WRITER [Ralph Ellison] REFLECTS ON ROOTS IN OKLAHOMA

Daily Oklahoman [Community Section] (January 11, 1993), pp.1-3.

By John Perry, Staff Writer

Author Ralph Ellison left Oklahoma City in 1933 and has returned only a handful of times in the intervening years. But in his writings and in interviews, he continues to identify himself as an Qklahoman. Ellison's 1952 novel "Invisible Man," about a young man who leaves his home in the deep South during the 1930s---first for college and then for the excitement of Harlem---was listed on the New York Times best-seller list 13 weeks. In 1965, it was named the most distinguished American novel of the previous two decades by the New York Herald Tribune.

"lnvisible Man" has become a staple of college literature classes, and a second hardback edition was released by Random House last year, the 40th anniversary of its first publication.

Ellison now is retired from teaching at New York University, where he was the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities. He is working to finish a second novel.

The Oklahoman contacted him by telephone at his New York City home in December [1992]. Here are excerpts from that interview:

The Oklahoman: You have lived in New York City most of your life, but you still identify yourself as an Oklahoman. Why is your Oklahoma identity still important?

Ellison: In writing, underneath, underneath there’s a great emotional continuum, and my early emotions found existence in Oklahoma. ...

That's were I spent my childhood and I frequently dream of old friends and escapades and football games and dancing European folk dances out at the old Western League Park. All of the black students, Negros [sic] if you will, would wrap May poles and dance these dances.

Then later on, I played trumpet in the Douglass High School Band, and we used to have football games there and I played in the band and then later I played on the football team.

You had teachers there who had attended some of the best schools in the North, and you had examples of possibility around you. You had mechanics and you had people who owned fine cars.

Oklahoma was a great oil state in those days and there was a lot of money in circulation. Much of that great pool of oil was on the northeast side and much of that property was owned by Negroes. So that too made for a certain optimism. ,

And for Negroes who came from the South, living in a less racially restricted state increased the optimism. Many people were sending their kids to college. Although they had to work like hell to do it, they did it.

The Oklahoman: What was the relationship between blacks and whites in Oklahoma City when you were growing up?

Ellison: I was all over Oklahoma City, and I don't recall ever having any serious trouble. Once in a while you'd get into an argument with a white kid, and sometimes you fought them. But you didn't have that kind of anxiety (that was felt in the Deep South), at least I didn't.

You knew many whites. I knew them and I worked for them and I bought from them. Many of the neighborhoods were mixed on the east side. The grocery stores were owned by Whites. There were some Jewish people who lived just around the comer from us on Byers. They were friends of my parents. And the first English people I knew owned the Blue Front Grocery which was just across the street from Tabernacle Baptist Church.

The Oklahoman: But whites did hold all the power in the community. Didn't you have to be careful in your dealings. with the white world? In "Invisible Man," it seemed that every contact the main character had with the white world ended in disaster.

EIIison: Yes, one had to be very careful as to how one dealt with whites, and far more so than the way whites dealt with Negroes. They treated you or could treat you as though you had no personal identity; you were part of a mass.

On the other hand, for your own safety, or for your own chicanery, or for your own amusement, if you were black then you looked at the individual. You looked for nuances of voice or for nuances of conduct and interrelationships, and that's how one survived. And very often you wore a mask, I very often pretending I to be what you were not just to survive or to keep out of trouble.

Underneath, the book ("Invisible Man") isn't racial in that sense. It's an attempt to get at the Americaness of all Americans and how the races fit together or didn't fit together; how the ideals of democracy were sometimes attained and very often ignored.

Race was and still is an important factor in our attempt to make the words of the sacred documents manifest in our conduct and in the structure of our cities and in the relationships between blacks and whites and now others who have come to be a part of America.

The Oklahoman: I understand your views on race in America where controversial during the 1960s and that you were booed by black students on at least one occasion when you spoke at a college campus.

Ellison: There were people who felt that I wasn’t militant enough, but I was not trying to be militant in that way, I’m trying to write fiction, and that imposes a discipline and it makes you look a little more carefully at what you are seeing and what you are hearing, and that's how I go about writing.

I believe that American culture is partially Afro-American. You can't find the cultural styles in Africa because there was no Africa in that sense; there were tribal cultures.

Whatever happened to the slaves here, we were all intermixed. Many of us, even genetically, are not totally African. Many of us are white of various backgrounds, and mamy of us are part American Indian as I am.

To reduce American culture to two racial strains I think is a mistake. You can't hear a Southerner talk without realizing that he was influenced, or his parents were influenced, by the presence of a people who put more music into the speech.

It's easy to write negative portraits of people, and I think my own group has suffered quite a bit from that. You probably don't remember the two black crows in Amos and Andy, and white men in black face projecting caricatures of my people, but I grew up seeing quite a lot of that and I wish to have no part of it.

The wonderful thing is how Afro-American white Americans can be. And I think that's quite true culturally in Oklahoma, which was the 46th state and which brought all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds together.

Blacks, as did whites, came to Oklahoma because of the opportunities here to make something of lives. With that sense of the complexity of interracial relationships within a new state, the improvisations that went on were very impressive and can't be reduced to simple racism. And I say that, even to remember one of the governors who was a Klansman.

The Oklahoman: What advice do you have for young black men and women growing up today?

Ellison: Remember that you are an American, and probably more American than many others who might oppose you; that you have a tradition here which is far more real than anything that we ever had from Africa.

Also, follow the example of those men and women who earned success by studying their techniques.