Buy or borrow this book! Support your local independent bookseller
Find it in a WorldCat library
Compare prices at major online bookstores
|
|
Most of us general readers know Ralph Ellison because of his Invisible Man. When it was published 42 years ago, it almost immediately leapt into the ranks of the classics, registering a high-water mark not only in African American literature, but in twentieth century American literature in general.
Through the years there were reports of a further novel or novels in manuscript, but after Invisible Man Ellison published only two collections of essays, Shadow and Act (1964) and Going to the Territory (1986). Invisible Man remains his only published novel.
But not his only published fiction. A few short stories, most from before the novel's publication, appeared in magazines from time to time. Ellison talked of having them collected in book form, but died in 1994 before it could be done.
When his literary executor, John F. Callahan, went through Ellison's effects after his death, he discovered a batch of unpublished stories -- stories that even Ellison's widow hadn't known existed. Those stories allowed him to fulfill the author's wish: taking the best of the published and unpublished stories, Callahan has midwifed Flying Home and Other Stories, to which he has appended a useful introduction.
Normally a short-story collection is the most difficult task in reviewing because the usual grab-bag nature of the beast will not let you get a handle on it. The difficulty does not arise here, however, since all of Ellison's stories deal in one way or another with race. Our unhappy national history has perforce provided Ellison with a theme.
Callahan has chosen his title wisely. "Flying Home," one of the published stories (1944), is without question the best of the 13 pieces here. To the admittedly limited understanding of a white reader like myself, this story of a black Army Air Corps pilot in training in the South during World War II seems to compress within its 27 pages much of the tension of the African American experience. "When you must have [whites] judge you," Todd, the pilot, thinks, "knowing that they never accept your mistakes as your own but hold it against your whole race -- that was humiliation."
Just as Invisible Man tells an African American version of Pilgrim's Progress, so does "Flying Home" update the myth of Icarus. Flying too high and too fast, Todd's plane is brought down, absurdly, by a buzzard. Lying on the ground in pain with a broken ankle, Todd must both deal with an old and comical black "peasant" who tries to help him and suppress his apprehension over the arrival of whites who don't like the idea of black airmen. "Between ignorant black men and condescending whites, his course of flight seemed mapped by the nature of things away from all needed and natural landmarks."
Another wartime story, "In a Strange Country," is more typical of Ellison in that it expresses his urge for interracial unity and harmony -- what Callahan calls his "hunger for democratic equality." A black American merchant seaman, shortly after getting off his ship in Wales, is beaten by fellow-white-Americans, then is heartily welcomed by Welshmen who view him as a "black Yank," a true American. Depending on the meaning you give to "strange," the country of the title is either Wales or America.
It is impossible in one 11-by-4-inch column to give a full idea of the rich variety of these stories. "King of the Bingo Game," for example, is surreal in a way none of the other stories is. A bingo winner, a rural rube, cannot bring himself to let go of the button controlling the spinning wheel that will determine his prize. He is entranced; it energizes him. "This is God!" he says aloud. At the end, when he wins, he loses.
There are the Buster and Riley stories about two boys testing themselves against the world; a couple of stories about riding the freights during the Depression; and "A Party Down at the Square," a horrible story of the lynching of a young black man, told by a shocked, though not necessarily sympathetic, young white man.
Wishing, like the author, that we all could just get along, I save for the end "The Black Ball," a previously unpublished story. Another tale in which hope keeps wanting to rear its lovely head amid the suspicion and fear, it has this exchange between the protagonist and his son:
"Brown's much nicer than white, isn't it, Daddy?"
"Some people think so. But American is better than both, son."
Roger Miller is a freelance writer in Lopez, Pennsylvania. He can be reached at roger_miller@bookpage.com.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.