes is both between “bulls” and “bums” and between black and white. There is a connection between the narrator and the white, Jewish Hymie. But the narrator holds back in his concern for the sick Hymie when he remembers the segregated world the train is soon to enter: “I felt sorry for the poor guy out there. … Then I thought, To heck with Hymie. A few miles down the road when we got South, he and the other guys would go into another car anyway” (Ellison, 1996, 85). The incident in which Hymie kills a detective in self-defense is itself an illustration of the fact that black hoboes are not the only ones who carry knives, despite the stereotype, in the violent working-class world they inhabit. And the aftermath of the incident is itself an illustration of racism. The narrator and his fellow black “bums” narrowly escape the reprisals for the knifing of the bull—although some other black man will be chosen as the scapegoat for Hymie's action. The narrator's relationship with Hymie is, however, an instance where working-class blacks and whites momentarily bond in friendship despite the racial attitudes of society at large.

“I Did Not Know Their Names” is also about making connections across racial lines. Again, the black narrator has befriended a white fellow hobo—Morrie—who once lost a leg under a train and once saved the narrator from a similar fate. Yet this interracial friendship is unusual. Morrie “got quite a kick out of having a Negro for a buddy” (Ellison, 1996, 90). The narrator “was having a hard time trying not to hate in those days. … I still fought the bums—with Morrie's help. But I had learned not to attack those who were not personally aggressive and who only expressed passively what they had been taught” (91-92). Although he claims to be “nasty sometimes, because to be decent was to appear afraid and aware of ‘place’” (92), the narrator in fact goes out of his way to avoid racial conflict.

The focus of “I Did Not Know Their Names” is on the narrator's encounter with an old couple, much older than those he usually encounters riding freights. To give them privacy, the narrator comes down from the roof of the boxcar only after dark, and he sleeps in the doorway of the boxcar. His concern appears to result from his identification with their plight. The woman “was the oldest woman I'd seen riding the freights, much older than my own mother at home. They seemed kind, and I had not wished to cause them embarrassment” (Ellison, 1996, 92). Although he had hoped to return to the roof before morning, when his race might become known and become an issue, dawn finds him awakening in the doorway. However, he is surprised when the old couple react with friendship instead of responding to him in stereotypical fashion. They offer him sandwiches (which he in turn saves part of for Morrie) and converse without condescension, encouraging his desire, as a young man, to travel on his way to college in Alabama. Shared hardship unites the narrator, momentarily, with the white couple. They are going to visit their son, whom they have not seen in five years and had not heard from until six months ago, a boy who “‘had a colored boy for his companion the whole four years he was in school in Amherst’” (94). New to the working class, they are reduced to traveling to see their son by freight car, and they are visiting him as he gets out of prison, not college. However, they claim to be “‘very happy, and very anxious to see him. When we had money, we lost our boy. Now the money is gone, and our boy will be back with us’” (95).

While Ellison reveals an instance of the discovery of what he would later emphasize as the shared humanity of people across racial lines, in these stories, it is a shared economic plight that encourages the connection. At the end of “I Did Not Know Their Names,” the narrator is pulled off a freight and jailed. “In jail I learned about Scottsboro, and I was glad when Morrie made his way down to Montgomery and got in touch with the school officials, who finally got me out. I thought of the old couple often during those days I lay in jail, and I was sorry that I had not learned their names” (Ellison, 1996, 96). By closing with a reference to Scottsboro, Ellison once again inserts the incident into a frame of reference that underscores the presence of racial injustice and the power of black and white unity against it. Scottsboro was the most famous instance of black and white protest against racism, and it is Morrie, the white “bum,” who helps the narrator obtain his freedom. While in jail, the narrator thinks of the old southern white couple, themselves traveling to visit a son in jail, again underscoring the parallels in the circumstances of black and white. While the old order of racial hatred still persists, the story suggests that, in the era that is dawning, there are new possibilities for working-class unity.

In “The Black Ball” cross-racial identification becomes even more overtly connected with working-class politics. The narrator of “The Black Ball” overcomes his sense of racial distrust to become what Ellison called “the most conscious American Negro type, the black trade unionist,” in his 1941 review of William Attaway's Blood On the Forge, (1941a, 24). There are two narrative threads in this story: the relationship between the narrator, apparently a single father, and his four year old son, who is just becoming aware of the racial rules of the adult world; and the working world in which the narrator, a building custodian, learns to overcome his distrust of the white union organizer.

“The Black Ball” is a subtle story that, except for its militant trade union viewpoint, prefigures many of the elements of the later Ellison. The story opens with the narrator interrupting his morning schedule to give his son breakfast. Their conversation reveals both the boy's attempt to start making sense of American race relations and his father's attempt to assert an optimistic hope. When the boy asks, “Daddy, am I black?” and is told that he is brown, the boy suggests, “Brown is much nicer than white, isn't it, Daddy?” His father replies, “Some people think so. But American is better than both, son” (Ellison 1996, 110-11). This assertion of an American faith despite considerable evidence to the contrary suggests both his wish to protect his young son from the harshness of American life and his attempt to believe in the dream of America—also indicated by his studying and desire to return to school despite the pressure of responsibilities.

But the narrator of “The Black Ball” is anything but a naïve believer in American justice. The story's central incident is his encounter with a Southern white union organizer. Thinking the white man is seeking information in order to demand his job (several unemployed whites have recently taken jobs from black workers in the neighborhood), the narrator distrusts him and lies about the number of blacks working in the building. When he learns that the man is organizing a union of custodial workers, he responds: “Listen, fellow. You're wasting your time and mine. Your damn unions are like everything else in the country—for whites only. What ever caused you to give a damn about a Negro anyway?” (Ellison, 1996, 114). However, the organizer replies by showing his burned hands and telling the story of how they were burned with a gasoline torch after he testified in defense of a black man accused of rape. Although not killed, the white organizer has also been the victim of a lynch mob, and the incident has led him to become more committed in his efforts. The narrator doesn't know what to say in response to this terrible story (he is still uncertain that the white man is telling the truth), and the organizer tells him not to try to figure it out all at once, and leaves a card inviting him to a meeting.⁵

The events of the rest of the day cause the narrator to be glad, at the story's end, that he still has the card in his pocket, for he is faced with dismissal (the black ball) after his son's ball is thrown (by an older white boy) through his boss's office window. It is concern for the boy, who has begun to notice racial difference, which gradually motivates him to accept the organizer's offer. The young boy remarks that he could someday drive a truck, as he has noticed a black man driving one. His father says nothing, but only stares into space, thinking, and when they return from being confronted by his angry employer, the narrator is shaken: “I gave him one hard look and then felt for the boy's hand to take him back to the quarters. I had a hard time seeing as we walked back, and scratched myself by stumbling into the evergreens as we walked around the building” (Ellison, 1996, 120). While the narrator puts iodine on his hand, which he discovers is bleeding, it is the boy's confusion that suggests a deeper wound. The boy says: “Daddy, that white man can't see very good, can he. … Anybody can see my ball is white” (121). The father thinks to himself how his son will eventually play with “the black ball” more than the boy suspects. While treating the minor injury to his own hand, he thinks of the organizer's fried hands, and it is clear that he will use the organizer's card.

As Ellison claims in “The Great Migration,” black trade unionism was developed by those who “pursu[ed] their vision despite the antipathy of some white unionists and bosses alike” (1941a, 24). “The Black Ball” dramatizes the awakening of a union vision that develops despite the heritage of racism within the union movement because some organizers and workers were able to see beyond racial division. One of the central themes of the stories of Flying Home is cross-racial identification, and in this respect, the collection reflects the politics of the popular front, which was the only widespread movement of both whites and blacks against racism between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights movement of the postwar years. However, “The Black Ball” also prefigures Ellison's later belief in the American dream despite the realities of racism, realities which he could describe in militant tones as late as 1953, when he said: “You might fight with a land, but you come to respect it and to love it. Simply because certain groups in this country tell me, ‘Well, you don't belong here; you are just being tolerated,’ I say, ‘To hell with you’”(Qtd. in Girson 1953, 49). These words, from an interview not often quoted, indicate the complexity of Ellison's response to America, which has too often been stereotyped as a politics of accommodation.

The letters from the 1950s between Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray—recently published as Trading Twelves—contain a number of similar examples that reveal the extent of Ellison's outrage at racial segregation. However, those letters contain no examples of the earlier working class militancy demonstrated by “The Black Ball” and the other unpublished stories. By the 1950s, Ellison's anger was directed at racial issues, in the years in which a new movement for racial justice emerged in an America where a radical class analysis had become taboo.

However, class is not ignored in Ellison's later fiction—it remains part of the latent content of Ellison's fiction. The story “Flying Home” introduces the theme of the young, ignorant, and educated African-American (Todd) who considers himself above the wise, knowing, but apparently ignorant older working class man (Jefferson), whose knowledge comes from familiarity with life as interpreted in the African-American vernacular. This theme is a familiar one to readers of Invisible Man, as the Invisible Man's youthful, educated ignorance is repeatedly contrasted to the knowledge of older individuals such as the grandfather, Trueblood, the Vet at the Golden Day, Brother Tarp, Mary, or the man with the blueprints who identifies himself as “Peter Wheatstraw” (for an explanation of the vernacular connotations of the name, see Sundquist 1995, 123-24). In each of these instances, it is an African-American working class individual who possesses knowledge (the Vet, who was once a physician, would be an exception but he has fallen in social class). Similarly, even Ellison's well-known essay, “The Little Man at Chelaw Station,” which suggests the importance of the artist performing the best allowed by his or her craft in every instance, is a declaration of the democratic equality of art across boundaries of race and class as well as of the importance of artistic craft. For the essay indicates that even in the most obscure, rundown setting inhabited by the rural poor, the artist might encounter someone who knows the rules of art, and the difference between a good performance and a poor one. The essay ends with a description of the young Ellison's astonishment, when circulating a petition during the Depression, at an encounter with four Black workers in arguing noisily behind the door of a ghetto tenement: “Impossible as it seemed, these foul-mouthed black workingmen were locked in verbal combat over which of two Metropolitan Opera divas was the superior soprano” (1995, 516). Significantly, they are skeptical of the young Ellison's politics, but sign his petition anyway, saying: “‘signing this piece of paper won't do no good, but since Home here is a musician, it won't do no harm to help him out. Let's go along with him’” (518).

There is a vast difference between this assertion of class equality in art and the earlier Ellison's rhetoric of a working class politics. However, one can still observe traces of the earlier rhetoric in Ellison's later writing, as it becomes transformed into his hopes for a pluralistic America that can overcome racism under the sign of democracy. It is his skepticism toward the left and his greater optimism for America that is new. In Invisible Man, where that skepticism and optimism emerge, there remains an elegiac celebration of the political opposition movements of the popular front alongside Ellison's satirical portrayal of American Communism. For much of the finest rhetoric of Invisible Man—including the Invisible Man's speeches at the eviction, at the first Brotherhood rally he attends, and at the funeral of Tod Clifton—takes its energy from the struggles of the popular front against eviction, for black and white class unity, and against lynching and police brutality, struggles which the Invisible Man's rhetoric embraces, sometimes to the chagrin of the Brotherhood's leadership. An extended reading of Invisible Man as a novel of the cultural front, hinted at but not developed in Denning's work, might reveal that much of the energy of Ellison's canonical novel derives from those opposition movements. But regardless of how one reads Invisible Man, Flying Home and Other Stories highlights the extent to which Ellison began his creative work as a political writer, and a writer whose artistic roots are in the political struggles and aesthetics of the cultural front.

In his effort to obscure his connection to the left in the thirties and forties and in his disillusionment with left-wing politics, Ellison (and Cold War writers like him) obscured the origins of an art that he celebrated as separate from social concerns. In de-emphasizing class politics in favor of the politics of pluralism, however, Ellison and the Cold War generation may have made the democratic equality they sought more difficult to achieve. Today, the limitations of a Civil Rights movement that was cut off from the insights of class analysis during its formative Cold War years are only too apparent in the persistent urban poverty of postindustrial America.⁶ In the years after his death, readers may find Ellison's early stories and essays as relevant as his later work as they confront an America still divided by race and class.

Whether or not I am correct about the preferences of twenty-first century readers, the increasing recognition of the importance of Ellison's early work and of other literary works and cultural documents of the cultural front—as well as of the time-bound and ideological nature of the formalist concerns that dominated American literary studies during the Cold War—is part of a larger rethinking of twentieth century literature (see Hoberek 2001). As I suggested at the beginning of this essay, it now appears that the canonization of Invisible Man occurred not only because of that novel's considerable merits, but also because of the way that Ellison's novel appeared at the beginning of a new era in American literary history. But since the Cold War is over, it is easier to see how the literary and ideological assumptions of that era foreclosed an understanding of much of the literature and culture of the thirties and early forties. To place the literature of the cultural front, of which Ellison's early stories are a part, on an equal footing with both the literature of the twenties celebrated by Cold War critics as modernism and the more recent literature celebrated as postmodernism is to unsettle the categories most of us have used to describe twentieth-century American literature. Instead of speaking primarily about modernism and postmodernism, or of dividing twentieth-century literature by decades, we may begin to use the Cold War and the cultural front as primary categories for thinking about—and teaching—twentieth century literature. And the rereading of Ellison that critics like Michael Denning, and Barbara Foley are suggesting (admittedly, in very different ways) would place Ellison within both categories—leading, perhaps, to a continued sense of Ellison's importance.

But Ellison is read not only within the category of American literature, but also within African-American literature. Here, his place as a master of the literature of the vernacular is well established. But as Houston Baker has emphasized, the vernacular grows out of a working-class African-American experience. While the later Ellison resisted the reduction of African-American literature to matters of class or protest, his work was nurtured by the vernacular forms that he loved. While African-American literature and culture should not be reduced to its working class elements, it is important to examine the ways that the African-American experience involves class as well as race. Although it is also worth reading and teaching for other reasons, the African-American contribution to the literature of the cultural front is especially relevant today because it presents models for interracial solidarity that are essential for progress in racial and class equality, as well as insight into the difficulties of building such solidarity. All too often, working class is considered to be a “white” category, while multiculturalism is treated as a code word for consideration of “black” issues. Yet class is also a part of culture (as is the seemingly neutral term “white”), and class may be a more effective source of resistance to political inequality than race, if class becomes a wider source of cultural identification. As Manning Marable has suggested, drawing on the familiar distinction between race as an “artificial social construction” (1991, 188) and culture as a positive source of identification,

the challenge for the future is to destroy and uproot “race” without negating African-Americans ethnic and cultural heritage. The new foundations for progressive black politics would not be “race” as previously understood, but the elimination of social class inequality and privilege, which continues to perpetuate the inferior condition of black Americans and millions of other Americans on the other side of the color line.

(Marable 1991, 219)

Yet despite the hope that class might provide the foundation for a new progressive politics, critics such as Sherry Linkon (1999, 1-11) and Janet Zandy have noted that class has been a mostly absent category in the understanding and teaching of multiculturalism. Zandy observes that it is crucial to focus on class “not because it is the predominant identity but because in recent scholarship it is, in practical terms and use, the missing identifying principle. Like a ghost, it is there but not there, mentioned but not really welcomed into the multicultural conversation” (1994, 10). However, as the presence of recent work in working class studies (including this special issue) indicates, working-class studies is increasingly part of that conversation. In ways he could not have foreseen, Ralph Ellison is also a participant through his early fiction, which critically examines the racial division within the working class as well as possibilities for cross-racial identification. As an established writer and critic, Ellison sought, in the category of a universal literature and an understanding of the American identity as interdependent, to transcend differences of race even while celebrating the uniqueness of African-American cultural traditions. In earlier years, as a writer on the left, Ellison sought a similar yet more radical cross-racial unity in the still unfinished project of articulating an American working class identity.

Notes

1. In an argument that parallels Schaub's, Lawrence Schwartz has suggested that a consensus of the New York Intellectuals and New Critics allowed William Faulkner's reputation to rapidly reverse itself, as Faulkner was transformed from minor novelist to one of the figures in American literature (1988). However, Schwartz also points out that the shift in Faulkner's reputation depended less on Faulkner's actual merits or demerits than on the way he fulfilled the requirements of the new aesthetic that emerged at the dawn of the Cold War. Not surprisingly, both Schaub and Schwartz identify Ellison as part of the new critical consensus.

2. For example, Foley notes that “Ellison's charge that the Brotherhood engineered the 1943 Harlem rebellion echoes the claim made in the 1951 Warner Brothers movie, I Was a Communist for the FBI … that the CP arranged the 1943 rebellions in both Harlem and Detroit” (1997, 542). However, during the Harlem riot, CP leaders joined with other authorities in an attempt to cool down unrest (539). She also claims that Ellison's characterization of Brother Jack is drawn in part from descriptions of a Communist leader variously named as Timmy, Yasha, and Golos in the accounts of professional anticommunists such as Elizabeth Bentley and Louis Budenz (542).

3. Wright was appalled at the effects of party discipline, and at the internal paranoia that led him to be suspected as a traitor because of his attempts to record incidents in the life of Ross, who was put on trial for supposed disloyalty. Wright associates democratic centralism and the “witch hunts” (1993, 433) of the Party against its own membership with the oppression he has experienced in the South: “It was inconceivable to me, though bred in the lap of Southern hate, that a man could not have his say. I had spent a third of my life traveling to the North just to talk freely, to escape the pressure of fear. And now I was facing fear again” (405-06). Wright finds the racial attitudes of Party circles liberating (despite some examples of racism), but he nevertheless finds parallels with the oppression he experienced in the South.

4. In the special issue of Black World, Nick Aaron Ford, Clifford Mason, and John Henrik Clarke all find positive things to say about Invisible Man, however much they dislike some of Ellison's critical comments on race, and John Williams offers only a little negative comment on Ellison for waiting too long to publish a second novel and for being too critical of “younger Black writers for producing second-rate material” (1970, 11). Even less critical is Eugenia Collier, who makes no mention of Ellison's criticism, and of course, Larry Neal, who repudiates his own earlier criticism of Ellison in Black Fire (1968, 652).

5. Foley suggests that the union organizer “with the scarred hand is a familiar type of mentor character from the conventions of proletarian fiction” (1999, 330).

6. Ellen Schrecker has suggested that one of the lasting effects of the Cold War was the way the anti-communism of the McCarthy era limited the Civil Rights movement. McCarthyism “narrowed the movement's agenda, separated it from potential allies, and kept it from seriously challenging the poverty that blighted the lives of most African Americans” (1998, 395).

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