When we were still too young to attend night dances, but yet old enough to gather beneath the corner street lamp on summer evenings, anyone might halt the conversation to exclaim, "Listen, they're raising hell down at Slaughter's Hall," and we'd turn our heads westward to hear Jimmy's voice soar up the hill and down, as pure and as miraculously unhindered by distance and earthbound things as is the body in youthful dreams of flying. - from "Shadow and Act," a collection of essays by Ralph Ellison.

Jimmy Stewart---the retired civil rights leader, not the movie star---is sitting with me in my car at the corner of Stiles and NE 2 on a cold, wet winter morning, looking out at the weed-covered lot where the Slaughter Building once stood.

We are here conjuring ghosts, and among them, the ghost of Ralph Waldo Ellison.

Ellison is not dead, of course. [He dies the year after this article was written.] The Oklahoma City-born writer, whose 1952 novel "Invisible Man" made him the first black author listed on the New York Times best-seller list, is very much alive and still writing in New York City where he's lived since 1936.

Ellison has returned to Oklahoma City just a handful of times in 55 years. But in Ellison's dreams, he often wanders Second Street -- not the burned-out disaster of urban renewal now soaking in the cold rain in front of Stewart and me, but the center of black commerce and culture of Ellison's and Stewart's childhoods, where black-owned stores and restaurants thrived, black lawyers and doctors worked, and nights throbbed with the music of Jimmy Rushing, Lester Young, and Charlie and Edward Christian.

"My early emotions found existence in Oklahoma City," Ellison had told me by telephone from his eighth-floor Manhattan apartment that overlooks the Hudson River. . I

"In houses and in drugstores and barbershops and downtown, all of the scenes, the sights, the localities that are meaningful to me are in that city; my father's buried there, and of course all the people who were heroes to me as a kid, my role models."

Stewart is one of Ellison's connections to Oklahoma City. The two men met in the third grade and renewed their acquaintance in 1953 when Stewart was elected to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's national board. During quarterly trips to New York, Stewart brought Ellison news and barbecue from Oklahoma City.

"Most of the time we would reminisce, talk about people and things that happened back when," Stewart tells me.

Then he waves his hand across the row of decaying buildings before us and conjures the Second Street of his and Ellison's youth, a hot summer evening with hundreds of people strolling up one side of the street and down the other under bright cones of streetlights, music blasting from the open third-floor windows of Slaughter's Hall, and a teen-age Ellison standing above it all on the grassy hill to the east.

"This whole block here was covered with black activity," he says. "All black. Not a white on the spot in here."

In the red brick buildings that lined NE 2 between Stiles and Central, there were two barbershops and a tailor shop ---- Ellison and Stewart both had earned extra money shining shoes at all three--- a hardware store, a music store, a funeral home and the Black Dispatch newspaper office.

The Rushing Building at the west end of the block, built by the father of blues singer Jimmy Rushing, housed Vaughn's Drug Store. Next door was the Aldridge Theater, its marquee announcing the play or vaudeville act appearing.

At the vortex of this swirl of activity sat the Slaughter Building. On Sunday afternoons, young men escorted their young women to the of soda fountain in Randolph's Drugs on the ground floor for malted milks and banana splits. Ellison worked there as a soda jerk and delivery boy.

The city opened its first library for blacks in what once was a large pool hall behind the drugstore, stocking it with seconds and leftover books from other branches. And on any afternoon, there sat Ellison reading the stories of Hemmingway and Conrad or the essays of Shaw.

The second floor housed the office of the building's owner, Dr. W.H. Slaughter, and of other black professionals---lawyers and dentists.

Slaughter's Hall occupied the entire third floor. Big-name bands from Kansas City, as well as local bands, played there nightly and at Saturday breakfast and Sunday matinee dances while Ellison, Stewart and their friends danced the glide, the one-step, the two-step and the waltz over the cornmeal-polished wood floor.

In summer, music poured from open windows and saturated the air for blocks around. When Ellison lived on Second Street, just before he left for college, he could lie awake at night and listen to the music.

"You couldn't escape it. That was one of the delights," Ellison had said.

But on this rainy morning, sitting in my car with Stewart, all we can, hear is the beat of windshield wipers. The Slaughter Building was torn down about a year ago, Stewart tells me. He doesn't remember when the building across the street burned.

"Anyway, this was Second. Street," he says, "what they called the Deep Two, Deep Second, the Deep Deuce. They called it all three of those, and Ralph was born on the next corner."

We drive south down Stiles to NE 1 and turn left up the hill.

"Right there was where Booker T. Washington stayed when he came to Oklahoma City," Stewart says, pointing to the empty southeast corner.

"Right here," he says, pointing to broken concrete steps climbing from the north curb into a thicket of weeds and leafless branches. "The church was right there on the corner, and the next place here--- see those steps?--- - that's where Ralph was born."

Ellison and Stewart were born in 1914, one year before Booker T. Washington died and seven years after Oklahoma became a state. The great migration of southern blacks to the industrial centers of at the North was just beginning, and opportunities in the territory, and of now young state, of Oklahoma had been attracting black immigrants from the Deep South for decades.

Ellison's father, the son of a former slave, had come from Abbenville, S.C., attracted by construction jobs in Oklahoma City's downtown. He was a foreman on the crew that is built the Colcord Building.

We had a Negro church and a segregated school, a few lodges and fraternal organizations, and beyond these there was the great white world. ---from "Shadow and Act."

'The steps that Stewart points to once led to the fine brick home of Jefferson Davis Randolph, father of drugstore owner Jim Randolph, father-in-law to W.H. Slaughter and something of an adopted grandfather to Ellison and his younger brother Harold.

Randolph organized the first school for blacks in Oklahoma City soon after he arrived in December 1889. That school was the predecessor to Douglass High Schoo1, which sat just south of here across the Rock Island Railroad tracks in Ellison's time.

Ellison graduated from Douglass. He was leader of the band in his senior year and played tackle on the football team. Stewart left Douglass after his freshman year when his family moved to Wichita, Kan., where schools were integrated.

"I’ll show you how we had to go to high school," Stewart says. "See, the Rock Island tracks are right down south of here. You couldn't get across there,"

He tells me to turn around and drive west on NE 1 to Central, then south over a viaduct that crosses the now abandoned tracks.

We reach Reno and turn back east.

"Now this corner right here's the old Douglass High School," Stewart says, pointing to what is now a city bus maintenance barn. The three-story school campus once covered the entire block, and to the east sat n the football practice field, he says.

"This was the third school for blacks in Oklahoma. They had one on Walker and Reno, then they had one over here on East Grand, and this was the pride of Oklahoma s City---Douglass High School."

Before World War II, black college graduates could do little with their degrees other than teach, and Douglass benefited from their lack of opportunity. Its faculty had been trained at some of the best colleges in the East.

Inman Page, who was principal when Stewart and Ellison were students, was the first black graduate of Brown University and the first president of Langston University. There also was Professor Henry t A. Butler, who taught Latin and who spoke Greek and Hebrew as well. Professor Rufus Youngblood, who taught biology; and Page's daughter, Zelia Breaux, who taught music appreciation, directed the school's band, orchestra and choir, and staged operettas in the school's theater.

"You had examples of possibility around you," Ellison had told me.

Stewart sits up a little in his seat now as he thinks back to the first C Douglass students invited to march in the annual downtown Boys Day parade. Blacks had been banned from the parade before 1924. When the school superintendent decided to let Douglass students march, Breaux drilled her band, and the male teachers---- some of them with ( military backgrounds) took the rest of the boys out on the football field every day and taught them to march with precision and decorum.

The parade began at Main and Broadway and traveled west, and Douglass was left to the end.

"Ralph was in the front, in the I band. I wasn't in the band, but I was marching with them, " Stewart tells me. "And when we hit Main and Broadway, it was a show. People just looked out the windows, 'Look at there at the Douglass High School,' and the band was in step and the boys were marching like the military, whereas the Central High School boys were going along waving at people and' just talking. It was a jolly thing to them, but our boys didn't say a word. They marched just like soldiers."

I ask Stewart how he felt, marching in that parade. .

"Proud, proud," he says.

"It was revealing to Oklahoma City when the black boys hit the street down at Main and Broadway," Stewart says. "It was some thing that was quite meaningful and it made a lasting impression on

this city for that period of time."

The parade left a lasting impression on Stewart as well.

"There were a lot of things to discourage one back then," he says. "But there were also reasons to try to do things and we had blacks who wanted to do things. Mrs. Breaux was an inspiration to all of our young people to want to do something. "

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allen Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.---opening lines of "Invisible Man."

We turn around to leave what once was the secure black enclave of Deep Second and climb the Interstate 40 entrance ramp into the greater white world, heading' west past downtown and toward the old West Town area where Stewart's family lived and where he first met Ellison.

I ask Stewart what he remembers of 1952, the year "Invisible Man" was published.

"There was no reaction, but not too much acceptance. It's rather subtle, the way Oklahomans do certain things," he says.

The rest of the country did notice Ellison's novel about the journey of a nameless young black man from his southern home to college and then to Harlem as his illusions were shattered one after another.

"Invisible Man" spent 13 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list---not quite two weeks for each of the seven years it took Ellison to write the book. It won the National Book Award in 1953, and a 1965 New York Herald Tribune poll of 200 authors, editors and, critics named "Invisible Man" the most distinguished American novel of the previous 20 years.

A new hardback edition was published by Random House last year, the 40th anniversary of the book's first release. "Invisible Man" has become a standard in college literature courses, and paperback sales remain brisk. In the Oklahoma City school district, students in high school advanced placement English courses now all read "Invisible Man."

An early chapter in the book describes a scene where the white community leaders amuse themselves at a civic club meeting by tossing coins on[to] an electrified rug and watching young black men jump and squirm as they collect the coins.

Ellison always has denied that his book is based on actual people or events.

"Remember first and keep' in mind that this is a book of fiction," Ellison had told me, "and I was writing not about Oklahoma, but about the deep South where the old tensions were still very much present."

As we drive west past downtown, Stewart tells me that Jim Crow, Oklahoma-style was not nearly as evil as that of Mississippi or Alabama. Oklahoma never had the chain gangs where police would arrest blacks indiscriminately for vagrancy and then offer them as cheap labor to land owners, or the leering laws that made it illegal for black man to stare at a white woman.

But Stewart remembers scenes at civic club "smokers" in Oklahoma City's downtown hotels similar to the scene in 'Ellison's book.

"I remember once they took us to the biggest hotel and had all of us stand around a big square thing maybe four or six of us - and they dropped money into flour. This thing was full of flour and we were black, see, and our hands were behind us and we'd have to get in there with our faces and try to get that money out."

Stewart says he remembers the dry taste of the flour and how it burned his eyes. "That was "fun to -them. We didn't realize how demeaning it was at the time. We did it because we were poor."

He left Tuskegee for New York in 1936 to earn money to complete school. Once in Harlem, though, Ellison met poet Langston Hughes and novelist Richard Wright, and with their encouragement, left music behind to pursue writing.

Ellison began writing "Invisible Man" in 1945 when he returned from service in the Merchant Marines during the, war. After the book was published, he taught literature at Bard College, then at the University of Chicago and Rutgers. In 1970, he became the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities" at New York University.

Since "Invisible Man" Ellison has published two collections of essays and interviews: "Shadow and Act" in 1964 and "Going to the Territory" in 1986. Ellison now is retired from teaching and working full time on a new novel.

While Ellison was honing his writing skills in New York, Stewart, after a short stay at Langston University, returned to Oklahoma City to wait tables and operate a small hamburger joint on NE 4 for a while. He also began writing a weekly column in the, Black Dispatch called "Jimmy Says."

Then one July morning, inspired by a conversation the day before about high utility bills and the lack of jobs for blacks, Stewart, dressed in his best suit, walked into the downtown office of Oklahoma Natural Gas and asked to speak with the manager about hiring blacks.

His timing was good---the gas company needed black voters to renew its franchise. Stewart was shown into the office of manager Tom Sterling, who agreed to hire blacks if he got their support in the franchise election.

The gas company won its new franchise, and as a reward offered Stewart a janitor's job that paid less in a month than he made in a week as a waiter. He took the job, though, because it was more stable than waiting tables. When the gas company opened a branch office on the northeast side, they made Stewart manager. Stewart retired in 1977 as assistant to the vice president.

During his career with the gas company, Stewart also was president of the local NAACP chapter and a leader in local battles to open housing, to admit blacks at the University of Oklahoma, to get jobs for blacks in the post office and fire department and to get equal pay for ---black teachers.

"The stacks of letters ONG got asking them to fire me came up to here," Stewart says, holding his hand at chest level.

Stewart falls quiet as we near the Western exit; he looks toward downtown.

"We felt the bitterness of so many things," he finally says.

This was an alive community in which the harshness of slum life was inescapable, but in which the strength, the imagination of the people, was much in evidence. ---- from "Going to the Territory," a collection of essays by Ralph Ellison.

We exit at Western and turn west on Sheridan.

"Now this is Clegern," Stewart says. "A few blacks stayed here on this corner and the floods used to come all the way up into here when we were kids. This is what was known as West Town."

The black neighborhood in West Town was older than Deep Second, which was predominately white until Black Dispatch editor Roscoe Dunjee led a fight to allow blacks to buy homes there. Before that, most blacks lived in either West Town, Sandy Town or Walnut Grove, all in the floodplain of the North Canadian River.

Ellison's father died when he was in third grade, and his family moved in for a while with an aunt in West Town on Peach Street, now called Brauer, across from the white.frame Archer Park School. The Jesus House shelter for the homeless occupies the old school ground now.

"I met Ralph right here," Stewart says, pointing to the corner of Main and Brauer.

The black community at the time was an insular world, and the notion of possibilities beyond that world did not occur automatically.

"When you're poor, two chances out of three you don't know you're poor. It's a fact of life," Stewart explains.

Ellison and Stewart both graduated from high school---- Ellison from Douglass and Stewart from Wichita North High School in Kansas---- in 1931, in the midst of the Depression, and in a world that offered few opportunities for blacks even in good times.

Still, both Ellison and Stewart managed to find success; and they were examples for those who followed.

Ellison hopped a freight train for Alabama's Tuskegee Institute in 1933 with the hope of becoming a classical composer. 

Stewart directs me onto I-40 traveling back east again. "There’s one more thing I want to show you," he says, and we pass downtown and again continue on past the Deep Deuce.

Because of the efforts of Stewart, and others----- including Black Dispatch publisher Roscoe Dunjee and Ellison's mother, Ida Milsap Ellison----more areas of the city became open to blacks.

As the black community moved farther north and east, Stewart tells me, the center moved from NE 2 to NE 8 and eventually to NE 23. After the war, street cars [sic] were replaced by buses, and the busiest didn't stop in the Second Street, he says.

"It just kept running down," he says as we zip above the decaying buildings of Second Street on the raised highway. "More desirable places were opened up and it made Slaughter's Hall inappropriate."

Stewart says he doesn't even remember when the dance hall closed. But its demise is one reason'" Ellison has not returned to the city of his birth.

"I hesitate to go back to Oklahoma City, especially now when I'm' trying to finish a book," Ellison. had said. "To go back and find that old East Second Street environment gone is traumatic, it's sort of disturbing and I don't want to lose the memories. I don't want to lose my sense of how it was, because after all, that's where I came from." .

Stewart tells me to exit at Martin Luther King Avenue, and we continue east on NE 4 until we reach a bridge crossing the North Canadian. Stewart tells me to stop here.

"Right up here is what they called Gargoly," he says, pointing: out to the rain-swollen river.

"It was a swimming place, you see, right up there. It connected to the river right here, in this area. It was the only place that you had in.Oklahoma City for black people to swim. They didn't allow you to swim at Spring Lake or any other place. Gargoly was a distinct part of the life of black kids here in Oklahoma City." '

I look out at the rain-swollen river where Stewart is pointing, but I see no signs of Gargoly; only red water swirling past muddy banks. "

James E. was born in Piano, Tx, Sept. 16, 1912, the son of Rev. Zena T. & Maggie (Feglee) Stewart. Rev. Stewart, an oil mill laborer, moved to Okla. City, Ok. in 1926. James attended Orchard Park Elementary from Kindergarten through 6th grade. At age 14, James and his mother moved to Wichita, Ks. He enrolled in the 10^th grade a Wichita, and saw for the first time the vast difference in "separate but equal" schools. While, at Wichita North H.S., he became the first of his race to "make" a Wichita high school football team as well as the All-City team. James graduated from Wichita North in 1931. He moved back to OKC and worked as a theater manager, restaurant owner/operator and, later, table waiter at numerous places. While working as captain of banquet services at the old Biltmore Hotel, James was asked by the late Thomas H. Sterling, OKC . Dist. Mgr. for Okla. Natural Gas Co., to take a job as janitor for his firm. Prior to 1942, Jimmy's civic endeavors were primarily limited to the Negro Business League on the local and national level. Meanwhile, ONG officials at both local and corporate headquarters in Tulsa observed his activities and decided to establish an eastside office with Jimmy as manager. He volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps in 1942 and served with the first battalion o Black Marines. He was discharged in 1945 with the rank of Tech Sgt., and returned to OKC and Okla. Natural Gas Co. His weekly news column, Jimmy Says, was a 3-decade must for Black Dispatch readers. Jimmy was the prime pusher to get the book "Black History of Oklahoma" funded, and served on its editorial advisory committee. He contributed a collection of over 30 years civil rights activities and Black history material to the Ralph Ellison Library to establish their Black Chronicles of History. Jimmy served on numerous local, state and national boards and received many honors and awards through the years. His most recent was his induction into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame and into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame. Survivors are his wife, Mae Lois Stewart; sons, Don Gilbert and James E. Stewart, Jr., daughter, Zandra Stewart Marshall; grandchildren, great grandchildren; nephews, nieces, other relatives and friends. Services for Mr. Stewart were held on April 18, with interment at Arlington Memorial Gardens, under the direction of Pollard Funeral Homes, Inc.