Flying Home (22 page)

“Think you can manage it, boy?”

“I think I can, suh,” Teddy said.

“Well, you better go behind then, and let yo pa go ahead so’s to keep that leg elevated.”

He saw the white men walking ahead as Jefferson and the boy carried him along in silence. Then they were pausing, and he felt a hand wiping his face, then he was moving again. And it was as though he had been lifted out of his isolation, back into the world of men. A new current of communication flowed between the man and boy and himself. They moved him gently. Far away he heard a mocking-bird
liquidly calling. He raised his eyes, seeing a buzzard poised unmoving in space. For a moment the whole afternoon seemed suspended, and he waited for the horror to seize him again. Then like a song within his head he heard the boy’s soft humming and saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold.

“[One] of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life.”

—
Washington Post Book World

GOING TO THE TERRITORY

The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America’s most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In
Going to the Territory
, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.

Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-76001-6

INVISIBLE MAN

First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece,
Invisible Man
is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison’s nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73276-4

SHADOW AND ACT

With intellectual incisiveness and stylish, supple prose, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker,
The Birth of a Nation
and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem. Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of
Invisible Man.

Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-76000-8

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