Chapter One
In the Territory: 1913–1931
There is no ancestor
so powerful as one’s earlier selves.
—Lewis Mumford (1929)
Decades after the blazing
hot afternoon in June 1933 when Ralph Ellison, in
his first and last outing as a hobo, climbed fearfully
and yet eagerly aboard a smoky freight train leaving
Oklahoma City on a dangerous journey that he hoped
would take him to college in Tuskegee, Alabama, his
memories of growing up in Oklahoma continued both
to haunt and to inspire him. For a long time he had
suppressed those memories; then the time came when
he began to crave them.
The turning point had been
his triumph in 1952 with his novel Invisible Man.
That success had led to a cascading flow of honors
such as no other African-American writer had ever
enjoyed. In 1953, he won the National Book Award,
besting The Old Man and the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway,
one of his idols. Later, the American Academy of Arts
and Letters elected him a member, one of the fifty
distinguished American men and women who formed its
inner core. At the White House, first Lyndon B. Johnson
and then Ronald Reagan awarded him presidential medals.
At the behest of the novelist and critic André
Malraux, another of his idols, France made him a Chevalier
of the Order of Arts and Letters. The most venerable
social club in America connected to the arts, the
Century, in New York, elected him as its first black
member. Harvard University, awarding him an honorary
degree, offered him a professorship. Never out of
print and translated into more than twenty languages,
Invisible Man maintains its reputation as one of the
jewels of twentieth-century American fiction.
Ellison’s triumph in
1952 had also led to a tangled mess of fears and doubts
about his ability to finish a second novel at least
as fine as Invisible Man. By the time of his death
in 1994, his failure to produce that second novel
had made Ellison, a proud man, the butt of surreptitious
jokes and cruel remarks. The snickering and giggling
behind his back often left him prickly and tart, if
not downright hostile. Clinging fearlessly and stubbornly
to the ideal of harmonious racial integration in America,
he found it hard to negotiate the treacherous currents
of American life in the volatile 1960s and 1970s.
Although he always saw himself as above all an artist,
and published a dazzling book of cultural commentary
in 1964, his later successes were relatively modest.
For some of his critics, his life was finally a cautionary
tale to be told against the dangers of elitism and
alienation, and especially alienation from other blacks.
For his admirers, however, no one who had written
Invisible Man and so skillfully explicated the matter
of race and American culture in his essays could ever
be accounted a failure. To some people—younger
black writers mainly—who hoped and perhaps even
expected him to help them, he frequently seemed cold
and stingy. To others—whites especially—he
was a man of grace, intelligence, wit, and courage
who saw his nation with prophetic optimism and clarity.
Each of these conflicting
views had, at the very least, an element of truth—and
the roots of these conflicts may be traced, not surprisingly,
to his upbringing in Oklahoma. Seeking artistic inspiration
as the decades passed, he turned more and more to
memories of his youth in what once had been the old
Indian and Oklahoma territories. From this virgin
land—as both whites and blacks saw it—the
state of Oklahoma had been carved in 1907. Certainly
he had no interest in living as a mature man in Oklahoma.
It was more than enough for him to brood on the past,
and to come back every seven years or so to visit
the old neighborhoods, talk with old friends, bask
in the glow of his celebrity, and revive his creativity
at its ancestral source. On these visits, he looked
sorrowfully on the banal evidence of “progress”
and “urban renewal” that marred the city,
and even more sadly on the spectral presence of those
old friends now dead and gone. “When I get there
I’m like a ghost,” he declared once, “or
a Rip Van Winkle who has slept for twenty years and
awoke to discover that his world has changed—but
how! . . . An obsessive refrain sounds in my mind:
Where have they all gone? Where, oh where?”
Fascinated by the power of
myth and legend, and alert to the ways in which geography
often means fate, he saw Oklahoma as embodying some
of the more mysterious forces in American culture.
He believed that the region possessed or had possessed
almost every element concerning power, race, and art
that is essential to understanding the nation. It
had Indians, whites, and blacks; treaties solemnly
made and shamelessly broken; despair and hope, failure
and shining success. Here was the legacy of the dispossession
of the Five Civilized Tribes—Cherokee, Choctaw,
Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole—from their homelands
in the South and their expulsion in the 1820s and
1830s, by way of the Trail of Tears, to Indian Territory.
(Ralph cherished the fact that he was “a wee
bit Creek!” on his mother’s side, just
as he was also proud of the white ancestry on both
sides of his family and the black ancestry that was
predominant in his physical features.) In 1879, whites
had entered Indian Territory for the first time, with
the avowed aim of seizing much of the land. Divided
and united by history, Oklahoma was culturally the
Wild West, the Southwest, and the Old South; it was
ancient but also brazenly new. One day, Oklahoma City
did not exist. The next day, April 22, 1889, after
settlers had raced to stake their claims as part of
the official Great Land Run, its population stood
at ten thousand. The Oklahoma Territory was born.
Ironically, helping to keep in line any indignant
Indians were the famous “Buffalo Soldiers”
of the 10th Cavalry.
Ralph, born only six years
after Oklahoma became a state, could put human faces—black,
white, Indian, and mixed—on this past. For the
freed slaves and their children and for free blacks
in general, Indian Territory had meant at first an
almost providential deliverance from Jim Crow. Many
blacks rushed to claim the one-hundred-acre parcels
of land allotted by the government to new settlers,
so that by 1900 almost sixty thousand blacks lived
in the Indian and Oklahoma territories. Many of them
saw Oklahoma the way Mormons had seen the new territory
that became Utah. Twenty-eight all-black towns sprang
up. Edward P. McCabe, a passionate spokesman for black
migration and the establishment of a black state,
implored his fellow African-Americans to make history:
“What will you be if you stay in the South?
Slaves liable to be killed at any time, and never
treated right; but if you come to Oklahoma you have
equal chances with the white man, free and independent.”
This was the promise that
in 1910 lured a young, newly wed couple, Lewis and
Ida Ellison, to Oklahoma City. Their first child,
Alfred, died as an infant. Their second, Ralph Waldo
Ellison, was born at 407 East First Street, in Oklahoma
City, on March 1, 1913. For most of his life Ralph
would offer 1914 as the correct year. Presented with
a chance to do so, around 1940—and despite the
fact that he was on the whole fastidiously honest—Ralph
decided to shave a year from the record. The U.S.
Census taker got it right in January 1920 when he
listed Ralph Ellison as being six years old, born
in 1913. A note in his mother’s hand, written
behind a photograph of Ralph as a toddler, sets his
time and date of birth as 11 a.m. on Saturday, March
1, 1914. But March 1 fell on a Friday in 1913, not
in 1914. Someone had changed 1913 to 1914 after an
erasure. Moreover, Ralph always insisted he was three
years old when the worst disaster of his life occurred:
On July 19, 1916, his father died after an operation
in the University Emergency Hospital in Oklahoma City.
Ralph was a healthy baby.
A photograph of him at four months in a washtub shows
him, as he later put it, as a “fat little blob
of blubber.” According to family lore, at six
months he took his first steps. At thirteen months,
he startled his father by seeming to crave steak and
onions. At two, he began to talk. Blessed with a sharp
memory, he recalled a doting father. “I rem[em]ber
toys, toys, and still more toys,” he wrote.
He recalled his father allowing him one evening to
splash in the bathtub while his mother went off with
a friend to a concert. He also recalled his father
reading incessantly but making time, too, for his
young son (“my father had two passions, children
and books”). Either his father or mother was
responsible for “the first song taught me as
a two-year-old” (“Dark Brown, Chocolate
to the Bone”), as well as for his command of
a wildly popular, risqué dance to go with it,
the Eagle Rock. His father took him on his horse-drawn
wagon through various neighborhoods as he delivered
ice and coal to businesses and homes. Ralph never
forgot his father’s tenderness. “Mr. Bub,”
as some customers called Lewis Ellison, explained
things “patiently, lovingly,” as they
ventured into “ice plants, ice cream plants,
packing plants, shoe repair and blacksmith shops,
bottling works and bakeries.” Ralph also never
forgot the day in Salter’s grocery store when
he watched his father climb some steps and attempt
to hoist a hundred-pound block of ice into a cabinet.
When a shard of ice pierced his stomach, Lewis Ellison
staggered and collapsed.
Ralph remembered the lingering
illness, the internal wound that would not heal, the
decision to operate, and their last visit together
in the hospital. As he prepared to leave with his
mother, his father slipped a blue cornflower into
Ralph’s lapel and gave him pink and yellow wildflowers
from a vase on a windowsill. Then his father was wheeled
away and Ralph saw his father alive for the last time.
“I could see his long legs,” Ralph
would write (the emphasis his own), “his
knees propped up and his toes flexing as he rested
there with his arms folded over his chest, looking
at me quite calmly, like a kindly king in his bath.
I had only a glimpse, then we were past.”
The official death certificate identified the cause
of death as “Ulcer of stomach followed by puncture
of same.” He was thirty-nine years old.
Ralph’s life was changed
forever. So, too, were the lives of his mother and
his brother, Herbert Maurice Ellison, who was then
only a few weeks old. The emotional cost was incalculable,
and in all matters involving money the change was
a disaster. Ahead lay years of shabby rented rooms,
hand-me-down clothing, second-rate meals, sneers and
slights from people better off, and a pinched, scuffling
way of life. For the Ellisons, Oklahoma City took
on a radically new character. Almost every aspect
of Ralph’s life became tougher, sadder. He would
take many years to recover fully from the shock of
his father’s death, if he ever did. He inherited
no money but rather a powerful physique; a nimble
mind; a worn copy of a book of verse, which would
perhaps compel Ralph to write his own book; and the
name Ralph Waldo Ellison, in honor of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, the famous American poet and essayist of
the nineteenth century. He also inherited what his
mother had “often warned us against,”
Ralph noted, “giving in to what she considered
the Ellisons’ sin of inordinate pride.”
Ellison pride, which would
both empower and hobble Ralph, could be traced back
to the patriarch of the family, Alfred Ellison, and
his wife, Harriet Walker Ellison, of the small town
of Abbeville Court House, South Carolina. Harriet
was long dead by 1916, but Alfred was still vigorous
at seventy-one. He was the father of ten children,
including Lewis and Lucretia Ellison Brown. Lucretia
migrated to Oklahoma City in 1910 with Lewis and Ida,
bringing with her Tom, Francis, and May Belle Brown,
her three children by her divorced husband. The death
of Lewis, Alfred’s eldest son, hit him hard.
At his request later that year, Tom and May Belle
took their three-year-old cousin by train on an extended
visit to Abbeville. Ralph found the visit both disturbing
and a welcome diversion. Many decades later, he would
recall “quite vividly” the train approaching
Abbeville across a muddy river and Uncle Jim, one
of his father’s brothers, waiting in a horse-drawn
carriage. He fondly remembered Alfred, who was a huge,
muscular man, and other members of the Ellison clan.
The Ellisons lived in a large
old house with fireplaces “into which I could
walk around and see the light filtering down the chimneys.”
Ralph recalled an abundance of melons and vegetables
heaped on the back porch. He walked in a grove of
pecan trees that his father had planted as a boy (for
many years afterward, at Christmas, a bag of pecan
nuts from this grove reached the Ellisons in Oklahoma
City). He slept in an enormous feather bed and was
fascinated by a ruined church, its stained-glass windows
intact, next door; now it served as a chicken house.
He loved the profusion of luna moths and fireflies
that glowed in the balmy South Carolina dark. “By
way of entertaining a small sorrowful visitor from
the west,” a kindly local boy, Eddie Hugh Wilson,
filled a glass jar with lightning bugs and presented
them to the weepy child “as a glowing toy.”
Ralph left Abbeville just
before one of the more heinous crimes in its history.
On October 21, a mob of whites dragged Anthony Crawford,
one of the most prosperous black farmers in the region,
from a local jail after the sheriff had arrested him
for insulting a white man. The mob then lynched him.
Ralph would not visit Abbeville again. Less than two
years later, on May 23, 1918, Alfred died. Proud to
be an Ellison, Ralph would learn about his paternal
grandfather later in life. Alfred had been born a
slave in South Carolina in 1845, had remained illiterate,
but had also shown uncommon intelligence, integrity,
and grit during the perilous Reconstruction. After
the war he married Harriet, who was virtually white,
and settled down with her in Abbeville. At first,
they both worked in some form of domestic service.
He also entered Republican Party politics during the
brief postwar period when black voters outnumbered
their white counterparts in the community. He was
an important member of the black Union League, which
aimed to preserve the advances made after Emancipation.
He tried all his life to keep up with the flux of
current events, and to recognize the maneuverings
of power about him. His reward was first a post as
constable, then as town marshal in Abbeville. Charged
with preserving order among blacks and whites, he
gained a reputation for being fair to all.
When Reconstruction ended
with the Hayes-Tilden Compromise and the withdrawal
of federal troops from the South in April 1877, Alfred’s
position became tenuous. Whites stepped up their efforts
to recapture power and influence in the region. In
elections held the previous year, violence had disrupted
sleepy Abbeville. The white Abbeville Medium made
it clear that “the Democratic party means to
carry this state in the next election . . . by fair
or foul means.” Many blacks sank into a kind
of neo-slavery, or headed north or west. Alfred Ellison
was different. When whites killed one of his closest
friends, he was defiant. On one occasion, he strode
down the main street in Abbeville, trailed by unfriendly
whites. “If you’re going to kill me,”
he challenged them, “you’ll have to kill
me right here because I’m not leaving. This
is where I have my family, my farm and my friends;
and I don’t plan to leave.” Soon, whites
stripped him and other blacks of power. In 1877, Lewis
was born, after three daughters. Six other children
came later. The family was never destitute; Alfred’s
prestige remained high in the black community, and
not without substance in the white. Owning a valuable
lot of land in town, he also maintained a horse-drawn
dray that earned him money, especially during the
cotton season. At times, he and his brothers built
trestles for the Southern Railroad. In 1884, he made
the local news briefly. “Big Alfred” Ellison,
as a white newspaper reporter called him, got into
a fistfight with “Beef Sam [Marshall], both
tremendous specimens of physical manhood,” when
tempers flared as they were moving a piano to the
train depot. Ellison was thrashing Beef Sam when Sam
stuck a knife three inches into his stomach. Ellison
recovered. After his wife and one of their children
perished in a house fire, the family’s standing
was such that the white newspaper carried a notice
of Harriet’s death without reference to her
race.
Unlike Alfred, young Lewis
Ellison learned to read and write, although the extent
of his formal education is unknown. Like his father,
he was brave. On May 31, 1898, at the age of twenty-one,
he responded to President William McKinley’s
national call to arms against Spain in Cuba and the
Philippines by traveling to Atlanta, where he joined
the U.S. Army as a volunteer. After basic training
in Georgia, he was assigned to Company F of the 25th
United States Colored Infantry. Although family lore
placed Lewis with Company F and Teddy Roosevelt’s
Rough Riders at the battle of San Juan Heights, it’s
clear that he was not in Cuba at the time. He was
sent to the Philippines, the other major theater of
the Spanish-American War, in 1899. Showing courage
under fire, he rose to the rank of lance corporal.
Family lore also had him serving in the suppression
of the Boxer Rebellion in China, but no evidence exists
of that service either. However, two recorded episodes
indicate that Lewis had become disillusioned with
the Jim Crow army. First, he was demoted to the rank
of private. Then, on April 9, 1901, he was court-martialed.
He had refused to obey orders to drill in hot, humid
weather as punishment for allegedly gambling (he was
apparently sick with malaria). The court sentenced
him to two years at hard labor. Released later that
year, he was dishonorably discharged.
What might have spelled social
disaster for a young white man was not as heavy a
burden for a black man, whose opportunities were already
constricted by Jim Crow. Returning to Abbeville around
1901, Lewis started an ice-cream parlor and candy
store. The venture fizzled. Nevertheless, he had enough
money in 1902 to finance a mortgage of $125 on his
father’s house and land. At some point, he took
a job with a construction company in Chattanooga,
Tennessee, that specialized in high-rise steel-and-concrete
buildings. Soon, he found an enticing reason to stay
at home in Abbeville. Among his friends was a handsome
young couple—Maston Watkins, a fireman employed
by the Southern Railroad, and his attractive wife,
Ida Milsap “Brownie” Watkins, from the
farming town of White Oak in southeastern Georgia,
who had attended Ferguson-Williams Academy in Abbeville.
One day, when Watkins was at his job on a train, a
group of idle young whites placed a skiff on the tracks
to see what would happen. The train derailed, and
Watkins was killed. Lewis consoled Brownie, which
turned into love and, eventually, marriage. Within
a month of their marriage, the couple left Abbeville
for a new life in the West.
In April 1910, they were
living in Oklahoma City. Starting out as a common
street laborer, Lewis soon returned to construction
work. For a while, as a foreman, he hired and fired
workers. Later, his son Ralph took pride in knowing
that his father had helped to build some of the most
impressive buildings in the city. Sprawling over the
largest municipality in the United States, Oklahoma
City should have provided ample opportunity for an
experienced construction worker, but Jim Crow ruled
even before the state was born in 1907, and Lewis
could go only so far in any white-owned business there.
In 1907, the populist Democratic politician William
H. “Alfalfa Bill” Murray, then president
of the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention (and much
later a governor of the state), told whites that while
“we must provide the means for the advancement
of the negro race, and accept him as God gave him
to us and use him for the good of society,”
the black man “must be taught in the line of
his own sphere, as porters, boot-blacks and barbers,
and many lines of agriculture. . . . It is an entirely
false notion that the negro can rise to the level
of a white man in the professions or become an equal
citizen to grapple with public questions.” Unless
they worked for themselves, blacks got only menial
jobs. By now most realized that emigration to Oklahoma
probably had been a mistake, yet another black dream
frustrated by whites. So Lewis believed. Late in April
1912, when he wrote to Ida from Texas, he mourned
the fact that Oklahoma had brought him “much
worry and much grief. I am sorry there ever was such
a place.” He hoped that his luck would change
soon: “I don’t want and don’t intend
to be there another winter.”
As it turned out, he endured
four more Oklahoma winters. Often he was away, working
and saving money. At such times he was solicitous
of his wife. “Your baby is sorry he cannot come
to his baby when she wants him,” he wrote once
to her. “I know how you feel about that and
I will pay you well when I get there.” Back
in Oklahoma City he started his ice and coal business
and planned to buy a house (though he now owned his
father’s old house in Abbeville). He and Ida
were living in a rooming house when Dr. Wyatt H. Slaughter,
the leading black physician in Oklahoma City, delivered
Ralph. Needing more space, they rented a house not
far away, and then another, on North Byers, surrounded
by whites, as Lewis tried to make his family comfortable
and give his son a secure start in the world.
When he died in 1916, Lewis
left behind the well-thumbed “thick anthology
of poetry” that became one of Ralph’s
dearest possessions. What did his father know of Emerson,
really? Lewis’s letters to Ida—the few
that have survived—suggest a poor education,
though it’s possible that he had started life
with certain interests and tastes only to have them,
and his entire sensibility, coarsened by racism. This
was, after all, the main purpose of Jim Crow laws
and conventions, to reduce blacks to neo-slavery.
It’s also possible that his choice of Ralph’s
resounding full name was sparked by the fact that
his boy was born in a house owned by a man named Jefferson
Davis Randolph, who had named his eldest son Thomas
Jefferson Randolph. Only late in life did Ralph assert
that Emerson had meant much not only to his father
but also to other blacks in Oklahoma. “I can’t
forget Emerson’s powerful force in the life
of my father,” Ralph wrote then, “or the
spiritual and intellectual support he provided several
of my teachers and community leaders.” According
to Ralph, “Emerson’s voice rang loud in
Negro communities and influenced my own elders’
decision to seek a broader freedom out in the Territory.
. . . Emerson got to me in the classroom no less than
at home; in drug store, barbershop, and dental chair,
as well as on the playing field. He was also a spur
to some of my father’s white friends, and thus
sponsored a community of hope.”
The pretentious name would
embarrass Ralph for much of his early life, when he
sometimes used to claim that Ralph Waldo Ellison was
a boy who lived next door. Then, as a teenager, he
reconciled himself to, and even embraced, his full
name. He didn’t embrace the “hidden name
and complex fate” because he came to believe
in Emerson’s transcendentalism. Instead, claiming
the full American heritage, he began to treasure his
nominal connection to the so-called American Renaissance,
when Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman,
and Henry David Thoreau, among others, penned some
of the most influential works of American literature.
Ralph would see this movement as a golden moment almost
unparalleled in the evolution of the nation. In the
Age of Emerson, abolitionist moral fervor had made
the black man—the slave—the one true symbol
of the American conscience. He also then came to appreciate,
however faintly traced, his father’s ambition
for him. “After I began to write and work with
words,” he recalled, “I came to suspect
that he was aware of the suggestive powers of names
and of the magic involved in naming.”
Thus the link between father
and son continued long after Lewis’s death.
Ironically, the son probably wouldn’t have become
famous if his father had lived. Protected, perhaps
even cosseted, by his father’s love, he would
probably have escaped the wounds of poverty, loneliness,
and despair that came howling in the wake of Lewis’s
death. Later, he resented suggestions that his father’s
death had marred him. “What quality of love
sustains us in our orphan’s loneliness,”
he asked, in words he himself stressed, “and
how much is thus required of fatherly love to give
us strength for all our life thereafter?” He
protested—perhaps too much—against the
idea that his father’s death might have crippled
him: “What statistics, what lines on whose
graphs can ever convince me that by his death I was
fatally flawed and doomed—afraid of women, derelict
of duty, sad in the sack, cold in the crotch, a rolling
stone in social space, a spiritual delinquent, a hater
of self—me in whose face his image shows?”
As Ralph told it, his mother’s reverence of
his father’s memory had made all the difference:
“His strength became my mother’s strength
and my brother and I the confused, sometimes bitter,
but most often proud, recipients of their values and
their love.”
Nevertheless, as a youth
he would be “bemused by a recurring fantasy
in which, on my way to school of a late winter day
I would emerge from a cold side street into the warm
spring sun and there see my father, dead since I was
three, rushing toward me with a smile of recognition
and outstretched arms. And I would run proudly to
greet him, his son grown tall.” Astutely, Ralph
would later define the blues, which may be at the
core of modern African-American artistry, as “an
impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of
a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness,
to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not
by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing
from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism.”
For him, the most dangerously “jagged grain,”
fingered in his youth and still wounding in his adult
years, would be his father’s untimely death.
Only eventually would Ralph learn to make art out
of this loss, and hope thus to transcend it.
The new life of poverty started
almost at once. Finding money to bury Lewis was hard.
His body had begun to rot and stink in the summer
heat, as Ida told Ralph later, before she was able
to bury him in Fairlawn Cemetery. Fortunately, she
found a job quickly, as a nursemaid for a Jewish family.
Lewis had counted several whites, including several
members of the small Jewish community, among his friends.
Now working in service for the first time, even as
she cared for her own infant, Herbert, Ida would spend
the rest of her life mainly as a hotel maid or a janitor.
At first, people rushed to help her. Co-worshippers
at Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church
moved her into its vacant parsonage. She made friends
easily. However, as Ralph grew toward adolescence
and young manhood, he watched his mother slip down
the social ladder until, in the end, she had lost
whatever cachet she had brought with her to Oklahoma
as a pretty young bride.
No one was more important
to her and her little boys than the Randolphs, in
whose rooming house Ralph had been born. Heading the
family were Jefferson Davis (J.D.) Randolph and his
wife, Uretta. Their eldest child, Edna Randolph Slaughter,
was for some years Ida’s closest friend; Edna
was the wife of Dr. Wyatt Slaughter, the wealthy,
property-acquiring physician who had delivered Ralph.
After supper in the evenings, Ida, Ralph, and Herbert
sometimes went window-shopping with Edna and her princely
children, Wyatt Jr. and Saretta. Edna’s two
younger sisters, Camille and Iphigenia (“Cute”),
were like older sisters to the Ellison boys. Edna’s
brothers—the dentist Dr. Thomas Jefferson “Bud”
Randolph and the pharmacist Dr. James L. “Jim”
Randolph—also took a lively interest in young
Ralph. Separately, Tom and Jim would employ him even
before he was a teenager.
The Randolphs and the Slaughters
were a prominent part of the black leadership of Oklahoma
City, which included men and women in business, religion,
medicine, dentistry, education, and law. These people
both tested segregation and sometimes grew rich from
it. For many years, Jim Crow had caged the city’s
blacks into scattered pockets. After World War I,
however, one area emerged to consolidate the power
of the community. This neighborhood was near the thriving
downtown district, as the city boomed as a result
of the state’s agriculture and abundance of
oil wells. Its disadvantages included being close
to the railroad tracks that served the bustling stockyards
(soon to become the largest cattle market in the world).
It was also close to the city’s major red-light
district, where prostitutes of all colors plied their
trade in segregated whorehouses.
By the early 1920s, in Ralph’s
boyhood, the heart of black life in Oklahoma City
would be the vibrant block on Second Street between
Central and Stiles that came to be known locally as
“Deep Second” or “Deep Deuce.”
This block housed the community’s drugstores,
doctors’ offices, funeral homes, hotels, haberdasheries,
restaurants, pool halls, and repair shops, as well
as its crusading newspaper, the Black Dispatch. Here
also were the Aldridge Theater (hailed as the finest
theater for blacks south of Chicago) and Slaughter’s
Dance Hall (taking up the third floor of Dr. Slaughter’s
biggest building). Between visiting celebrities such
as Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, or hot local
talent such as the Blue Devils Orchestra, Deep Second
made Oklahoma City second only to Kansas City among
jazz centers west of Chicago. The major churches,
too, were there or nearby. On East California stood
the main school for blacks, the combined Douglass
(Colored School) Elementary School and High School,
as officials called it. In 1919, Ralph would enter
the first grade at Douglass; aside from brief stints
elsewhere, he would study there until finishing in
1932 as a member of the class of 1931.
Before Ralph became thoroughly
familiar with Deep Second, including its taverns and
dancehalls, he led a sheltered life as Ida, his Aunt
Lucretia and her children, and the Randolph and Slaughter
clans tried to fill the terrible void caused by his
father’s death. Although Aunt Lucretia was a
formal woman, she dearly loved her brother’s
two boys; her children also showered gifts and favors
on their young cousins. Lucretia’s irreverent
son, Tom, was much older than Ralph but never played
the serious adult with him. Instead, he treated him
more like a pal. For fifty years a brakeman on the
Frisco Railroad, Tom loved whiskey, cigars, fishing,
tinkering with cars, and traveling. “He was
also a ladies man,” Ralph noted, “whose
attraction for good looking young women must surely
have influenced my own taste by the time I reached
adolescence.”
Excerpted from
Ralph Ellison by Arnold Rampersad Copyright ©
2007 by Arnold Rampersad. Excerpted by permission
of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights
reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the
publisher.
