Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 40, No.

1, Spring 2001 ( 2001)

Trying to Blow
All Life Through
a Brass Trombone:
Ralph Ellison
Preaches the Blues
ROBERT G. OMEALLY
ABSTRACT: Not only does Ralph Ellisons writing reflect his background as a musician who
played European classics and Southwestern blues-based jazz, and whose fiction reflect the aesthetics of these worlds, but also his work reveals a vital connection to religion. It is OMeallys
contention that Ellison viewed the Negro spiritual and sermon, with their frequent namings of
the troubles of the world, as never more than two steps from the bluesEllsions model and
metaphor for American culture. Ellision blended the two forms in an aesthetic and philosophy of
transcendence that needed both to ring true. The spiritual dimension that always underlies his
project as a writer is explored and developed.
KEY WORDS: jazz; blues; spiritual; church; sermon; invisibility; music; imagination.

Ralph Ellisons novel Juneteenth, whose main characters are preachers and
whose primary setting is the black evangelical church, raises the question of
this writers attitude toward religion. How does Ellisons identity as a church
boy who, as an adult, gave up religious worship as such, relate to his other
identities: as a musician and then as a writer charged with coming to terms
with the entire American scene, sacred and profane? Unlocking this mystery
may present new perspectives on the oeuvre of this writer whose insistence
Robert G. OMeally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Literature at Columbia University,
where he has served on the faculty for thirteen years. His published works include: The Craft of
Ralph Ellison (1980) and Lady Day and the Many Faces of Billie (1991) Seeing Jazz (1997), Lady
Day, Duke Ellington: Beyond Category (1995), and The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998),
which was awarded the ASCAP-Deems Taylor prize in December 1999. Professor OMeally was
nominated for a Grammy for his work as co-producer and author of the The Jazz Singers (1998) a
CD box-set produced by the Smithsonian. Recent collaborations include The DUKE (2000), a
Duke Ellington box-set (five stars from Downbeat Magazine, naming it one of the best recordings of the century) and a re-release of Louis Armstrongs Hot Fives and Sevens (2000). He has
also recently finished a collection of essays for the Modern Library Series, entitled Living with
Music: Ralph Ellisons Essays on Jazz. He lives in New York with his wife, Jacqui Malone, and
their sons Douglass and Gabriel.
15

2001 Blanton-Peale Institute

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Journal of Religion and Health

on the blues as model and metaphor for American culture can obscure the
insistently spiritual dimension always underlying his project as a writer.
It has become a commonplace to consider Ellisons background as a musician who played European classics and Southwestern blues-based jazz, and
whose fiction seems to reflect the aesthetics of one of his music teachers, the
composer William L. Dawson, who used black vernacular ingredients in his
Negro Folk Symphony. Surely Invisible Man and perhaps Juneteenth are
verbal equivalents to Dawsons big project, blues anecdotes scored for the
New World symphony of the modern novel.3 But what about Ellison the
church boy, in services at least once a week through his teen yearsand then
in mandatory chapel at Tuskegee when he was there as a student? It is not
my aim to deny the blues in favor of the spirituals (or the other way round)
but rather to suggest that this writer blended the two forms in an aesthetic
and philosophy of transcendence that needed both forms to ring true. If fullbodied and zestful enough, he says, the blues are fundamentally a spiritual
music anyhow.4 It is my contention that Ellison also views the Negro spiritual
and sermon, with their frequent namings of the troubles of the world, as
never more than two steps from the blues.5
Ellisons parents, Lewis and Ida Ellison, were steady church members. One
of the writers earliest memories of his father, who died when Ralph was
three, finds Lewis playing drums for special services at Avery Chapel A.M.E.
Church, near the familys home in Oklahoma City. Eventually the youngster
was well aware that his father had named him Ralph Waldo, and that the
poet-essayist had been the descendent of a New England ministerial family
and had earned his living as a preacher of the gospel.6 Widowed and on her
own to provide for the family, including now another son Herbert, Ida Ellison
became more and more devout in her religion and soon was serving as a
church leader and stewardess at Avery. For about three years, she worked as
the church buildings janitor; in exchange, the struggling Ellisons moved into
the parsonage itselfwhich, Ralph later noted with pleasure, was furnished
with plenty of novels and other books to explore.7
Placed in Sunday school and church youth groups, Ralph was quite religious in those days, he says. Elsewhere he confesses boredom with most
church meetings themselves. With a writers memory, he recalls that on good
days (and sometimes on Wednesday nights) he heard great preachers in
Oklahoma, and delighted in their variations on frequently preached themes:
the play of the received traditions (Biblical and local vernacular) and the
improvisations by skillful pulpit artists.8 He remembers, too, the naughty delight of playmates after-church parodies of sermons and of such holy staples
as Amazing Grace, which became Amazing grace / How sweet the sound / A
bullfrog slapped your grandma down.9 Juneteenth features a scene with Rev.
Bliss under the gun of his playmates teasing wit as one of them mockpreaches a sermonette on the verities of the letter A.

Robert G. OMeally

17

Brothers and sister [the boy began], ladies and what comes with you, my text
this mawning is A.B.C. Yall dont like to think about such stuff as that but you
better lissen to me. I said A-whew Lord! I says A! Just lissen, just think about it.
A! A! Aaaay! In the beginnin there was A. B. and C. The Father, the son, and
the son-of-a-gun! I want you to think about it. Git in it and out of it. I said
A.B.C., Lawd. . . .
[The boy] shook his head grimly, his mouth turning down at the corners, his
tone becoming soft then rising as he hammered his palm with his fist. A.B.C.
double-down D! Think about the righteous Word. Where we be without A? Nowhere cause its the start. Turn b around what you got? Ill tell you what you got,
you got a doggone d! I say you sinners better mind y alls Abcs and zees!1

Such take-offs and spoofs, the writer later realized, served paradoxically to
siphon off religious doubt and thus to fasten the holds of faith.11 (Indeed this
sermon, though a mockery, served to state an important position for Ellison,
who certainly came to view his role as a writer in relation to The Word [the
Bible] and to the word as mankinds most explicit medium.) Though he appears never to have been among those, like his mother, who shouted for glory
in Avery Chapel, Ralph Ellison grew up with the churchs exalted language,
its hymns and praise-songs (along with the church music of Handel and
Bach), its manners and values, and the sense of a ritual gathering that transformed and undergirded ones lifeall derived from regular attendance at
the neighborhood African Methodist Episcopal church. Though soon after
leaving Tuskegee Ellison would write to Richard Wright of the cultural lag of
those professing wornout Christian ethics,12 many aspects of the church
would stay with him for a lifetime.
Fortunately, Ida Ellison was not so fixed in her religious pieties that she
forbade her sons explorations of worlds beyond the house of prayer. For all
her strictness, she was not a castrator but a circumciser, he told an interviewer.13 An active member of the Socialist Party, this traveler from the Deep
South to Oklahoma in search of broader freedom expected her sons to be alert
participants in the here and the now. As far as music was concerned, though
her beliefs did not permit her to attend public dances or concerts of secular
music, she encouraged Ralphs pursuit of a music career that from the beginning would not mean playing a church organ or leading sanctified choirs.
Ellison honors her memory as one who gave him a sense of the sacred/secular
nexus by permitting him
to leave sunrise Christmas services to attend breakfast dances [and] once expressed the hope that when I completed my musical studies I would have a band
like Ellingtons. I was pleased and puzzled at the time, but now I suspect that
she recognized a certain religious element in Ellingtons music, an element
which has now blossomed forth in compositions of his own form of liturgical
music. Either that, or she accepted the sound of dedication wherever she heard

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Journal of Religion and Health

it, and thus was willing to see Duke as an example of the mysterious way in
which God showed His face in music.14

Oklahoma Citys public dances, where strongly blues-charged music was

played, showed teenage Ellison a world apart from that of church services. So
did his experiences as a drugstore delivery boy who, while on his rounds, had
the chance to observe church leaders sometimes unchurchy private lives.
Moreover, as Ellison the self-declared bookworm dug deeper and deeper into
the public library (an institution he once hailed as the nexus of dreams),
Sunday mornings bright teachings were put to hard tests. Doubtless Shaw,
Neitzche, and Freudoften named by Ellison as early discoveriescast long
shadows over straightforward religious piety.
The local black library had its own history of sacred and profane, including,
at its inception, a stir of political activism. As a boy, Ellison became aware
that Oklahoma Citys black public library was hastily concocted (he always
testified that the haste luckily prevented overorganization at the expense of
the self-propelled reader) through the persistence of a local black minister
who was arrested for trying to do research for his sermon at the local white
library:
It was a drama [said Ellison in 1976] involving a conflict between law and custom, the American right to freedom of information, and the shameful fact of
racial segregation. The tragedy lay in the irrational denial of our admission to a
tax-supported institutiona denial sanctioned by law, by custom, and understructured by group force. The comedy lay in the conflict of wills which led to the
discovery that there was, in fact, no law which denied the use of the public
library to Negroes. And the discovery came about when a man of the Word entered the local storehouse of words to enlarge his store of words for the purpose
of making more eloquent his presentation of the Word of God!15

The result was that Oklahoma Citys first black library was assembled in
one of the rooms of an old pool hall, a juxtaposition in which Ellison the
writer would come to delight.
Through the lens provided by Juneteenthwith its obvious emphasis on
religionone looks again at Ellisons essays and stories, and discovers there
a thick saturation of biblical language. Beginning to write professionally in
the late 1930s, Ellison first conducted fictional experiments relying on the
patterns of social realism and invoking a Marxian master-text that sounded
beneath his scenes turbulent surfaces. Even in this first fiction, it was clear,
as he later divulged, that he was rereading the Bible.16
Led by T.S. Eliot and then by many other writers to anthropology and
myth-and-ritual views of art, Ellison sought, in his stories of the 1930s (most
about hoboing, white violence, and lynch mob hysteria), connections between
immediate raw action and its underlying rituals of whiteness and black sacrifice. At the same time, he was studying European, African, and Native Amer-

Robert G. OMeally

19

ican ceremonies of initiation, scapegoating, death; and the promise of regeneration, of rebirth. To Ellison, rites are there before character; rites are there
to form and to test character and I believe speaking abstractly that this is the
way I want my fiction to work. 17 The young writers drive was to seek in the
particulars of everyday life those abiding patterns (to quote one of his favorite phrases, using a word almost never used outside a specifically religious
context), and to rehearse that same pain, that same pleasure18 that has
bedeviled and then offered a measure of salvation for mankind throughout
the ages. In his fiction, he sought not local color or issue-driven protest alone
but the full palette of the universal, with light from the Bible.
In early and late fiction, he created ritual-laden fictions that involved black
religious heroines, some of them based directly on the example of his religious
but steadfastly practical mother Ida, to whom Invisible Man is dedicated.
Concerning that novels saintlike Mary Rambo, Ellison says (in language
echoing the New Testament): For those. . . . who hunger and thirst for meaning, let them imagine what this country would be without its Marys. Let
them imagine, indeed, what the American Negro would be without the Marys
of our ever-expanding Harlems.19 In Out of the Hospital and Under the
Bara section cut from the final published version of Invisible Manone
gets a wider view of Marys character as a community elder who, using ancient herbal formulas and ritualized words, is instrumental in saving Invisible Man from the factory hospital: from modern racism, northern, urbanstyle.
From the beginning, Ellisons writing typically featured untraditionally
schooled characters like Mary Rambo and Brother Tarp in Invisible Man and
Jefferson in Flying Home (1944)briarpatch-bred black figures who offer
perspective and continuity. These tough characters may or may not read or
write, but they are clairvoyantly literate readers of the cultural terrain they
travel. Perhaps educated (not overeducated) in school, their most significant
training has occurred in such US black institutions as barber and beauty
shops, at home with family adults, in sports arenas pool parlors, music halls,
or churchesspaces where inside secrets are exchanged, where youngsters
learn by example and apprenticeship. (Where they learn most by keeping
their mouths shut.)
Especially through his fiction after 1944, Ellison celebrates these hardknock schools as sites of black memory. Such places of unself-conscious black
independence and cultural exchange inspire an expressional richness and
profundity that somehow eludes most black poets and novelists, he says. In
1967, Ellison spoke of this matter, and again he chose a religious lexicon:
Over and over again when we find bunches of Negroes enjoying themselves,
when theyre feeling good and in a mood of communion, they sit around and
marvel at what a damnable marvelous human being, what a confounding human
type the Negro American really is. . . . And this catalogue soon becomes a brag, a

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Journal of Religion and Health

very exciting chant celebrating the metamorphoses which this individual in

question underwent with the limited circumstances available to us. . . . But
when we Negro Americans start writing, we lose this wonderful capacity for
abstracting and enlarging life. Instead we ask, How do we fit into the sociological terminology?20

Religion and religious institutions play much more significant parts in Invisible Man than first meets the eye. From his vantage-point outside the text
itself, Ellisonwhose glosses, like Faulkners, are never unimportanttells
his readers that Invisible Man isnt a religious individual.21 To an interviewers question of whether or not his character believes in God, Ellison
replies, I suppose he did at the beginning. There are religious moments in
the book, but he was committed to a materialist solution finallyduring his
political activities.22 The novel does offer scenes of revelation, not of God or
gods but of heretofore hidden but deeply significant social or cultural truths:
the abiding patterns of US black (and thus of human) culture.
Truebloods discovery of the power to continue living in his family despite
his own perpetration of evil there presents one such moment:
Finally one night [the farmer says] way early in the morning, I looks up and
sees the stars and I starts singin. I dont mean to, I didnt think bout it, just
start singin. I dont know what it was, some kinda church song, I guess. All I
know is I ends up singin the blues. . . . While Im singin them blues I makes up
my mind that I aint nobody but myself and aint nothin I can do but let whatever is gonna happen, happen. I make up my mind that I was goin back
home. . . .23

In front of white Norton, Invisible Man is embarrassed by the black

farmers lowly status and plain talk. He misses the power of Truebloods alloy
of vernacular forms as shields against despair and chaos.24 Truebloods mixed
church-house/road-house song offers him the armed vision of undeserved forgivenessor, what Ida Ellison would have called the gracehe needs to keep
rolling through a world so unfriendly that some of the most unpredictable
and destructive evils flow directly from material circumstances, yes, but also
from his own miry sins.25
In a sense, the novel is structured as a series of such sometimes surreal
moments of mystery and revelation (for Invisible Man as well as for readers):
the unmasking of President Bledsoe, the sudden awareness of the Golden
Day vets comic brilliance, Brother Jacks blind-eye and double-cross, the
truth of Rine the Rascal, of Dupres independent action, of Ras, etc. The scene
in the subway presenting the three young black men out of time as they tap
their way along the underground platform like dancers in some kind of funeral ceremony is a moment of epiphany that shakes the Invisible Man with
a power like the Holy Ghosts. Who knew, he says, (and now I began to
tremble so violently I had to lean against a refuse can)who knew but that

Robert G. OMeally

21

they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious.26
Fascinating that these revelations typically involve the complexity (at times
the duplicity) of individual motives; in the cases of Dupre and the subway
boys, they suggest the power of the collective (sometimes represented by the
individual) for inspired leadership. At times those with the potential for leadership feel the pressure of an ancestor-figure, as if Frederick Douglass, for
example, whose picture hangs on the wall at the Harlem Brotherhood headquarters, were seeking a successor to carry on his struggles for justice. Here
religion and politics overlap one another in a vision of the power of the inspired common man or woman to save a nation and a world.
Ellisons Working Notes for Invisible Man (only a section of which is included in Ellisons Collected Essays)27 were evidently composed in the mid/late
1940s as part of an effort to win a publishers advance or a foundation grant
for the novel in progress. In that statement Ellison says, quite surprisingly,
that at that point he planned for Invisible Man himself to take his turn as a
man of the cloth! In summary form, Ellison writes that his main character
moves to another part of the city full of resentment. He decides to become a
preacher, the leader of a cult. Has noticed the appeal which the redeemed
criminal holds for folk Negroes announcing himself as such. Ellison eventually elaborates this idea for Invisible Mans progress into the separate character of Rev. Rinehart. But in that early memo Ellison sketches Rev. Invisible
Man as the trickster in clerics robes:
He becomes the leader of a small store-front church into which he introduces
technological gadgets as a means of exploiting the congregationrecording machines, P.A. systems, electric guitars, swing orchestras are all introduced. At this
point he embraces his invisibility, adopting many personalities as he wanders up
and down the main social levels of the city. He feels deep resentment against
society which fails to see him.

This novels most alluring trope, that of invisibility, is best understood in

terms of racial prejudice as well as other forms of cultural psychosis and
blindness. But as Ellison says in Working Notes, invisibility is also something his character wisely embraces. Here the meanings of invisibility multiply. In the black Americans confrontation with US racism, invisibility offers
not only pain and anger but a strategic weapon. Unseen (in the sense of
racially underestimated), Invisible Man realizes that he is ironically freer to
play a very wide variety of parts, including ones of social and artistic commitmentroles uncharted for blacks in white America. Thus the prologues
Louis Armstrong, black and blue (and unseen), has made poetry out of being
invisible.28 For it was Armstrong who took advantage of his place beneath
the social hierarchy to create a more idiosyncratically evocative artusing
the extraordinarily expressive invisible language of music29 than would ever
have been sanctioned by music conservatories of his day.30 Indeed, he used his

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Journal of Religion and Health

position as an invisible musician to become one of centurys most significant

inventors of modernism, an exemplar for Ellison of what could be done by an
alert and ambitious black artist in spite of the whiteness of the official powersystems in America.
(Doubtless young Ellison realized that his own role as an unknown Negro
writer granted him a certain freedom of expression: Nothing at all was expected of him; experimenting with all the derring-do and irreverence he could
muster still left him with nothing to lose. Invisibility left him freer, one suspects, than he was to become after Invisible Man turned him into the celebrated National Book Award winner whose high visibility raised expectations
that the next novel would be even greater than the first.)
This first novels main character seeks not just a hiding place but the
light of invisible imagination, understanding of the unseeable inner self.
Though treated with slashing irony (and thus all the more powerful, considering the doubt-releasing church-humor that Ellison grew up on), the ministry
of Rev. B. P. Rinehart31 suggests this deeper quest. Hustling Rev. Rines handbill speaks in an imperative voice:
BEHOLD THE SEEN UNSEEN
BEHOLD THE INVISIBLE
YE WHO ARE WEARY COME HOME!32

For weary Invisible Man to come home, what he must undergo (as suggested by the authors Working Notes) is a turning from storefront hucksterism, and all that it implies, toward the true spiritual mission of transformed conscience and consciousness, the seen unseen. Or as Ida Ellison
might have put it, his was a case of one needing to get himself together, to get
right with God.
According to Ellison the modernist, rituals underlie comedy and tragedy,
with both forms having vitally sacred aspects. Based primarily on rites of
initiation, courtship, fertility, and marriage, comedy celebrates humanitys
capacity to endure as it affirms lifes joyousness, abundance, and pleasure
beyond any question of ones social status. As a Kenneth Burkean, Ellison
sees the comic frame of reference as the widest window on the world offered
by an artistic form, a perspective that does not waste the worlds rich store of
error.33 The comic character recognizes his or her placement in the sweep of
lifes cosmic flows and absurd ripples, and develops the capacity to stay
afloat. From a comic stance, one is positioned to see around corners and
thus to accept and sometimes to anticipate inevitable defeat with some kind
of a smile: as part of an ongoing larger pattern of continuity and growth. So
through a painful series of fools errands, blindfold tests, and battles royal,
Invisible Man learns the things which hurt me helped me. By degrees he
attains what Burke terms perspective by incongruity, the odd dissonant
laughter that prevents his being permanently disabled by the ineluctable
trouble he sees.

Robert G. OMeally

23

In a very important and overlooked lecture on American laughter,34 Ellison

makes the case that American humor, famously summarized by Henry James
as the American joke, names something definitive of American character:
something that saves.35 For one thing, Americas tall tales and other ritual
jokes help inoculate citizens against turns for the worse in a new land, inevitable distresses despite all promise. These jokes, says Ellison, also help grant
Americans the capacity to live together with other Americans who may look
to them like comical foreigners, the barbaric other. Thus does the callous
humor of stereotypes serve a practical US function. If you can laugh at me,
you dont have to kill me, he told an audience in 1970. If I can laugh at you,
I dont have to kill you. You might not like, and I might not like, the context of
the laughter as projected in stereotypes and distortions and reductions. But
this kind of humor, for all its crudeness, in some instances has allowed the
American people to come together on some sort of workable basis.36
This crude humor of stereotype also serves the unintended function of inviting intimate identification with the very ones butted by the hard punchlines of racial joking. Ellison: It seems that in order to have the insight to
isolate the comic defect . . . within the other person, you have to make the
human identification.37 In this way American humor comprises what Ellison
has called a cementing factor for a fractured nation. It is this aspect of
humor, alongside the sudden awareness of the crazy extremes of white racism, that helps explain the explosions of laughter in Flying Home, Invisible
Man (consider the scene at that first Brotherhood social gathering), On Being the Target of Racism (1989), and An Extravagance of Laughter (1986).
It also helps clarify the refrain of Juneteenth: Master, did you smile? as
Ellisons fiction moves beyond wit and satirewhere one character may seem
ridiculously great or small in relation to anotherto the realm of Gods high,
rocking laughter signifying the real situation of all mere humans, however
great or small they may appear to themselves.38 Laughter provides
Ellisons characters with a new, and perhaps clairvoyant, perspective on the
world in which they live.
Before experimenting with the comic frame as fictional device and cosmic
attitude, Ellison the close student of Wright and Malraux (not known for
their humor) asserted the idea of human life as inherently tragic. In an early
letter to Wright, Ellison describes Negro Americans as the ones whose tragic
visioni.e., whose troubles in white America and unillusioned clarity of
sightgrants them special capacities for national leadership. Drawing from
wide reading of American and European modernists, especially the Spanish
existential philosopher Miguel de Unamuno,39 Ellison developed the view of
humans as animals of bone and blood, born to sickness, suffering, and demise. Uniquely among animals, Homo Erectus is marked to name the things
of the world (here again one thinks of the A-B-C sermon in Juneteenth) and to
strain against all limitations to understand the earth while making it more
rational and fair. So for Ellison, Melvilles Ahab is a tragic hero who embodies and expresses the individuals obligation to discover the extreme limits

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Journal of Religion and Health

of his own possibilities.40 Thus is the mad sea-captain on a spiritual mission.

Does this mean Ahab has assumed the position of God? an interviewer asked
the writer in 1963.
I dont think hes taken over the position of God [Ellison replied]. I think hes
acting as a god-like man, a man who would assume that it is possible to pierce
through the mask and discover ultimates. But that in itself is carrying out a very
profound moral mission in terms of the obligation of human beings to learn as
much as they can about the nature of life. The human being has the obligation to
learn as much as he can about where he is and what he is for several reasons.
The species can only continue to survive and to develop to the extent that this is
donein a disciplined way, one hopes, but if not, it must be done anyway.41

Nor does the tragic heros death prove final failure. In 1972, Ellison observed:
Oedipus is defeated and Christ is defeated . . . and yet they live. Raskolnikov is
defeated; hes found out and sent to Siberia. But theres a promise of redemption.
. . . Youve got an ambiguous movement from defeat to transcendence in those
works. Ahab is defeated but Ishmael isnt. Ishmael brings back the story and the
lesson; hes gone to the underworld and has returned. Gatsby ends up dead but
the narrator does not; he gives us the account. So, you dont have absolute defeat
or absolute victory. You have these ambiguous defeats and survivals which constitute the pattern of all literature. . . . Underlying it most profoundly is the
sense that man dies but his values continue.42

This tragic view of heroism explains why Tod and Bliss, men whose promise (though thwarted) is extraordinarily great, stand at the centers of
Ellisons novels as men who have to die. In Invisible Man it is Tod, whose
name means Death in German, who thus is marked for destruction, but
only in the sense that one plants a heros body to revive a nation. As Bliss/
Sunraider dies, the reader is left to wonder if he has changed enough in his
last hours with Rev. Hickman to qualify to be redeemed. Perhaps at the last
he achieves redemption as what Ellison once termed a flawed white Southerner:
. . . the flawed white Southerner . . . while remaining true to his Southern roots
has confronted the injustices of the past and been redeemed. Such a man, the
myth holds, will do the right thing however great the cost, whether he likes
Negroes or not, and will move with tragic vulnerability toward the broader ideals of American democracy. The figure evoked by this myth is one who will grapple with complex situations that have evolved through history, and is a man who
has so identified with his task that personal considerations have become secondary.43

For Ellison not only the writers characters but writers themselves faced a
duty resembling that of a priest of God, if not a savior. With society not made

Robert G. OMeally

25

by God but by humans, men and women are directly accountable for humanitys acts of justice (and injustice), reason (and unreason). Like certain European Romantics, Ellison believed that the artists profoundest duty was to
create in art a better world and, with eloquence, to lure readers to higher,
brighter ground. Writing is an act of salvation, he wrote to Richard Wright
in 1940: it helps order ones feelings and provides a means of communicating
the truth to others, of warming our frozen brotherswhich all good writing
must do.44
With such lofty and yet functional duties at hand, Ellisons ideal writer
must master the very stern discipline of artistic communicationa concentrated commitment so strong that it achieves the level of a kind of piety or, as
Kenneth Burke put it, a gesture toward perfection.45 The disciplined writer
exemplifies freedom of expression: Old woman, what is this freedom you love
so well? asks Invisible Man in his memoirs prologue. I guess now it aint
nothing but knowing how to say what I got up in my head. . .46 This Flaubertian injunction to excellent technical know-how also suggests the writers
work as visionary with the sacred duty to balance dreams against the jagged,
grainy (as well as hopeful) truth of past and present reality. For the black
American writer, the stakes are particularly high, because the African American story has not been recorded by what Ellison repeatedly terms official
history. He says: One of the ways for getting at many of the complex matters which we experience, but seldom find recorded in official history, is
through art. Art is the mystery which gets left out of history.47
Art also leads to action. In Invisible Man, even music, the most abstract of
the arts, evokes the protagonists response: This familiar music had demanded action.48 Presenting carelessly wrought or otherwise false images,
the writer risks directing the reader into deadly blind alleys and battles
royal. To drive home this point, Ellison compares the writers profession not
only to that of the priest but to that of the medical doctor. The particular
doctor who misdiagnosed his mothers illness caused her death, he has observed. This was a man, Ellison told an interviewer, who did not do his
homework, and the consequence of all of this incompetence, at every level, is
indeed life-destroying.49 In the case of the Southwestern jazz musician Bennie Moten, killed by a surgeons careless hand, the villain was almost
lynched by his own people in their outrage over the discovery that inept medical technique could end the life of a musician whom they revered. . . . Sometimes Afro-Americans have been known to call their own irresponsibles to
account.50
Surely the prose of Ellison the ex-trumpet player aspires to the condition of
music, secular and sacred. In the mid-1950s, as the new novel Juneteenth
was just beginning to roll through Ellisons typewriter, his wife Fanny McConnell told a group of students that when he cannot find the words at the
[machine], he gets up and starts to play the horn.51 My basic sense of artistic form is musical, he said in 1974. I think that basically my instinctive

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Journal of Religion and Health

approach to writing is through sound. A change of mood and mode comes to

me in terms of sound.52 It is not surprising to learn that while writing Juneteenth he would routinely test new work by reading it into his tape-recorder
and then playing it back as he edited the written pages.
Ellison often expresses his ideal of the artists high calling through his
work on music. Again the key word is discipline. For unlike inexperienced
writers who may think deep feeling enough to make them poets, Ellison has
said, musicians cannot so easily delude themselves. Every player of strings,
horns, or drums can testify that no depth of emotion can substitute for the
monster of practice. Again, the communitys own guild polices itself. Ellison
uses the example of the uptown jam sessions during the birth of bebop, members-only encounters where, should any pretenders to technical proficiency
venture onto the stage, the pros would routinely run them off, not, typically,
without rancor.53 The musicians knew that the major responsibility for the
quality of art doesnt belong to the critic or to the public, but to the artist.54
At their best, Ellisons jazz players are at least as priestlike as the writers.
For those he had known in Oklahoma City, the driving motivation was neither money nor fame, but the will to achieve the most eloquent expression of
idea-emotions through the technical mastery of their instruments (which, incidentally, some of them wore as a priest wears the cross).55 The music of
Armstrong, and especially Basieseveral of whose sidemen, including
Jimmy Rushing, Ellison had known as a young man back in Oklahoma
offered the most potently evocative soundtrack to the everyday life of the
Southwesterner. Recalling late-spring nights in bed when he would hear
Jimmy Rushings voice sailing from four blocks away in Slaughters Hall,
Ellison writes:
Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the nightthrobbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains,
departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley,
it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments
of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were, some ideal native to the time and to the land.56

This brilliant essay on Rushing spells out how the Blue Devils Orchestra,
despite its name (referring to barb-wire fences, Ellison has said; and, according to Albert Murray, to fighting planes of World War One as well as to the
blues as trouble and as warriors against trouble), played communal roles
ironically paralleling those of Sunday morning clergy:
Now, thats the Right Reverend Jimmy Rushing preaching now, man, someone
would say. . . . Our wit was true, for Jimmy Rushing, along with the other jazz
musicians whom we knew, had made a choice, had dedicated himself to a mode
of expression and a way of life no less righteously than others dedicated themselves to the church. Jazz and blues did not fit into the scheme of things as

Robert G. OMeally

27

spelled out by our two main institutions, the church and the school, but they
gave expression to attitudes which found no place in these and helped to give our
lives some semblance of wholeness. Jazz and the public jazz dance was a third
institution in our lives, and a vital one, and though Jimmy was far from being a
preacher, he was, as official floor manager or master-of-the-dance at Slaughters
Hall, the leader of a public rite.57

Ritually, jazz players were joy-bringers, brimming with comic wit and wisdom. But their art was also based on what Ellison has famously termed the
near-tragic rhythms, and intonations of the blues. His description of the
blues echoes what he had to say about the tragic heroism of Melvilles Ahab
as it asserts the blues as a music of audaciously heroic steadfastness in the
face of existential dislocation. For the blues artist, meanings
shimmer just beyond the limits of the lyrics. The blues is an art of ambiguity, an
assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstance, whether created by
others or by ones own human failings. They are the only consistent art in the
United States which consistently remind us of our limitations while encouraging
us to see how far we can actually go. When understood in their more profound
implication, they are a corrective, an attempt to draw a line upon mans own
limitless assertion.58

It is significant that Ellison describes jazz and blues at their best as music
not just for the instrumentalist but for also as a highly physical art: for the
singer and the dancerthose body-deep in the blues. Ellison: It was when
Jimmys voice began to soar with the spirit of the blues that the dancers
and the musiciansachieved that feeling of communion which was the true
meaning of the public jazz dance. The blues, the singer, the band and the
dancers formed the vital whole of jazz as an institution form, and even today
neither part is quite complete without the rest. The blues and jazz as communal music for the body as gateway to the soul is writ large in Ellisons
essay on flamenco, which, at its best, also is a communal art of the physicaland-spiritual combined:
In the small rooms in which it is performed there are no squares sitting around
just to be entertained, everyone participates very much as during a non-commercial jam session or a Southern jazz dance. It can be just as noisy and sweaty and
drunken as a Birmingham breakdown. . . . Very often the . . . cantes con baile
(dance songs) sound like a revivalists congregation saying Amen! to the
preacher. . . . Perhaps what attracts us most to flamenco, as it does to the blues,
is the note of unillusioned affirmation of humanity which it embodies. The gypsies, like the slaves, are an outcast though undefeated people who have never
lost their awareness of the physical source of mans most spiritual moments;
even their Christ is a man of flesh and bone who suffered and bled before his
apotheosis. In its more worldly phases the flamenco voice resembles the blues
voice, which mocks the despair stated explicitly in the lyric, and it expresses the

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Journal of Religion and Health

great human joke directed against the universe, that joke which is the secret of
all folklore and myth: that though we be dismembered daily we shall always rise
up again.59

With this background of Ellison on spirituality in and beyond the church,

Juneteenths presentation of a bluesman-turned-preacher as father to a
preacher-turned-politician is all the more complexly resonant. Born a slave,
Rev. Alonzo Zuber Hickman, nicknamed Brother A.Z., is one of Ellisons
Mary Rambolike figures of communal responsibility. Hickman is the novels
wisest man. That old bastard knows how to get under even so initiated and
tough a skin as mine, Ellison wrote to Albert Murray in 1959. He preaches
gut, and that comes from depths and admits no absolute control. All I can do
is ask him hard questions and write down his acts and his answers.60
One of the secrets of Hickmans wisdom is that he begins his professional
life not as a reverend but as a blues trombonist on the territorial circuit. In
one of his remembrances of these secular days, Hickman sets a scene thick in
the briarpatch of the hard-rocking public roadhouse, and again the language,
for all its qualities as a frontier-style brag, also goes to church:
Used to put a number-two washtub full of corn on the table and drink your fill
for a dime a dipperful. And there was Fergusons barbecued ribs with that good
hot sauce, yes; and Pulhams. Gimme a breast of that Guinea hen, Id say, and
make the hot sauce sizzling. All that foolishness. Ha! Me a strapping young
horn-blowing fool with an appetite like a bear and trying to blow all life through
the bell of a brass trombone. Belly-rubbing, dancing and a-stomping off the numbers and everybody trying to give the music a drive like those express trains.
Shaking the bandstand with my big feet, and the boys romping by midnight and
jelly-jelly-jelly in the crowd until the whole house rocked. . . . Surely the Lord
makes an allowance for all that, when youre in the heat of youth. . . .You have to
scream once maybe so you can know what it means to forbear screaming. That
Chock beer, how I exulted in that; rich and fruity mellow. A communion there,
back there in that life. Its own communion and fellowship.61

As a blues-idiom music-maker who has been to the thumping underworld of

the dance hall and back, Hickman has been forged in blue fires where individuality is discovered and shaped. After working-hours, wrote Ellison in
1959 (at a time when he was actively composing Juneteenth), these musicians private jam sessions, comprised a continuing symposium of jazz and
the jazzmans true academy. Ellison continues:
It is here that he [the jazz apprentice] learns tradition, group technique and
style. . . . Here it is more meaningful to speak not of courses of study, of grades
and degrees, but of apprenticeship, ordeals, initiation ceremonies, of rebirth. For
after the jazzman has learned the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional techniques of jazzthe intonations, the mute work, manipulation of timbre,

Robert G. OMeally

29

the body of traditional styleshe must then find himself, must be reborn,
must find, as it were, his soul.62

Like Invisible Man, Juneteenth has at its center another American ritual: a
lynchingthe burned, bloodied ground where white Americans have celebrated their whiteness and the dream of a blackless new nation. This archetypal scene of sacrifice takes the lives of Hickmans mother and the brother
who is falsely accused of fathering a white womans child. In an emotional
episode, the woman gives the newborn boy to Hickman to raise as his own.
Although Bliss (so named by Hickman because his true father is not known,
and ignorance is Bliss) is not Hickmans own nephew, the boys role as the
offspring of racial violence and ritualized black sacrifice makes him a representative American figurein a sense, as Leon Forrest has put it, the baby
Democracy, tossed from hand to hand and born out of wedlock.63 Blisss mysterious birth, abandonment, and adoption mark him for the potential role of
the communitys spiritual son and saviorthe tragic hero who could save the
nation.
In his new role as adoptive father, Blisss Daddy Hickman gradually
leaves the public dance circuit to settle down with a church-house band.
Eventually Hickman creates his own evangelical ministry, now traveling the
road not from barn-dance to dance hall but from one tent-meeting or churchhouse to the other. His years on the bandstand serve Hickman well. As he
prays to God, he meditates on the paradox of the spiritual richness of his
devils-work days in the Deep Souths caverns of the blues:
[D]own there in the craziness of the Southland, in the madhouse of down home,
the old motherland . . . I in all my ignorance and desperation was taught to deal
with the complications of Thy plan, yes, and at a time when I was learning to
live and to glean some sense of how Thy voice could sing through the blues and
even speak through the dirty dozens if only the players were rich-spirited
enough, comical enough, vital enough and enough aware of the disciplines of life.
In the zest and richness Thou were there, yes!64

Moving from one seat of black vernacular independence and excellence to

anotherspaces of self-determination that are immensely important to understanding Ellisons aestheticrev. Hickman learns to preach to the point of
whooping exultation. As his sermons rise to climax, the trombone sound enters his preaching/singing voice; sometimes then he reaches for the battered
silver trombone . . . blowing tones that sounded like his own voice amplified.
Hornlike voice yields to the speech-in-tongues of voicelike horn, persuading,
denouncing, rejoicingmoving beyond words back to the undifferentiated
cry.65
On the night when yet another white woman (entering, as in the realm of
Richard Wrights early short stories, as a harbinger of chaos and black death),
not Blisss mother, breaks up the church meeting. Hickman tries to regain

30

Journal of Religion and Health

order by blowing the old brass horn. But instead of blowing something calming, I was so excited that I broke into the St. Louis Blues, like we used to
when I was a young hellion and a fight would break out at a dance. Hickman
catches himself and smeared into Listen to the Lambs . . . and . . . there I
was half laughing at how my sinful days had tripped me upso it came out
Let Us Break Bread Together. 66 The blues and the spiritual together again,
recalling Truebloods blue gospel songhere lifted by voice and by instrument
along with Hickmans laughtercomprise the doubled and tripled power of
Hickmans expression: his black song at the juncture of tragedy and comedy,
secular and sacred, voice and horn, words themselves and the cry beyond
words into the peculiar articulacies of pure sound, the undifferentiated cry.
In this case the chaos wrought by the white female intruder is too great to be
contained, and in the confusion Bliss begins to wonder and to wander.
Two of the novels great sermons, both first printed in the 1960s as fragments from the novel-in-progress (And Hickman Arrives, 1960, and Juneteenth, 1965) probe these Ellisonian junctures that grant the book as a
whole its multiplied power. The sermon from And Hickman Arrives (Juneteenths chapters four and eight) concerns Jesuss death and resurrection. Implicitly too, it explores the African Americans as the nations hope for redemption in the land of injustice and random death they travel. And true to
the thrust of the Civil Rights Movement of the mid- to late-1950s, Hickmans
message is of the redemptive value in the communitys standing up for what
you believe, in facing pain and death with hope for rebirth on a better day
ahead.
To intensify the drama of Hickmans Easter sermon, a white coffin has been
conspicuously placed before the congregation; at sermons climax, the boypreacher Bliss sits up from inside the box to ask in his piccolo voice: Father,
why has thou forsaken me? In anticipation of this electrifying moment, Hickman preaches in response to Deacon Wilhites rhythmical recitations of lines
from the Bible, with their voices call and countercall becoming decidedly
jazzlike. Daddy Hickman began spelling out the text which Deacon Wilhite
read, recalls Bliss, playing variations on the verses just as he did with his
trombone when he really felt like signifying on a tune the choir was singing.
. . . Oh my Lord, just look how the bright word leaps! Daddy Hickman said.67
Here again spiritual message blends with the blues. Both forms involve the
suffering of flesh and bone, cleansing attacks against the devil (or blue
devils), and, as Ellison says in his essay on flamenco, the hope to rise up
again. As Juneteenth opens, Bliss, now passing for white and transformed
into the Negro-hating Senator Adam Sunraider, is shot down on the floor of
the US Senate. As he goes down, he repeats the Christs cry of his tent meeting days (another of the novels important refrains): Lord . . . Lord . . . WHY
HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME? It is a question Hickman and Blisss old
church members could well ask of Bliss/Sunraider himself.
The sermon that Ellison first published as Juneteenth (the fragments

Robert G. OMeally

31

title chosen by John Callahan for the novel as published) memorializes June
19, 1865, the day of the Emancipation Proclamation and thus of the African
American slaves promise of freedom in the United States. On Juneteenth, socalled because news of freedom arrived not all on one day but over the weeks
and months following the vaunted great dayblacks have traditionally remembered their day of Jubilee with parades, feasts, dances, contests, and
speeches on the history memory of black people and the meaning of delayed
freedom. In the larger frame, this eloquent sermon again reflects on Americas promise of freedom and of humanitys ongoing hope for redemption in
the face of the ineffable fate to suffer and to die.
Unable to fathom the sermons rich mixes of jazz and the sacred, politics
and religion, spiritual form and mere commercialized showbiz makeup, Bliss/
Sunraider wishes he could shake off the bad dream of Juneteenths remembered message:
No, the wounded man thought, Oh no! Get back to that; back to a bunch of oldfashioned Negroes celebrating an illusion of emancipation, and getting it mixed
up with the Resurrection, minstrel shows and vaudeville routines? . . . In
strange towns and cities the jazz musicians were always around him. Jazz. What
was jazz and what religion back there? . . . Was he [Hickman] a charlatan? Am
Ior simply as resourceful in my fashion? Did he know himself, or care? Back to
the problem of all that.68

Like a jazz musician working with the blues along with pop songs and
other forms (not excluding European classics), Hickman builds the Juneteenth sermon on fragmented variations of the Old Testament and of US
black vernacular sermons like The Valley of Dry Bones. Representing the
younger generation with his high, clear voice, Bliss (now echoing Henry
Jamess famous paragraphs of cultural elements not found in America as well
as parodying those who overemphasize slaverys capacity to denude the
slaves of their culture) counts the parts of life stripped from Africans in the
New World. Count it Rev. Bliss, says Hickman. In a comedy of virtuoso
naming, Bliss preaches in dialogue with Hickman, saying that black slaves
were
Left eyeless, earless, noseless, throatless, teethless, tongueless, handless, feetless, armless, wrongless, rightless, harmless, drumless, danceless, songless,
hornless, soundless, sightless, wrongless, rightless, motherless, fatherless, sisterless, brotherless, plowless, muleless, foodless, mindlessand Godless, Rev.
Hickman, did you say Godless?
. . . At first, Rev. Bliss, he said, his trombone entering his voice, broad, somber
and noble. At first. Ah, but though divided and scattered, ground down and bettered into the earth like a spike being pounded by a ten-pound sledge, we were
on the ground and in the earth and the earth was red and black like the earth of
Africa. And as we moldered underground we were mixed with this land. We

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Journal of Religion and Health

liked it. It fitted us fine. It was in us and we were in it. And thenpraise God
deep in the ground, deep in the womb of this land, we began to stir! . . .
What was it like then, Rev. Bliss? You read the scriptures, so tell us. Give us a
word.
WE WERE LIKE THE VALLEY OF DRY BONES!69

As Hickman and Bliss reenact the tale of black revival in America, the
performance-in-dialogue becomes more and more jazzlike in its comic interplay:
Lord, we were dead! Except . . . Except . . .
. . . Except what, Rev. Hickman?
Except for one nerve left from our ear . . .
Listen to him!
And one nerve in the soles of our feet . . .
. . . Just watch me point it out, brothers and sisters . . .
Amen, Bliss, you point it out . . . and one nerve left from the throat . . .
. . . From our throatright here!
. . . Teeth . . . Tongue . . . And another nerve left from our heart,
. . . All stirring in the ground
. . . Amen, stirring, and right there in the midst of all our death and buriedness, the voice of God spoke down the Word . . .
. . . Crying Do! Crying Doooo
these dry bones live?
He said: Son of Man . . . under the ground, ha!
Heatless beneath the roots of plants and trees . . .
Son of Man, do . . .
I said, Do . . .
. . . I said, Do, Son of Man, Doooooo!these dry bones live?
Amen!70

In keeping with Ellisons tragic and comic sense of life, the Juneteenth
sermon yearns for continuity and community in the American landoffers
the hope, that is, of rebirth. A man doesnt live just one life, Bliss, Hickman
says, he lives more lives than a catonly he doesnt like to face it because
the bitter is there nine times nine, right along with the sweet he wants all
the time. So he forgets.71
In this chapter Ellison offers of his clearest statements about US black
vernacular culture as a defense against white oppression. Hickman:
Remember that when the labors back-breaking and bossmans mean our singing
can lift us up. That it can strengthen us and make his meanness but the flyspeck
irritation of an empty man. Roll with the blow like ole Jack Johnson. Dance on
out of his way like Williams and Walker. Keep to the rhythm and youll keep to
life.72

Robert G. OMeally

33

This sense of African American cultural rhythm as a life-line has vital implications for a people facing short haul master plots of history rendering
them invisible. Building toward a crescendo on this point concerning history,
Hickman says:
They had us bound but we had our kind of time, Rev. Bliss. They were on a
merry-go-round that they couldnt control but we learned to beat time from the
seasons. . . . They couldnt divide us now. Because anywhere they dragged us we
throbbed in time together. If we got a chance to sing, we sang the same song. If
we got a chance to dance, we beat back hard times and tribulations with the clap
of our hands and the beat of our feet, and it was the same dance.73

Not only can blacks save themselves through Godly connectedness and cultural memory; eventually, as Ellison asserted from the early forties through
the end of his life, blacks become the disciplined ones with the armed vision
and the timing required to save the country. Time will come round when
well have to be their eyes; time will swing and turn back around, says Hickman. I tell you, time shall swing and spiral back around.
Why Bliss becomes a racist is the white whale of this book. Clearly, as
Priscilla Wald has argued concerning white racism in general, uneasiness
about his own racial status and purity helps turn Bliss against his black
family.74 In confusion and fear concerning the complexity of his omni-American identity (not just black and white, but, as Juneteenth makes clear, also
Native American and Asian), the white racist opts to remain partial, to adopt
only the white part of his heritage, to deny the rest. This, says Ellison, helps
explain the new white immigrants conventional impulse to declare antiblackness as they first enter the nation, lest they be designated the newest
untouchables, the newest niggers. This fear of paying the price of living
black partly explains Blisss betrayal: he will escape personal candidacy for
the lynching bee if he simplifies his identity by getting shut of the black boy
who caused all the confusion. Of course, the trouble, in a centerpiece Ellisonism, is that the enemy he would remove is himself, is Blissthe name now
implying the zest and joy of spiritual peace.
In a sense, this novels central question restates in full-dress form the case
made in Ellisons essay called What America Would Be Like Without
Blackswhere the author enumerates the major black aspects of culture
and consciousness in the United States: the blackness of whiteness, the
whiteness of blackness: There is a des and dos of slave speech sounding
beneath our most polished Harvard accents, writes Ellison in that essay of
1970, and if there is such a thing as a Yale accent, there is a Negro wail it
doubtless introduced there by Old Yalie John C. Calhoun, who probably got it
from his mammy.75
Simply put, Bliss/Sunraider turns against his black family for his own selfishness and convenience; he steps to the side of the difficult path that Ellison

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Journal of Religion and Health

often calls the discipline of living black in an America that denies black
humanness. He passes for white because he confuses the uses of showmanship to deliver Gods word, and the uses of (the also sometimes sacred) stage
drama or the movies merely for tinsel entertainment or self-aggrandizement,
and escape. He loses himself, in other words, in the funhouse of the United
States of Jokeocracy, where appearances and reality (like sacred and profane)
twist and tangle. Bliss becomes white quite simply as a leap toward the simplicity of easy formulaic answers (white is right); he leaps for the easy
money and for personal and political gain.
Perhaps most tellingly, he chooses the old American stances of innocence
and hubris over the more demandingly ironical and regenerative perspectives
represented by Hickman, Ellisons musician and man of the word. Bliss/Sunraider loses his tragic Hickmanesque capacity to cope with the old good/bad
of everyday life: the white in the black, the black in the white; the sacred in
the secular, the secular in the sacred. As he gives up the tragic sense of life he
also loses his perspective of comedy. Remember, said Ellison in 1974, that
the antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony.76
Oddly enough, some of the novels most compelling solutions to Blisss problem of identityand implicitly to the problem of living as one people in the
United Statesare offered by Senator Sunraider himself, who, just before he
spews another of his notorious blasts of racist rhetoric, preaches the decadesold Ellisonian texts of chiasmus, ambiguity double-vision, and tolerance. We
can work together, Bliss/Sunraider says, [t]hrough a balanced consciousness
of unity in diversity and diversity in unity, through a willed and conscious
balance . . . so easy to say yet so difficult to maintain. How can the dark
and the light live together? Why, says Bliss/Sunraider, by seeking ever
the darkness in lightness and the lightness in darkness. . . . We filter and
blend the spectrum, we exalt and we anguish, we order the world.77
Bliss/Sunraider is close to pronouncing Ellisons own oft-repeated conviction that although we fall short, our goal as Americans is to live up to the
sacred principles set down in the nations founding documents. Using language close to the Senators, Ellison wrote in 1977:
The rock, the terrain upon which we struggle, is itself abstract, a terrain of ideas
that, although man-made, exert the compelling force of the ideal, of the sublime;
ideas that draw their power from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. We stand, as we say, united in the name of these
sacred principles. But, indeed, it is in the name of these same principles that we
ceaselessly contend, affirming our ideal even as we do them violence.78

The corrupted Senator shows his down-home lineage by offering a jazz

players solution to the most radical problems of democracy in a land based
on breaking with Old World patterns while creating the new. We seek not
perfection, he says, but coordination. Not sterile stability but creative mo-

Robert G. OMeally

35

mentum. Ours is a youthful nation: the perfection we seek is futuristic and to

be made manifest in creative action.79 The solution, in other words, is to face
up to the tragicomic arc of historythe deep bedrock of the bluesand to
remain poised and optimistic of what Ida Ellison knew as Gods grace; ready
and resilient concerning the jazz and blues players ability to improvise:
ready to swing.
Ellison the church-boy gave up Sunday services but remained true to the
language of the Bible and of the black pulpit. From the mid-forties on,
Ellisons prose is saturated with references to these institutions. And in this
work he routinely speaks of secular institutions operating at their best when
leading to communion, soul, discipline (with awareness of the words relation to disciple), redemption, rebirth, and other aspects of the sacred.
No surprise that his second novel appears in the form of a series of confessions, prayers, and sermons delivered by a former blues man who preaches
with his old dancehall horn always at the ready. No surprise either that when
most inspired the Revs. Hickman and Bliss preach a kind of gospel of the
blues: a near-tragic, near-comic realism tempered by irony and laughter
spelling what hope there is in a weary landnot for unreachable perfection
but for swinging coordination and equipoise, the blues-preachers most solid
rock.

References
1. Conversations with Ralph Ellison, ed. Maryemma Graham and Amrijit Singh (Jackson: U of
Mississippi P, 1995) 28384.
2. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952) 88.
3. In fact Dawsons Negro Folk Symphony includes references to both sacred and secular
expression; and finally Dawson has been best known for his arrangements of the Negro
spirituals.
4. See Juneteenth (New York: Random House, 1999) 26768.
5. This perspective is spelled out in James Cones The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Seabury Press, 1972).
6. In Juneteenth, Rev. Hickman says to the boy-preacher Bliss: Whos Emerson? He was a
preacher too. . . . Just like you. He wrote a heap of stuff and he was what is called a philosopher. Main thing though is that he knew that every tub has to sit on its bottom (45).
7. These biographical data come from Robert G. OMeallys The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979).
8. Interview on radio station KVTV (Oklahoma City), 19 June 1975.
9. Authors interview with Ellison, May 8, 1976.
10. Juneteenth 50.
11. Authors interview.
12. Ellison to Wright, April 22, 1940; Yale Collection of American Literature, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, Yale University.
13. Conversations 19697. Here he speaks of Ida Ellison as well as the Mary Rambos of his
fiction. Ellison: The treatment of Mary as a dominant figure is natural for me. I was raised
by my mother, my father died quite early, so she had to be strong, but I never felt that she
emasculated me because she always insisted upon my achieving manliness and responsibility. So, Id say that you would be closer to the truth if you say the early women in my
fiction from the perspective of Mark Twain; in terms of the symbolism of woman standing for

36

14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.

21.
22.
23.
24.
25.

26.
27.
28.
29.
30.

31.
32.
33.

Journal of Religion and Health

established values rather than as, in Freudian terms, castrators. I would say that they were
circumcisers. A Coupla Scalped Indians, Ellison short story of 1957 (in Flying Home and
Other Stories [New York: Random House, 1997]), tells of two black boys whose walk toward
manhood involves literal circumcision and an encounter with an uncannily old-young woman
who, despite her evident madness, serves as a magical maternal figure, readying Riley for
the harshness and the mystery of growing up male in a world of men and women and much
trouble. Note too that with this insistence on the black mother as strong but not destructive
of black manhood, Ellison takes aim at Patrick Moynihan and others who have insisted on
the brokenness of black, matrilineal families, and then on the pathological state of the black
community in the United States.
Collected Essays 679.
From the speech Ellison delivered on the occasion of the dedication of the Ralph Ellison
Public Library in Oklahoma City on grounds, he said, where he had first hunted for rabbits.
June 21, 1975.
Conversations 124.
Conversations 261.
Cf. Richard G. Stern, That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview, The Collected
Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John Callahan (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1995) 63
80.
Out of the Hospital and Under the Bar, Soon One Morning, ed. Herbert Hill (New York:
Knopf, 1968) 24344.
When Ellison completed Invisible Man, he wrote (on June 6, 1951) to his friend Albert Murray that his editor was having a time deciding what kind of novel it is, and I cant help him.
For me its just a big fat ole Negro lie, meant to be told during cotton picking time over a
water bucket full of corn [whisky], with the dipper passing back and forth at a good fast clip
so that no one, not even the narrator himself, will realize how utterly preposterous the lie
really is. Trading Twelves (New York: Random House, 2000).
Conversations 75.
Conversations 75.
Invisible Man 51.
Chaos names the condition against which characters struggle throughout Ellisons fiction
and essays, and is a key word in Ellisons lexicon.
Sadly, Ellisons vision of tragic heroism does not quite encompass Truebloods wife and
daughter as rounded characters. When Ellison says all the characters, not just Invisible
Man, are me, he certainly includes Jim Trueblood but not, evidently, Matty Lou or Kate
Trueblood, who, like most of Ellisons female characters, are fixed markers on the male
heroes way to self-realization. (Exceptions, in fiction and essays, include Clara in The
Birthmark [1938]; Ellisons mother and other Marys of black America; and some of his
teachers, notably Mrs. Zelia Breaux, the music teacher and owner of the Aldridge Theater in
Oklahoma City. In the essay Going to the Territory Ellison describes Mrs. Breaux as a sort
of second mother (Collected Essay 604).
Invisible Man 333.
The whole document may be found at the rare book and manuscript room at Columbia University in New York.
Invisible Man 6.
Note Duke Ellingtons telling confession that he wrote poetry but did not like to show it to
anyone. You can say anything you want on the trombone, he said, but you gotta be careful
with words. Mark Tucker, ed., The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford UP, 1993) 238.
Note too that between the beams of the sound of Armstrongs rendition of What Did I do to
be So Black and Blue? (that bluesy show tune-become-protest song), Invisible Man hears
an old woman singing a spiritual as full of Weltschmerz as flamenco and a shouted sermon
preached in dialogue with a congregation of voices. Invisible Man 68.
From beyond the text itself, Ellison explains that these initials stand for Proteus and
Bliss. Collected Essays 110. It is fascinating to think of this reverend as an antecedent of
the second novels Rev. Bliss, also a leader/betrayer of his black congregation.
Invisible Man 374.
Here I refer mainly to Burkes Attitudes Toward History (New York: New Republic, 1937),
particularly 170ff; see also Robert G. OMeallys Ellisons Boomerang of History in Ge-

Robert G. OMeally

34.
35.
36.
37.
38.

39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.

56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.

37

nevieve Fabre and Robert G. OMeally, eds. History and Memory in African American Culture (New York: Oxford UP. 1989).
Ellisons American Humor is an appendix to the Fisk University doctoral dissertation by
Elwyn E. Breaux: Comic Elements in Selected Prose Works by James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison,
and Langston Hughes, May 1971.
Jamess statement in Hawthorne is important to Constance Rourkes American Humor (New
York: Harcourt, 1931), a key book for Ellison.
Ellison, American Humor 148.
Ellison, American Humor 15253.
(Cash) says: The humorist sees a totality which embraces both the ridiculous (the finite
small) and the sublime (the finite immense knowable only to the intellect), setting the two
side by side. He may degrade the great or elevate the small, but his ultimate purpose is to
destroy both because everything is equal and nothing before the infinite (19).
See The Tragic Sense of Life, first published in 1913.
Conversations 225.
Conversations 78.
Conversations 22526.
Collected Essays 561.
Ellison to Wright: November 3, 1940; Yale Collection of American Literature, Yale University.
See Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1961, 1970) 302.
Invisible Man 9.
Collected Essays 835.
Invisible Man 10.
Conversations 223.
Conversations 330.
Vilgot Sjoman, En Val Synlig Man Dagens Nyheter (January 3, 1955): 4.
Conversations 283.
Collected Essays 246.
Conversations 344.
Collected Essays 229. This discussion owes something to Travis A. Jackson (University of
Michigan), whose work on young jazz musicians on the New York scene of the late 1990s
revealed the desire on their part to make music that sought a spiritual dimension: To take
their music to the next level.
Collected Essays 274.
Collected Essays 27475.
Collected Essays 277.
Collected Essays 1011.
Ellison to Albert Murray of June 27, 1959; in Trading Twelves.
Juneteenth 31819.
Collected Essays 245.
Conversations 215.
Juneteenth 267.
Juneteenth 11617.
Juneteenth 169.
Juneteenth 14647.
Juneteenth 11617.
Juneteenth 125.
Juneteenth 12526.
Juneteenth 223.
Juneteenth 330.
Juneteenth 130.
Priscilla Wald, Constituting Americans (Durham: Duke UP, 1995).
Collected Essays 581.
Collected Essays 425.
Juneteenth 19.
Collected Essays 501.
Juneteenth 20.

38

Journal of Religion and Health

Envoi: To Barry Ulanov

With humility, and a degree of trepidation, I dedicate this essay to the memory of Barry Ulanov, someone I deeply admired. He and I shared several linkages which continue to mean a great deal to me. Before meeting him in person, I met him or the page, and found his biography of Duke Ellington and
his History of Jazz in America two of the most broadly learned and valuable
books on the shelf of jazz writing. In both those works, Barry was searching
for much more than historical datum: within the granite of the lives he described, he sought the rainbows. For Barry, these books, and his many articles about jazz, were occasions for wonder about the meaning of art on the
American scene, about mans precarious fate, about the need for expression
and significance in our time. So even when writing about an obscure trumpet
player, or a forgotten impulse in jazz piano-playing, for example, Barry was
raising questions of aesthetics and philosophy, art and the divine.
He understood that jazz artists at their best, like serious artists everywhere working in all forms, sought to offer more than entertainment (as complicated as it can be to entertain a sophisticated audience). Thus, as he told
me, he regarded Billie Holiday as a brilliant woman, and deeply spiritual.
Anyone who ever talked with her would know what I mean, he once told me
as we stood on Broadway near his home. With Duke Ellington, the sacred
concerts made his spiritual questing obvious. But it was just as evident in
Billie. She could be so quiet, so brilliantly intense, so eloquent.
Before we met, I had heard about Barry from the novelist Albert Murray,
who often spoke of him warmly. From Murray I gained a sense of Barry as a
Barnard professor of English, the one who had invited Ralph Ellison and
Albert Murray to the campus, and who also had invited Fred Astaire to come
to class to talk to his students; the one who led special sessions on the meanings of jazz.
When I came to Barnard in 1989, I was given Barrys old office, left behind
when he took over his new position at Union Theological. I always felt his
aura in that space, 408D Barnard Hall. And as my interest in jazz, as an
amateur player and fan, became a professional concern, I was very aware of
Barrys role as a teacher of literature who also wrote about jazz, and who
wondered what the relationship was between a concert by Ellington and a
play by Shakespeare. (Barry and I once had a lovely talk about Ellingtons
Shakespearian piece, Such Sweet Thunder.) We talked from time to time,
over our shared ten years in Morningside Heights, about God, about literature, about jazz. He once told me of his great admiration for Ellingtons sacred concert piece called TGTT (Too Good to Title).
That was true of Barry himself. As an intellectual, he defied categorization.
More than a jazz writer, more than an English professor or scholar of religion
and psychology, he was too good to title. I miss his wisdom, his breadth of
learning, his questing mind, his warmth. And I do hope that this essay on

Robert G. OMeally

39

Ralph Ellison the churchboy will win a particle of Barrys approval. And may
God bless this model of intellectual/spiritual questing, this wonderful man.
What is the old phrase:the planned dislocation of the senses? That is the
condition of fiction, I think. Here is where sound becomes sight and sight becomes sound, and whose sign becomes symbol and symbol becomes sign.
Ralph Ellison, 19741
Listen to me, the bungling bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombones timbre, playing thematic variations like a baritone horn.
Ellisons Invisible Man, 19522

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