The Visible Man:
Ralph Ellison
Quincy Troupe
I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL when I first read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. I was about fifteen or sixteen and had just finished reading Richard Wright’s seminal novel, Native Son. I loved Wright’s book, was really knocked out by it and totally identified with Bigger Thomas and his situation. His was my experience, his dreams mine, his anger and frustration what I felt and knew. I could also identify with the young man for whom the “Invisible Man” was named because I was going through the same thing attending an almost all-white high school of three thousand kids—there were seven black kids, including me—who hardly paid attention to me except when I was out on the basketball court. I loved Invisible Man, but the novel was dreamlike, close to being a fantasy, all the scenes so unfamiliar to me. That is, I could identify with what the invisible man was going through but I couldn’t seem to get a grip on the settings he was in; I just hadn’t experienced any of those settings yet, though all of that would change soon after when I went to college.
I attended Grambling, a then all-black college in Louisiana, and the president of the school, Dr. Ralph Jones—who also doubled as my baseball coach—reminded me eerily of the president of the black college in Ellison’s novel, although he was nowhere close to being as evil and manipulative. The vesper services at Grambling also reminded me of the one in Invisible Man. Somehow the novel was becoming clearer to me in college, and after I read it again there, my respect for Ellison grew by leaps and bounds. Over the years, after college, when I decided to become a writer, Ralph Ellison became one of my genuine literary heroes, someone I definitely wanted to meet. After coming to New York City to teach at the College of Staten Island in the early 1970s, I met the late Larry Neal and Albert Murray, who knew Ellison well, socialized with him on a regular basis, so I thought it would be through one of these men that I would meet Ellison. But I was wrong; I would meet him through an altogether different source.
The first time I encountered Ellison was in 1974, at a reception given by the Academy of American Arts and Letters held at the old Museum of Indian History on Broadway and 155th Streets in Harlem. The guest of my longtime friend Ishmael Reed (who had received an Academy Citation at an awards ceremony preceding the reception), I remember seeing Ellison and being shocked when he didn’t applaud when Ishmael’s name was called. Later, at the reception, Ellison came up to us with a drink in his hand and began arguing with Reed about something. Then he called Reed a “gangster and a con artist.” We were shocked. I looked at Ishmael to see if he was going to respond. He just kind of shrugged as Ellison’s wife, Fanny, appearing a little nervous, dragged him away. I remember Ellison’s eyes being on fire that day, red, really angry. Why was he so angry? We hadn’t said anything to him. I don’t know but I think it had something to do with his thinking that Ishmael might be being groomed to replace him—an absurd notion—within the New York literary establishment. I don’t know. I mean, what a way to meet one of your literary heroes!
In 1977, I participated in an interview that Ishmael Reed and Steve Cannon conducted with Ellison. On this occasion Ellison revealed himself to be a witty, charming, absolutely brilliant raconteur, as well as an irascible, cantankerous and tenacious defender of his beliefs. We all got into arguments with him but I remember that he and Reed got into some very heated discussions about literature. Reed asked Ellison why he was always putting our generation of writers down when he had read only a few and didn’t know any of the poets. But Ellison never backed down, although he did seem a little disturbed by our line of questioning. Still, he laughed and joked and reprimanded us throughout the interview.
On the other hand, I remember Mr. Ellison being meek as a lamb during a telephone conversation with the great American poet Sterling Brown (who died in 1989 at the age of eighty-eight). Sterling was staying at my Harlem apartment on one of his periodic visits to New York City from his home in Washington, D.C., around 1982. He asked about Ellison, if I knew him, had his number. I told him that I knew him, that I did have his number. So he asked if I could call him, that he’d like to speak to him because he hadn’t for some time. So I called Ellison and when Fanny answered I told her that Sterling Brown wanted to speak with Ralph, was that possible? She said she was sure it was, then she left and Ralph came on almost immediately, happy to talk with Sterling. After exchanging a few pleasantries I handed the phone to Sterling, who almost immediately—after less than a minute had passed—inquired about the state of Ellison’s long overdue second novel. Now, I don’t know exactly what Ellison was saying to Sterling at his end of the phone but I do remember Brown telling Ralph in no uncertain terms, “Oh, Ralph, just finish the goddamn book and stop all this hand-wringing bullshit. Just finish the goddamn thing, son! Just do it.” I could tell by the tone of the conversation that Ellison wasn’t putting up a fight, that he was indeed being lectured to by the older man. Maybe that’s why Ralph didn’t say anything because Sterling was his elder and Ellison respected him. I never forgot that conversation and every time I saw Ellison after that he would look at me curiously, as if I had set him up.
The only time I was invited to his home was in 1977. I remember his eighth-floor apartment on upper Riverside Avenue in Harlem being full of light, with a fabulous view of the Hudson River and across to New Jersey. Books were everywhere, as were record albums, sculpture pieces, African and otherwise, the walls graced with great paintings by his friend Romare Bearden and other artists of his generation. It was a large, elegant apartment, the kind you imagined a great writer, intellectual or artist would live in. It wasn’t a cold place but had a lived-in, comfortable feeling about it. I recall thinking at the time that it showed taste, was a reflection of a refined sensibility and I remember promising myself that I would one day strive to live like this.
Ralph Ellison was an enigma for many writers of my generation, born as we were a couple of decades after him. We were the so-called “World War II babies” (Ishmael Reed, Haki Madhubuti, the late Toni Cade Bambara, John Edgar Wideman, Al Young, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, Sherley Anne Williams, myself and others) and our view of the world was decidedly more political—almost radical, if you will—than was his. We all thought Ellison a great, seminal twentieth-century American writer, who had exerted a powerful influence on our own writing. We learned from his mastery, held him in very high esteem. And yet our relationship remained strangely vertical. He was “up there” and we were “down here.” We never understood why he insisted upon identifying himself with the term “Negro”—we could appreciate that it was his prerogative to call himself whatever he liked, but he called us Negro, too. We didn’t want to be identified with that term, and that was our prerogative. Yet he insisted upon calling us that anyway and heated arguments ensued when and if we protested. For the most part, Ellison was a conservative man, a product of the “Negro” old school who thought blacks should wage a more rearguard, less confrontational approach toward the American White power structure than my generation was advocating. So he didn’t trust many of us, especially those of us who were still involved in and sympathetic toward the political and cultural ideas that spawned the upheavals of the 1960s. In person he was always unpretentious, unassuming, a charming man, engaging, with a keen, even self-deprecating sense of humor. Still, we sensed an air of aloofness about him, a distance, a sense of always being above the fray, while seemingly swimming around in it. A great conversationalist, he seemed to know a little bit about everything. In other words, his was a formidable personality.
Like Ellison the man, Ellison the writer is complex. Very. A magnificent prose stylist, one of the greatest of this century, in my opinion, his grandeur and his lyrical, powerful poetic gifts evoke and sing the language. This is especially evident in his one published novel. This gift for language, structure and style is also present in snatches of his unfinished, yet unpublished second novel, in a few very good short stories and in many great essays like “The Little Man
at Chehaw Station,” “The Shadow and the Act,” “The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner,” “Going to the Territory,” “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” and others. His essays were gathered in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. However, it is for his great achievement in Invisible Man that Ralph Ellison’s fully deserved reputation finally rests.
When Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952, won that year’s National Book Award for Fiction, he was the first African-American writer (Ellison would prefer that I call him a “Negro” writer here) to win this prestigious award. The award changed Ellison’s life forever. He went from being a respected writer to becoming a famous and venerated one, in a very short period of time. Invisible Man became both a best-seller and an instant classic of American literature. The novel, a picaresque, coming-of-age story of a young African-American unnamed male, explores with astonishing insight the concept of invisibility as experienced by black people in the United States. Besides his page-turning story-telling ability, the lyrical way he uses language throughout to tell the story and the loose twelve-bar blues-based structure of the novel, Ellison also dishes up a rich host of memorable, compelling characters: Trueblood, the man who impregnates his own daughter, and who is treated “fine by the white folks … ” but “the niggers up at the school don’t like” him; Dr. Herbert Bledsoe, the powerful president of the Negro College, who suspends the Invisible Man from school and sends him to New York with sealed letters that say, “Keep this nigger boy running”; blind Reverend Homer Barbee and Mr. Norton, the powerful, rich white northern financier and trustee of the college who stands in awe of Trueblood’s incestuous act because he, too, loves his own daughter. Then there’s the Invisible Man’s grandfather; there’s Tadlock, Halley, Supercargo, Sylvester, Doc Burnside and a whole host of other crazy characters from the Golden Day Saloon. There’s Lucius Brockway, the irascible old black man in the bottom of the Liberty Paint Factory; Tod (“death” in German) Clifton, the disillusioned revolutionary led astray by one-eyed white Brother Jack, leader of the brotherhood party. There’s Brother Tarp, who presents the Invisible Man with “a slave’s leg chain … a link to his past and his future,” Mary and Ellison’s great trickster figure, and master of disguise, Rinehart, who is a preacher, briber, lover, gambler, runner and master confidence man. There’s Ras the Destroyer, the almost mythical black nationalist leader based on the character of Marcus Garvey and a whole panoply of others.
Invisible Man is a novel full of great scenes, set pieces that serve as metaphoric rites of passage. Take, for example, the “battle royal” between the Invisible Man and Jackson. At a smoker, a blond, buck naked, voluptuous young white woman with an American flag tattooed on her stomach dances seductively in front of the Invisible Man and Jackson as drunken white men hoot, jeer and threaten them before throwing heaps of coins on an electrified rug that shocks the blindfolded young men as they are forced to retrieve the money; Mr. Norton’s encounter with Trueblood and his—and the Invisible Man’s—experience at the Golden Day Saloon; the explosion in the Liberty Paint Factory, whose company slogan is “Keep America Pure With Liberty Paints,” with the most celebrated product being a paint called “Optic White,” whose secret is “ten drops of black paint stirred into the white solution”; Lucius Brockway, an old black man, is the keeper of this solution; the Invisible Man’s subsequent symbolic lobotomy, or if you prefer, transformation; the riot scene; encounters with Rinehart and Ras the Destroyer; the 1,369 light bulbs screwed into the Invisible Man’s ceiling, which are kept on all the time so that he can see himself; the Invisible Man almost cutting to death a white man who runs into him on a dark New York City street and then won’t apologize because he refuses to acknowledge his presence; Tod Clifton on a Harlem Street selling Black Sambo dolls, who dance when Clifton pulls their strings; the dolls are effigies of himself; and finally, the Invisible Man’s taking on the role of Rinehart and his confrontations with Bledsoe and Brother Jack. Each of these scenes is a different metaphor for the experience of African-Americans—and indeed all Americans—in the United States. Each scene is a rite of passage that leads ultimately to the Invisible Man’s understanding of his destiny and place within the American society. These metaphors—and so many others in this book—are instructive on so many different levels.
Invisible Man is a polemical, anti-Stalinist, anti-Black Nationalist novel, very American in that it is pro-integrationist in its political, social and cultural outlook. (The irony of this is that it was the very same thing he accused my generation of being—overly polemical and political; although he misread us, thought all of us were dyed-in-the-wool Marxists or Black Nationalists. Some of us were but the majority weren’t.) With the exception of Mary—whose role is still small—there are no major female characters in this book. Women are almost invisible throughout this novel; men, black and white, are everywhere. I’m not accusing Ellison of being a male chauvinist—which he probably was—but I am saying that he and the novel were products of their time, a time when men were always out front and center, dominating, with women pushed to the margins to play minor roles. Still, with these flaws, Invisible Man is a major achievement, one of the great novels of this century, a book I return to time and again.
If I had to pick a character from Ellison’s novel to compare him to, it would be Rinehart the trickster, the master of disguises. Ellison probably saw himself as a Dr. Bledsoe-type figure vis-à-vis the New York literary establishment, and, maybe he was in his lived life. But in his writing, at least for me, he was closer to being a Rinehart figure—sly, unpredictable, slippery, hard to pin down, brilliant and political; in his writing, Ellison was no Uncle Tom but the real thing, whether you agreed with him or not. He was also an astute listener and critic of music, at least of the music produced during his generation. He loved Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and the blues. He was also an avid collector of African art, could speak eloquently about Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, Hale Woodruff, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis and other black painters of his generation. It goes without saying that he was a penetrating reader of American and world literature produced during his generation. His readings and insights into Dostoevsky (whose Notes From Underground had a profound influence on Invisible Man), Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Faulkner, Mark Twain, Henry James, Saul Bellow, James Joyce, Herman Melville, Hawthorne, Stephen Crane and others were absolutely stunning, right on the mark.
At the time of his death on April 16, 1994, at the age of eighty, Ralph Ellison was rumored to be close to completing his long-awaited second novel begun in 1958, tentatively entitled Cadillac Flambé, a 368-page draft of which—Ellison’s only copy—was lost in a fire that destroyed his Plainsfield, Massachusetts, summer home in 1967. Ellison was devastated by the loss and refused on many occasions to discuss the book. Over the years he painstakingly went about reconstructing the novel but was never fully satisfied with its total structure, according to James Alan McPherson, a close friend of Ellison’s and himself a Pulitzer Prize-winning short story writer. I have read sections of the novel—at least eight sections were published. I love the surreality, the wackiness, the beautiful writing.
Ralph Ellison wrote with the sense and timing of a fine jazz or blues musician (which he was; he once played the trumpet). Consider this passage from Invisible Man where Tod Clifton, rapping a street-corner vendor’s pitch, tries to sell his Black Sambo dolls on a Harlem street corner:
Shake it up! Shake it up!
He’s Sambo, the dancing doll, ladies and gentlemen,
Shake him, stretch him by the neck and set him down,
—He’ll do the rest. Yes!
He’ll make you laugh, he’ll make you sigh, si-gh.
He’ll make you want to dance, and dance—
Here you are, ladies and gentlemen, Sambo,
The dancing doll.
Buy one for your baby. Take him to your girlfriend
and she’ll love you, loove you!
He’ll
keep you entertained. He’ll make you weep sweet—
Tears from laughing.
Shake him, shake him, you cannot break him
For he’s Sambo, the dancing, Sambo, the prancing,
Sambo, the entrancing, Sambo Boogie Woogie paper doll.
And all for twenty-five cents, the quarter part of a dollar …
Ladies and Gentlemen, he’ll bring you joy, step up and meet him,
Sambo the …
What makes him happy, what makes him dance,
This Sambo, this jumbo, this high-stepping joy boy?
He’s more than a toy, ladies and gentlemen, he’s Sambo, the dancing doll, the twentieth-century miracle.
Look at that rumba, that suzy-q, he’s Sambo-Boogie,
Sambo-Woogie, you don’t have to feed him, he sleeps collapsed, he’ll kill your depression
And your dispossession, he lives upon the sunshine of your lordly smile
And only twenty-five cents, the brotherly two bits of a dollar because he wants me to eat.
It gives him pleasure to see me eat.
You simply take him and shake him … and he does the rest.
Pure music, poetry, very symbolic of the struggle of black people. Goes right to the core. In the following passage the Invisible Man has come upon an old black man and his wife after they’ve been thrown out of their Harlem apartment. They have been rendered worthless, totally invisible by a system that has never seen or recognized them one single day in all their long lives. In this scene, the Invisible Man talks to the old couple, to people in the crowd that has gathered and gives a speech:
“And look at that old couple … ”
“Yeah, what about Sister and Brother Provo?” he said. “It’s an ungodly shame!”
“And look at their possessions all strewn there on the sidewalk. Just look at their possessions in the snow. How old are you, sir?” I yelled.
“I’m eighty-seven,” the old man said, his voice low and bewildered.
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