Flying Home

About the Author

Ralph Ellison
was born in Oklahoma City in 1914. He is the author of
Invisible Man
(1952), which won the National Book Award and became one of the most important and influential postwar American novels. He published two volumes of nonfiction,
Shadow and Act
(1964) and
Going to the Territory
(1986), which, together with unpublished speeches and writings, were brought together as
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
in 1995. For more than forty years before his death in 1994, Ralph Ellison lived with his wife, Fanny McConnell, on Riverside Drive in Harlem in New York City.

About the Editor

John F. Callahan
was born in Meriden, Connecticut. He is Morgan S. Odell Professor of Humanities at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His books include
The Illusions of a Nation
and
In the African-American Grain.
He is the editor of the Modern Library edition of
The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison
and is literary executor of Ralph Ellison’s estate.

1.
“You could never tell where you were going,” Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man observed, musing over the twists and turns of his fate. “You started looking for red men and you found them—even though of a different tribe and in a bright new world.” So it was with Ellison’s discovery of his identity as a writer. And so it is with this collection of his short fiction.

“I blundered into writing,” Ellison admitted in a 1961 interview with novelist Richard G. Stern. At first, in Oklahoma from the time he was eight and his mother bought him a used cornet, music was his life. As a high school student, Ellison cut the grass in exchange for trumpet lessons from the conductor Ludwig Hebestreit, who, impressed with his earnestness and talent, also gave him impromptu instruction in orchestration. In 1933, according to his unpublished “Autobiographical Notes,” written before the publication of
Invisible Man
, after “operating an elevator two years at eight dollars a week in a vain effort to save tuition fees,” he was awarded a scholarship to Tuskegee Institute
to study symphonic composition and trumpet with the famed William L. Dawson, whose Tuskegee choir opened Radio City. Unable to afford train fare, he made his way from Oklahoma City to Alabama, hoboing on the freights of half a dozen railroads.

A year after coming to New York in the summer of 1936, hoping—vainly it turned out—to earn the money for his senior-year tuition, Ellison met and struck up a friendship with Richard Wright. Having finished but not yet found a publisher for his first book,
Uncle Tom’s Children
, Wright encouraged Ellison to review a novel for the fall 1937 issue of
New Challenge
, which he co-edited. Ellison complied. “My review was accepted and published,” he recalled, “and so I was hooked.” Yet one review does not make a writer, let alone turn a musician into a fiction writer. Once again Wright intervened, and the shadow of Ellison’s destiny moved closer to the act. “On the basis of this review,” Ellison recalled, “Wright suggested that I try a short story, which I did,” again for
New Challenge.
“I tried to use my knowledge of riding freight trains. He liked the story well enough to accept it, and it got as far as the galley proofs, when it was bumped from the issue because there was too much material. Just after that the magazine failed.” The story was “Hymie’s Bull,” and at the top of the first page of the final typescript, Ellison drew a rectangle around the year 1937 in emphatic black ink. Just where he wrote his apparent first story is not clear. Perhaps he began it in New York, where, after a fling at sculpture, he was still trying to be a musician. Life in New York that summer of 1937 was chaotic for Ellison. Like many with artistic aspirations who came of age in the 1930s, Ellison also agitated on behalf of
Republican Spain, and was involved in the campaign for the release of the Scottsboro boys, nine young black men convicted and sentenced to death on trumped-up charges of gang-raping two white women in a boxcar in Alabama.

Meanwhile, in Dayton, Ohio, Ellison’s mother, Mrs. Ida Bell, who had moved there from Oklahoma City the year before, fell from a porch, and her actual condition—tuberculosis of the hip—was gravely misdiagnosed as arthritis. In mid-October Ellison arrived in Ohio. With only a single short story in progress to his credit, he had no idea he was at the edge of a drastic change in his life. He expected to stay only long enough to see his mother through her illness and convalescence. But he was wrong. And his experience wrenched him away from the inner moorings he thought he had made fast the previous four years at Tuskegee and in New York.

In a letter headed “Dear Folks,” dated October 17, 1937, written from Dayton, probably to relatives or friends back in Oklahoma City, he tells what he had found a few days earlier at the Cincinnati hospital to which his mother had gone when her condition suddenly worsened. “I arrived in Cinn. on Friday at 5:45 to find my mother leaving, and she in such a condition that she was unable to recognize me. At 11:00 next day she was gone. She was in such pain that she knew no one. It is the worse [sic] thing that has ever happened and I can’t explain the emptiness.” Ten days later he writes Richard Wright that his mother’s death marked the end of his childhood. Unlike the pretense of change he’d felt on coming to New York, the loss of his mother “is real, and the most final thing I’ve ever encountered.” His mother’s illness and unexpected death became a painful catalyst, for, as Ellison
later told it in
Shadow and Act
, it was “during the period I started trying seriously to write and that was the breaking point.”