3 From Oklahoma City to Tuskegee, from Harlem to Dayton

The Sites, Levels, and Travels of Ralph Ellison’s Marxism

In 1942, Ralph Ellison wrote the critic Stanley Edgar Hyman to encourage him to submit an essay to Negro Quarterly, the journal Ellison edited at the time. In response to Ellison’s suggestion, Hyman outlined a possible essay on blues music:

My theory . . . is that the attitudes behind a substantial section of the blues . . . are not actually the values and attitudes of the Negro people, but a small section of it, the lumpenproletariat: whores and pimps and gamblers and saloon people and the musicians and entertainers who work around them. I am referring to such stuff as the constant preoccupation with drink, the emphasis on a woman’s primary function as keeping her man, the cracks about dice and razors, etc.

Hyman continued to speculate that the blues, articulating the “primarily sexual miseries” of lumpenproletarian African Americans, the “really de-classed,” have functioned to symbolize the “social and economic miseries” of the larger black community.1 Ellison encouraged this project, but with reservations:

I suggest . . . that you be very careful when applying Marxist concepts to American Negro experience—especially such a term as “lumpenproletariat.” I would define the term carefully, remembering the fluidity of Negro class lines. For my own work I find an approach when [sic] defines the American Negro in terms of his consciousness much more exact. Most of us are still of the folk, poised between an American Negro working class outlook, and that of the Negro middle class. And again, the blues are disapproved by respectible [sic] Negro families of the middle class, and by religious folk Negroes.2

While brief, this exchange illuminates Ellison’s understanding of the lumpenproletariat. Hyman offers, in rhetoric that directly alludes to Marx’s famous cataloguing of the lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire discussed in chapter 1, a definition of the lumpenproletariat as criminal and nonpolitical. For Hyman, the underclass experience expressed in the blues can be a metaphor for the socioeconomic plight of African Americans precisely because that experience seems qualitatively removed from politics and concerned only with sex, drinking, gambling, and the like. And while Hyman defines the lumpen as “de-classed,” he associates that status with recreation and vice rather than material want. In seeing underclass life as only metaphorically related to real political concerns, Hyman echoes Marx and Engels’s estimation of the lumpenproletariat’s moral degradation and sociopolitical irrelevance.

It’s easy to read Ellison’s response as rejecting any application of Marxism to African American concerns at all, but he actually specifies the care a thinker must take when doing so. It’s not that Hyman cannot use Marxism to think black experience, but that one cannot apply Marxist concepts to African American experience without, in turn, modifying those concepts. Ellison thus questions Hyman’s (and orthodox Marxism’s) assumption that the lumpenproletariat would specify a segment of the black community defined by illicit activity. Rather, the concept signals the “fluidity” of black class distinctions, a definition that preserves the orthodox emphasis on the lumpenproletariat as declassed, but which revises the import of that classlessness. When applied to black life, Ellison implies, the lumpenproletariat references the vicissitudes, complications, and possibilities for “consciousness” that emerge from individuals’ mobility across and out of class lines. He augments this redefinition of the lumpenproletariat with one of the folk, which is not an agricultural precursor to the capitalist mode of production but a liminal location between bourgeois and proletarian social and cultural positions. Ellison’s investment here in the intersection between the concept of the lumpenproletariat and the on-the-ground realities of black life hearkens back to his earlier 1930s writings. Ellison’s Depression fiction enacted an original and sophisticated mode of Marxist theoretical practice by associating the lumpenproletariat and the folk with the political potential afforded by socioeconomic instability.

To link Ralph Ellison to Marxism is, of course, a counterintuitive move given that his political reputation, as established both by scholars and his own postwar comments, has often been framed as an absolute rejection of any leftist radicalism. While he started his career on the Communist left in the Depression, authoring numerous radical fictional works and publishing prolifically in Communist periodicals, Ellison later claimed that he was only briefly drawn to “Marxist political theory” as a youthful “attraction.” While admitting that he had written for Communist-backed journals and had produced “propaganda having to do with the Negro struggle,” he insisted he “never wrote the official type of fiction.”3 Critics have distanced Ellison from Marxism on the assumption that the latter is a reductive, mechanistic doctrine at odds with Ellison’s intellectual and aesthetic sophistication and largely unsuited to the complexities of US contexts and African American experience. As Larry Neal put it: “Ellison had never really internalized Marxism in the first place. . . . [L]ucky for us, his work never took on the simplistic assertions of the literary Marxist” (60).4

Barbara Foley has argued that this characterization of Ellison, Marxism, the Communist Party, and the Depression-era proletarian literary movement was a politically motivated discursive project of postwar reaction. The period’s anticommunism, Foley argues, “invisibly entered the groundwater of U.S. cultural history” and has shaped the assumptions many critics and readers bring to Ellison. By historicizing Ellison’s political reputation as a Cold War–era construction, and by offering the first sustained discussion of his 1930s writings, many of which were never published, Foley opens up new possibilities for reevaluating Ellison’s relation to Marxism and the institutions of the Communist left.5

To that end, this chapter recovers the theoretical problematic of Ellison’s Marxism, the undergirding and enabling conceptual structure of his work, the scaffolding of his epistemological priorities. The influence of Ellison’s own lumpenproletarian experience on his Marxism are visible and enacted in his 1933 journey from his home in Oklahoma City to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he intended to study music. Lacking financial resources, Ellison hopped a freight train to get to Tuskegee. He was accompanied on the first leg of his trip by Charlie Miller, a friend of Ellison’s mother and veteran transient who taught Ellison how to ride the rails. Before arriving at Tuskegee, he had a racially charged encounter with railroad bulls in Decatur, Alabama.6 His trip lasted only a few days but was formative of his intellectual priorities, and Ellison would still recall it decades later. His distinct brand of Marxism animates his 1930s stories, essays, and correspondence, as well as two longer works of fiction that Ellison began in the 1930s but never finished: Tillman and Tackhead and Slick. Long neglected by scholarship, these narratives of African American characters who enter the social underworld of the lumpenproletariat and there discover political opportunity demonstrate the ingenuity with which Ellison used fiction to advance the protocols of his Marxism.

As he encouraged Hyman to do in 1942, Ellison’s Depression work refashions the concept of the lumpenproletariat. As we’ve seen, Marx considered the lumpenproletariat to be a dead end for revolutionary politics: because it has no role in capitalist production as a class, it is self-interested, resistant to organization, and prone to reactionary co-option. Ellison’s 1930s work preserves Marx’s understanding of the lumpenproletariat as figures inhabiting the margins of class struggle and the interstices of social structures, but reimagines Marx’s political estimation of them. For Ellison, the economic conflicts of American capitalism create politically generative encounters, accidents, and events within the social superstructure. In his Depression writings, transient figures navigate the margins and gaps of the social and metaphorically figure this social manifestation of revolutionary possibility. To further describe that possibility, Ellison employs another repurposed concept, a departicularized definition of the folk drawn from Communist discussions of black folk identity in the period. What I term lumpen-folk figures trope, for Ellison, the origin and operation of revolutionary politics.

Oklahoma City and the Form of the Social

Jesse Wolfe voices a critical consensus when he writes that Ellison’s love of “the fluidity and unpredictability of American democracy” is a “patriotic American, and anti-totalitarian, impulse [that] was a constant throughout Ellison’s career.”7 That impulse characterizes Ellison’s 1930s work, where, however, it is Marxist in orientation. This paradox is illuminated when Ellison is read alongside Louis Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, who despite considerable differences between their political careers and national contexts, explore materialist conceptions of social “fluidity and unpredictability.” Both define a given social order as determined by economic relations of production but complex and internally variant in its own right. For Althusser, that definition is essential to the materialism of Marxism itself, which “establishes in principle the recognition of the givenness of the complex structure of any concrete ‘object’. . . . There is no longer any original essence, only an ever-pre-givenness. . . . There is no longer any simple unity, only a structured, complex unity.” Reducing the social to a simple reflection of an underlying economic “essence,” and flattening its multivalent ontology, is an idealist error.8 For Althusser and Gramsci, the economic determination of the social or superstructural is realized as the irreducible complexity of the social. They thus help us see the materialism of Ellison’s 1930s work, which approaches the super-structure as the terrain of revolutionary possibility, where the fluid and shifting conditions of American society are simultaneously shaped by, facilitate, and complicate racial domination and class exploitation.

In his well-known post-Depression essays, Ellison would use the quasi-existentialist term “chaos” in connection with a sense of American social life as unpredictable, fluid, and resistant to static categorization. Sometimes the term names an epistemological and moral danger that the novelist must recognize and contain: Arnold Rampersad calls it “a threat to social order” while Foley situates it as “the existential void threatening to engulf those courageous enough to explore complexity and fluidity.”9 But it can also invoke a political potential in American experience. In his speech accepting the National Book Award for Invisible Man, Ellison urges novelists to “challenge the apparent forms of reality,” those deceptively “fixed manners and values of the few” that underwrite social hierarchies, in order to reveal the true “mad, vari-implicated chaos” those hierarchies conceal.10 John F. Callahan points out that chaos is linked to agency as “the front man for possibility. It is, Ellison believes, man’s fate to defy the formlessness of chaos and the abyss, and at the same time to recognize that possibility flows from chaos.”11 Given Ellison’s postwar turn away from the left, one can interpret this celebration of chaotic possibility as a denial of the reality of any structural oppression in American life. But the political as opposed to quietist ramifications of this concept of America are foregrounded when we see in it traces of Ellison’s 1930s Marxism, which foregrounded the “chaos” of a social ontology determined by capitalist exploitation and organized around racial domination, but at the same time enabling resistance to both.

Ellison began his 1933 trip to Tuskegee by leaving Oklahoma City, which he would long recall as representative of the form of American society itself. The city, Ellison wrote in the introduction to Shadow and Act (1964), though officially dominated by white supremacy, was a “chaotic community” that allowed Ellison and his friends to “[explore] an idea of human versatility and possibility which went against the barbs or over the palings of almost every fence which those who controlled social and political power had erected to restrict our roles in the life of the country.”12 In the essay “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” (1964), Ellison attributes the richness of black life in segregated Oklahoma City to an interplay of historical and social contradictions that complicates the workings of Jim Crow. The same city in which Ellison found “card[s] warning Negroes away from the polls” is also the city in which he was able to read Shaw and Maupassant “in the home of a friend whose parents were products of that stream of New England education which had been brought to Negroes by the young and enthusiastic white teachers who staffed the schools set up for the freedmen after the Civil War.” While the composition of Oklahoma City is defined by Jim Crow, it nonetheless challenges racial rule by being temporally and culturally uneven: the legacy of Reconstruction, supplanted by Jim Crow in the late nineteenth century, is residually present in this family that introduced Ellison to modernist literature.

Ellison lists other elements of Oklahoma City that imprinted themselves on his consciousness:

I was claimed by weather, by speech rhythms, by Negro voices and their different idioms, . . . by music, by tight spaces and by wide spaces in which the eyes could wander, by death, by newly born babies, by manners of various kinds, company manners and street manners, the manners of white society and those of our own high society, and by interracial manners . . . .

I was impressed by expert players of the “dozens” and certain notorious bootleggers of corn whiskey. By jazz musicians and fortunetellers and by men who did anything well. . . . I was fascinated by old ladies, those who had seen slavery and those who were defiant of white folk and black alike, by the enticing walks of prostitutes and by the limping walks affected by Negro hustlers . . . .

And there was the Indian-Negro confusion. There were Negroes who were part Indian and who lived on reservations, and Indians who had children who lived in towns as Negroes. . . . There were certain Jews, Mexicans, Chinese cooks, a German orchestra conductor and an English grocer who owned a Franklin touring car. And certain Negro mechanics—“Cadillac Slim,” “Sticks” Walker, Buddy Bunn and Oscar Pitman—who had so assimilated the automobile that they seemed to be behind a steering wheel even as they walked the streets or danced with girls. And there were the whites who despised us and the others who shared our hardships and our joys.13

Multicultural interactions, residual energies and cultural forms, interracial “confusion,” lumpenproletarian prostitutes and hustlers, and access to modern technology make black life more than a reflection of Jim Crow and capitalism. For instance, black auto mechanics certainly experience racial marginalization and economic exploitation, but they also dwell among premodern preachers and fortunetellers and bear heroic, folkloric personas. Ellison’s love of the fluidity of the American scene stems from a materialist recognition of its actual contradictions and their productive capacities.

Recognizing the possibilities of social complexity is Louis Althusser’s intention in describing the social as an overdetermined structure in dominance. Althusser theorizes a given social formation as a unified set of relatively autonomous sites of practical activity, related to each other, yet related—like the social components shaping black life in Oklahoma City—unevenly, through difference rather than equivalence. The economic determines the social by aggregating the uneven relations between all sites into a totality or “structure in dominance” unified by its overall dedication to reproducing capitalism’s relations of production. However, the structure is characterized not by a uniformly consistent reflection and implementation of economic exploitation, but by the heterogeneous determinative relations shaping its component social sites and levels. Althusser thus describes the social as overdetermined: internally inconsistent and variant, or to quote Althusser, “complexly-structurally-unevenly-determined.” Since that complexity does not uniformly reflect or effect ruling-class dominance, but combines both domination and disruption as elements of social form, overdetermination makes revolutionary change possible:

Only overdetermination enables us to understand the concrete variations and mutations of a structured complexity such as a social formation . . . as so many concrete restructurations inscribed in the essence, the ‘play’ of each category, in the essence, the ‘play’ of each contradiction, in the essence, the ‘play’ of the articulations of the complex structure in dominance which is reflected in them. . . . [U]nless we . . . think this very peculiar type of determination once we have identified it, we will never be able to think the possibility of political action.14

Since overdetermination theorizes play or fluidity as a structural quality of the social, it enables one to identify chances for structural disruption and change. To quote Alain Badiou, “overdetermination puts the possible on the agenda . . . [and] is in truth the political place.”15 Ellison describes black life in Oklahoma City in a similar manner, as determined by capitalism and white rule, but also by figures, traditions, and practices that work in tension with or against that determination, making opportunity and resistance possible.

Recalling his youth in Oklahoma City, Ellison describes his childhood friendship with a white boy nicknamed Hoolie. Ellison’s family was living in a white neighborhood (another sign of the unevenness of segregation) and Ellison, fascinated with radios, spent his time searching through the trash for items that could be of use to a radio amateur. One day he met Hoolie, who was engaged in the same search, and they struck up a brief friendship. “Knowing this white boy was a very meaningful experience,” he recalled. “It had little to do with the race question as such, but with our mutual loneliness . . . and a great curiosity about the growing science of radio.”16 This experience of a technologically enabled encounter across racial lines recurs in his 1930s fiction, where technological products of modern capitalism (cars, radios, and airplanes) figure the social as porous to opportunity because it is internally uneven. In Ellison’s fiction, technology moves characters and situations from across the social landscape into new relations, and these encounters allegorize the formation of interracial political alliances and action. That Ellison uses modern technology to figure this process indicates that he understands such opportunities to be enabled by the modernity of capitalist production.

John S. Wright has paid the most attention to the role of technology in Ellison’s work, arguing that Ellison does not share high modernism’s suspicions of modern technology. Rather, “revolutionary technological modernity” is for Ellison a crucial component of African American identity in the modern era. Wright indicates how technology, for Ellison, exists in a synecdochic relationship with social relations, “as an extension of human lives, as something someone makes, someone owns, something some people oppose, most people must use, and everyone tries to make sense of.”17 Similarly, I see Ellison’s Marxism as enacting the practice Rayvon Fouché argues African Americans have long performed with the technological products of modernity: “produc[ing] meanings for technological artifacts, practices, and knowledge that regularly subvert the constructed meanings of these technological products.”18

“A Party Down at the Square,” one of Ellison’s earliest literary efforts, uses technological symbolism to demonstrate how the form of the social itself gives rise to opportunities for political resistance. This story of a lynching in a small Southern town is narrated by a racist white youth. The lynching is interrupted by an airplane whose pilot, seeing the light of the blaze on the town square through the pouring rain, mistakes it for the runway lights of the nearby airport and starts to make a landing. The pilot corrects his mistake in time, but the plane’s landing gear knocks over power lines, electrocuting a white woman. The lynching is resumed and carried off, but it gives rise to some unusual aftereffects. Afterwards, the town’s blacks “look mean as hell when you pass them down at the store.” Additionally, white sharecroppers are grasping materialist critiques of white supremacy: “it didn’t do no good to kill the niggers ’cause things don’t get no better” says one who, according to the narrator, “looked hungry as hell.” Finally, the airline has launched an official investigation into the event “to find who set the fire that almost wrecked their plane.”19

The plane disrupts the practice of Jim Crow by revealing its contradictory relations with the capitalist social totality. Antagonistic scrutiny from modern, corporate eyes outside the rural South, the airline and its investigators, may complicate future rituals of racial violence. Yet at the same time the incident has revealed white supremacy’s hidden complicity with capitalism as an ideological compensation, thematized around white female sanctity, for exploited white workers. Jim Crow is rendered vulnerable due to its overdetermined nature: it is regionally peculiar yet contiguous with the larger social structure, temporally residual as well as an apparatus of modern capitalism. The plane’s descent reveals that overdetermination as enabling the dissent of empowered African Americans and white sharecroppers.

The Practice of Politics: Decatur and the Lumpen-Folk Figure

Ellison’s theory of revolutionary political action revises two concepts and figures: the lumpenproletariat and the folk. His memory of black Oklahoma City auto mechanics bearing folk legend status suggests an alignment, in Ellison’s thought, of the ability to manipulate technology, to work the overdetermined complexity of social form, with an organic mode of individual agency. In his Depression work, he associates that agency with lumpenproletarian outsiders who craft possibility from the gaps and margins of the social. As we’ve seen, Althusser’s theory of social form is designed to enable revolutionary action, and Gramsci’s work further theorizes such action and thus furnishes an additional theoretical vocabulary for the specification of Ellison’s Marxism.

Gramsci approaches the traditional Marxist framing of base and superstructure through his attention to what he terms “organic” (economic) and “conjunctural” (superstructural) components of social structures. Economic conditions are epistemologically grasped, however, when they are manifested on the “terrain of the ‘conjunctural,’” where the objective dynamics of production are subjectively apprehended in various social and ideological forms. Class struggle, in other words, is actually waged in terms that orthodox Marxism might dismiss as merely superstructural: cultural, political, and so forth. Gramsci thus interprets Marx’s famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as arguing that “men acquire consciousness of structural conflicts [i.e., economic class conflicts] on the level of ideologies,” but that this is “an affirmation of epistemological and not simply psychological and moral value.” The economic ultimately determines this acquisition: the presence of anticapitalism in an ideological or social form indicates, Gramsci argues, that the economic “premisses exist . . . for this revolutionising.”20

Catharsis, then, describes how economic conditions can be manipulated by subjective action at the level of the superstructure. For Gramsci, catharsis is “the passage from the purely economic . . . to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the [organic] structure into [conjunctural] superstructure in the minds of men.” When this occurs, the capitalist totality is no longer approached as “an external force which crushes man, assimilates him to itself and makes him passive” but is “transformed into a means of freedom, an instrument to create a new ethico-political form and a source of new initiatives.” Catharsis redefines the objective conditions of capitalism as routes of subjective anticapitalist action: it is “the passage from ‘objective to subjective,’” from structural exploitation to active resistance, and inculcating the “‘cathartic’ moment” is Marxism’s top priority. As Norberto Bobbio explains, “the very moment in which the material conditions are recognized, they become degraded to an instrument for whatever end is desired.”21

Ellison’s experience in Decatur, Alabama, in 1933 would guide his thinking about politics in similar channels. In Decatur, railroad bulls seized him and other hobos, “forty or fifty of us, black and white alike,” from their train. “Not only was I guilty of stealing passage on a freight train,” Ellison recalled, “but I realized that I had been caught in the act in the very town where, at that moment, the Scottsboro case was being tried.”22 The Scottsboro case had begun two years prior, when police took nine black male hobos off a train and accused them of raping two white female transients. Their trial would become a rallying point for the Communist Party, which provided them with legal representation and turned their defense into a national antiracist struggle. Ellison had been following the trial, and in the Decatur freight yard, when he realized that some of his fellow hobos were white women dressed as men, he feared the worst.23 He was saved, however, by an act of spontaneous resistance: “when a group of white boys broke and ran, I plunged into their midst.” He escaped and hopped another train, but “the fear, horror and sense of helplessness before legal injustice” he felt in Decatur “was most vivid in my mind,” he recalled more than four decades later, “and it has so remained.”24

Analyzing the significance of this moment requires specifying Ellison’s 1930s understanding of Jim Crow. As the ending of “A Party Down at the Square” indicated, Ellison understood Jim Crow as a practice of dominance complexly connected to capitalist economic exploitation. In a note to himself when working on his aborted 1930s novel Slick, Ellison wrote: “The presence of Southerners in the North coupled with the fascist minded of that region make life for the Negro as miserable as in the south.” Just as in the South, “Northern capitalists exploit” blacks “and attempt to keep them at the same level. Use police force to intimidate them.”25 Ellison generalizes Jim Crow as a national social order that ultimately reflects and achieves ruling-class economic dominance. If racially driven repression is the distinctly American sociopolitical articulation of capitalism, to battle Jim Crow is to wage anticapitalist struggle in sociopolitical terms. Ellison’s approach thus resembles Stuart Hall’s famous Gramscian claim that “race is . . . the modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class relations are experienced, the form in which it is appropriated and ‘fought through.’”26 Fleeing Jim Crow, and thereby defying and demystifying the naturalness of its repressive routine, is an act with anticapitalist as well as antiracist significance, as it articulates the resistance of the economically marginalized to both racial dominance and economic exploitation.

Ellison’s escape from Decatur proceeds cathartically, as it involves reapprehending structural dominance as political resistance. At first, the presence of white women among the hobos occasions fear and passivity in the face of impending violence. But Ellison is then drawn into action by those same individuals whose presence he initially feared. After all, how does Ellison know that some of those “white boys” he recalled breaking and running weren’t also white women dressed as men? In a cathartic instance, the racial and gender significance of white women and black men together shifts from a catalyst of objective structural repression to a means of subjective action.

The incident in Decatur resituates a defining feature of the lumpenproletariat’s social and economic marginality, its transience and mobility, as resistance. The incident thus resonates through Ellison’s Depression fiction, in which the experiences of the lumpenproletariat connect the complexity of the American social scene to revolutionary action. Extricating the lumpenproletariat from Marx’s dismissal of it as a politically unconscious or reactionary social segment guided only by vice and self-interest, Ellison reimagines lumpenproletarian agency in terms of a political subjectivity normally reserved, in classical Marxism, for the collective proletariat. As the socially and economically displaced, Depression lumpenproletarians navigate the interstices, underworlds, and margins of the social, those illicit routes and spaces capable of troubling the functioning of race and class rule. Ellison, fully as much as Wright or the later theorists of the Black Panther Party, situates the experiences of the lumpenproletariat at the center of his Marxism.

In Ellison’s unpublished memoirs, Charlie Miller, the transient who accompanied Ellison on the first part of his 1933 journey, demonstrates the possibilities accessed from navigating the complexities of social form. Miller was a light-skinned African American who crossed racial, social, and class boundaries, and Ellison’s description of him echoes Marx’s of the heterogeneous social locations of the lumpenproletariat: “Sometimes footloose wanderer, sometimes taxi driver, butcher, man of all work, circus roustabout and gambler, he knew America like the palm of his hand.” Refusing to define himself through fixed identities of either class or race, he was “as irreverent toward the Protestant work-ethic as he was toward the mystique of race and color.” Miller is a “proven master” of transience not only in his capacity to read freight manifests and avoid the multiple perils of life on the bum, but in a figuratively political manner as well, in that he grasps how the fluid complications of American society can be manipulated against racial and economic power.27

Ellison explores this political potential figured within and by lumpenproletarian experience in his 1930s story “I Did Not Learn Their Names.” The unnamed main character, based on Ellison himself, is African American and has gone on the road to earn money to pay his college tuition as a music student. Unable to find any work during the Depression, he rides freight trains across the country. He travels with Morrie, a white drifter he met in a hobo jungle in Oklahoma. Morrie has once saved his life, and helps him fight the racist white transients they often encounter. The train is figured as a vehicle of interracial, antiracist allegiance with larger, revolutionary implications: its rapid movement gives off sparks “dancing red in the whirling darkness,” and on the morning of the story’s main action, the protagonist “woke to see the line in the east turning red with the dawn.” These allusions to Communism and the Soviet Union, the utopian “red” promise rising in the east, cast the mobile world of the lumpenproletariat as the origin of revolutionary practice.

The story explicates that origin through the protagonist’s accidental encounter, in a boxcar, with an elderly white couple traveling to Missouri to meet their son, who is being released from prison. At first he assumes the white couple will be offended to discover him in the same car as dawn breaks: “In the dark, I was like all the rest who were on the freight and it didn’t make a difference. Now it did.” But the two welcome him, invite him to join them for a meal, ask after his own life, and relate the story of their son’s troubles. The red light of dawn brings not the imposition of Jim Crow, as the protagonist initially feared, but its suspension, a suspension secured by the social marginality of the space itself. Still suspicious of the couple at first, he nonetheless refuses to address the man as “sir” because “Saying ‘sir’ was too much a part of knowing your place. I had learned that on the road you really had no place; you were all the same though some of them did not understand that.”28 Out of place and moving freely in the margins of the social, lumpenproletarian experience accesses human communion free from sociopolitical hierarchies.

The couple encourages the protagonist to continue his studies, and tells him that even though “the money is gone . . . our boy will be back with us. We are very happy.” Lumpenproletarian crime and transience circumscribe the possibility of a collectivity and fulfillment that forecast the means and ends of revolutionary practice. After his encounter with the couple, the protagonist “thought of them a few days later” after he is arrested by railroad police in Decatur, who suspect him of traveling in the company of white women. In jail he learns of the Scottsboro case, and is relieved when Morrie is able to secure his release. While Ellison doesn’t explicitly identify why the arrest puts him in mind of the couple, the implication is clear: his encounter with the couple stands in contrast to Jim Crow, and the racial violence of the latter is contiguous with the state violence suffered by the couple’s son, who is approximately the same age as the protagonist. “I thought of the old couple often during those days I lay in jail, and I was sorry that I had not learned their names.”29 This closing regret is less a lament than a subtle foreshadowing. Among the lumpenproletariat, he has found white allies whose friendship allegorizes revolution by, in a reworking of Ellison’s own escape from Decatur, defying Jim Crow. That friendship is colored red by the allusion to Scottsboro, and forecasts a new world in which the true names and true identities of human beings will, because outside of social and economic stratification, be known. The story thus combines romantic and realistic framings of the lumpenproletariat. Ellison depicts the violence and racism of the freights, echoing the brutal and unredemptive representations of lumpenproletarian life found in the Depression bottom dogs fiction described in chapter 1. Yet Ellison also sees a forecasting of postclass society in the marginal lives and encounters of the lumpenproletariat.

Alongside the lumpenproletariat, Ellison theorizes political action by drawing on an unusual concept of the folk, one inspired by the particular place of the African American folk in Communist discourse. As the instinctual humanity of the couple in “I Did Not Learn Their Names” suggests, Ellison reconceives the folk as a principle of positivity, an undeconstructible kernel of human will and the impulse to act that, while often associated with African Americans, nonetheless transcends racial identity. As a conceptualizing of transracial human impulses, it describes antecapitalist and prediscursive energies that can invigorate anticapitalist discourses and projects. The folk in Ellison’s Marxism is thus a conceptual abstraction from the familiar definition of the black folk as a premodern Southern peasant class preserving the authentic cultural roots of the black community. Raymond Williams, however, points out how such purportedly empirical definitions of the folk are actually discursive responses to industrial society that position historically residual cultural practices as modes of oppositional authenticity.30 J. Martin Favor and David G. Nicholls have identified the primarily discursive and instrumental presence of the folk in African American writing, where it often tropes problems of modernity and authenticity. Ellison’s Marxism similarly repurposes the folk, situating it not as an empirical demographic but as an instrumental trope, one that associates human authenticity with the origins of political action.31

Ellison’s recasting of the concept of the folk is informed by the Communist Party’s approach to black folk culture in the Depression, when the party’s “Black Belt” thesis described African Americans in the South as an oppressed nation and prioritized their struggle for self-determination. Party discourse defined the authenticity of Southern blacks, their folk identity, as working-class in nature, making their objective allies not the black middle class, but the interracial proletariat. The party sloganized black cultural identity as “national in form, but proletarian in content.” The Communists thus developed nonessentialist and politically empowering concepts of black folk identity and black nationalism, understanding nations as historical formations and approaching national struggles as articulated modes of resistance to capitalism and imperialism.32

As historical materialists, both Ellison and Wright were interested in the meaning of Southern agricultural black folk identity in the capitalist North in the wake of the Great Migration. In a reading of Wright and Ellison’s writings on the folk during World War II, Robin Lucy argues that Wright saw the folk as having been negated by modernization. Accordingly, for Wright, black folk culture had become “an element of an unusable past that cannot be translated into modernity.”33 Ellison, however, understood black folk identity and culture as having been transformed, in the North, into a mode of collective working-class consciousness and resistance. For Ellison, this modernized folk consciousness and cultural practice “defines a strategic, self-conscious, and radically transformative black national politics.”34 I argue that Ellison’s 1930s fiction similarly developed a political, nonethnographic definition of the folk, one associated not with the proletariat, as Lucy holds, but with individual lumpenproletarian figures.

While affirming the historical eclipse of the agricultural folk, black Communist writers in the period tended to retain and reassign the senses of racial authenticity and communal and individual strength associated with the folk. Folk culture was considered the authentic expression of the black masses and the expressive kernel or motor of black revolutionary consciousness, and thus needed to be creatively updated for the current historical moment. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Wright describes black folk culture as a vital raw material for the black writer who must synthesize it with Marxist theory.35 Marian Minus, a friend of Wright and Ellison, advanced a similar argument a few months prior to the publication of Wright’s more well-known essay. In “Present Trends of Negro Literature” she insisted that black writers must reject the middle-class values of the Harlem Renaissance and return to the “earthy, burning, vital forces” of the folk culture of the masses. The writer must modernize this culture from a Marxist perspective, mastering its “social implications” in order to totalize it, to link its rich particular content to “the total configuration of world-wide human emotions, ideals and struggles.”36

Such arguments contextualize Wright’s portrayal of boxer Joe Louis as a folk hero capable of uniting the masses in revolutionary struggle. Despite seeing the empirical Southern black folk as historically outmoded, Wright, like Ellison, deploys a folk-derived rhetoric of organic or essential capacity in order to think the origins of political action. Wright’s New Masses report “Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite” describes the mass celebrations of African Americans in Chicago following Louis’s 1935 victory over Max Baer. Wright gives voice to the celebrants’ nascent revolutionary consciousness as they storm a streetcar and take the money that spills in the chaos: “They stole it from us, anyhow.” Louis’s prowess makes him a folk avatar of the revolutionary capabilities of African Americans: “We ain’t scared either. We’ll fight too when the time comes. We’ll win, too.” Gramsci might note that this instance of unleashed, inherent folk militancy represents the acquisition of anticapitalist revolutionary agency on sociocultural terrain and in ideological terms. Concluding his narrative, Wright exclaims to his Communist reader: “Say, Comrade, here’s the wild river that’s got to be harnessed and directed. Here’s that something, that pent-up folk consciousness. Here’s a fleeting glimpse of the heart of the Negro, the heart that beats and suffers and hopes—for freedom. Here’s that fluid something that’s like iron. Here’s the real dynamite that Joe Louis uncovered!”37

In a similar manner, Ellison’s Marxism synthesizes the irrepressible strength and human agency associated with the folk with the socially displaced mobility of the lumpenproletariat in the archetypal figure I call the lumpen-folk, a figure for and elaboration of the “fluid something that’s like iron” of politics.38 Morrie and the elderly couple in “I Did Not Learn Their Names” reference this figure, and Ellison develops it further in his 1937 story “Hymie’s Bull.” Here, the protagonist is again a black drifter riding freights in the Depression. The narrative opens within a lumpenproletarian social fluidity determined by economic crisis: “We were just drifting; going no place in particular, having long ago given up hopes of finding jobs.” The narrator recounts the spontaneous emergence of a lumpen-folk hero, “an ofay bum named Hymie from Brooklyn.” Hymie is legendary because he killed a railroad bull in a knife fight, an individual act of self-defense but one that will enable, like Joe Louis’s heroic victory over Max Baer, collective political action. The day after Hymie kills the bull, the train the hobos are riding is stopped and the transients taken off. “We knew Hymie’s bull had been found and some black boy had to go.” But just then, “the storm broke and the freight started to pull out of the yards.” The hobos make a run for the train, hop it, and escape.39

As a Jew from Brooklyn who saves black transients from Jim Crow, Hymie invokes the Communist left and its leading role in the Scottsboro defense and other antiracist causes. His act sets in motion a cathartic response to racial oppression. When they are pulled off the train, the narrator and his fellow drifters expect racial violence as the outcome of an apparently inevitable law. But in a fortuitous moment the conditions of the social totality, as figured by the technological symbol of the train, are cathartically transformed into an instrument of escape and freedom. Both the train and Hymie, the modern conditions of capitalism and an irrepressible human agency, make resistance to racial and class rule possible.

Rampersad points out that nowhere in his recollections of the 1933 journey does Ellison mention anyone like Hymie.40 Ellison is instead extracting and departicularizing the themes of a black folk legend he heard on that journey. “I remember that when I was riding freight trains through Alabama to get to Tuskegee Institute there was a well-known figure of Birmingham, called Ice Cream Charlie, whose story was also told over and over again whenever we evoked the unwritten history of the group,” Ellison later explained. Charlie was an ice cream maker. His success in this trade led his white competitors to send the police after him, “and it ended with his killing twelve policemen before they burned him out and killed him.”41 Ellison takes Ice Cream Charlie, a figure of both lumpenproletarian criminality and the agency of the black folk, and reimagines him as Hymie, thereby combining the potential of the lumpen-folk with the efficacy of organized interracial action Ellison experienced in Decatur.

Recalling his childhood in Oklahoma City, Ellison described how he and his friends worshipped a wide range of African American figures who appeared to freely defy racial subordination, including lumpenproletarian “gamblers” or “some local bootlegger.” Ellison characterizes this practice as “projecting archetypes, re-creating folk figures, legendary heroes, monsters even, most of which violated all ideas of social hierarchy and order and all accepted conceptions of the hero handed down by cultural, religious and racist tradition.”42 In “Hymie’s Bull,” he translated this practice into explicitly political terms, crafting a new kind of transracial revolutionary folk hero. Ellison’s story thus follows Marian Minus’s injunction to black writers to comb the “legends, myths and ballads . . . in which Negroes have immortalized their culture heroes for those elements of universality” and to identify black folkloric figures “touched with the super-human, who reflect the aspirations and failures of all humanity.”43

Criteria for Institutions: Tuskegee and Harlem

A theory of institutional revolutionary leadership forms the final level of Ellison’s 1930s Marxist problematic. When Ellison arrived at Tuskegee in 1933, he entered an institution dedicated to Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist political paradigm. He would soon discard that paradigm by leaving Tuskegee for New York in 1936, where he would affiliate with another institution, the Communist Party. As a result of these two encounters, institutional critique is a priority of his work. When Wright turned to his Communist reader and, pointing at the Louis-inspired crowds, exclaims “here’s the wild river that’s got to be harnessed and directed,” or when Wright offered Bigger Thomas as a lumpenproletarian figure possessed with the capacity for revolutionary action, he indicated the need of the party to recognize and administer such potential. This criterion also drives Ellison’s analysis of ostensibly radical institutions.

The ability to link leaders and intellectuals with the masses is, for Gramsci, a distinguishing feature of Marxist institutions, which must “construct an intellectual-moral bloc which can make politically possible the intellectual progress of the mass and not only of small intellectual groups.”44 Revolutionary parties and organizations foster reciprocity between the spontaneous feelings and thoughts of the masses and the theoretical knowledge of informed leaders. Marxist intellectuals must theorize the “elementary passions of the people” by relating them to the terms of “the particular historical situation” and to a general Marxist worldview. The masses in turn contribute “passion” to the intellectuals and leaders, enabling the institution to move from theory to praxis. “In the absence of such a nexus” Gramsci warns, “the relations between the intellectual and the people-nation are, or are reduced to, relationships of a purely bureaucratic and formal order.”45 In the context of a Marxist critique of the African American leadership of the Communist Party, Ellison questions how revolutionary institutions can avoid becoming bureaucratic and provide the intellectual cohesion and strategic leadership capable of harnessing and exploiting the fluid possibilities of the social and the “passion,” or agency, troped by the lumpen-folk.

In the spring of 1940, Ellison attended the Communist-backed National Negro Congress (NNC) in Washington, DC, where he was impressed by the passion of the black sharecroppers and workers in attendance. As he reports in New Masses, the delegates came to see if and how the institutional Communist left could advance their interests. Ellison describes the delegates as having already fashioned folk culture into a kind of anticapitalist agency: “They were people sure of their strength. . . . In many of the speeches I had heard the names Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass. And in these mouths the names had a new meaning. And I suddenly realized that the age of the Negro hero had returned to American life.” In the speech of one delegate, Ellison hears a moment of Gramscian catharsis: “all the violence that America has made our Negro heritage was flowing from him transformed into a will to change a civilization.”46

Yet at the same time, he was skeptical that the party—particularly the Harlem Branch, whose leaders he and Wright knew—could recognize this source of potential. He wrote to Wright that the NNC was “the first real basis for faith in our revolutionary potentialities I have found,” a faith that the black masses can correct the “stupidities of black CP leaders. Some morning they [the Communist leaders] will be awakened from their ‘Marxist’ fog by the people who think they are carrying out God’s wishes when they fight for freedom, telling them ‘Comrades, us dont want to disturb youall, but us thought youall would like to know that us got the revolution going like youall been talking about.’” Reminding Wright of his own conclusion to the 1935 Joe Louis article, Ellison writes of his report on the congress: “I guess what I am trying to say in the article . . . is that the ‘river’ is harnessing itself!”47 Ellison’s comments suggest a general theory of the measure of any revolutionary party. That the masses grasp revolutionary consciousness in ideological terms of “God’s wishes” doesn’t make that consciousness false, since this subjective articulation expresses objective economic contradictions cathartically, in politically empowering terms. The danger Ellison describes is the blindness of institutional leaders to political opportunity when it emerges in new and unusual forms beyond their prescription—forms which, for a Marxist, might well be cultural or ideological, and articulated in idioms of the black folk rather than the international proletariat.

A few weeks prior to his letter about the NNC, Ellison describes to Wright a suggestion he’s heard, in Communist circles, that writers should submit their manuscripts to the party for prepublication inspection. Ellison is open to the idea, but only “if the inspectors are people the writers can respect. However, I understand the suggestion originated in Harlem!”48 Ellison doesn’t renounce institutional supervision per se: committed writing could benefit from an active exchange between writer and party, but the Harlem CP, he suggests, would be unsuited to that exchange. His complaint suggests that his criticism of the Harlem leadership’s political acuity stemmed from his experience as a party writer, and in 1940 Ellison was especially frustrated by what he saw as the failure of party leaders to properly read Native Son. Wright’s novel was published on March 1, Ellison’s twenty-seventh birthday. Ellison’s remarks in May about the “stupidities of black CP leaders” derive from his ardent defense of Wright’s novel against criticisms from within the Harlem Communist Party: he saw the literary inadequacy of these leaders as a symptom of a more general political inadequacy. Of all his intellectual efforts in the Depression period, his defense of Native Son most clearly develops his criteria for institutional effectiveness.

In a 1941 New Masses article, Ellison praised Native Son as “the first philosophical novel by an American Negro,” a text that utilized modernist techniques in order to access “unlimited intellectual and imaginative possibilities.” The novel’s theoretical understanding of black life in modern America set it apart from previous black writing, which was “apologetic in tone and narrowly confined to the expression of Negro middle-class ideals.”49 For Ellison, Native Son was literature as philosophy and socially engaged theory rather than sentimental or didactic propaganda.

As I discussed in the previous chapter, Native Son explores the lumpenproletariat’s unique capacity for revolutionary politics through Bigger Thomas’s gradual self-recognition of his ability to act, to transcend racist and economic marginalization and distinguish himself as an individual capable of altering his environment. Through Bigger, Wright theorizes the subjective processes through which African Americans might attain revolutionary agency, and Ellison saw Native Son as compensating for Marxism’s lack of a psychoanalytic or existential component, its “almost total failure . . . to treat human personality.”50 The capacity to transform one’s situation is for Wright both the defining capacity of human subjectivity and the existential germ of the revolutionary impulse. In gradually discovering that capacity, Bigger simultaneously reclaims his humanity from its structural devaluation and reminds the reader that such devaluation can be actively challenged. Communist leaders, Wright’s novel holds, must recognize and educate the impulsive mode of agency Bigger discovers. That the specific actions through which Bigger makes this discovery are ethically repugnant is Wright’s challenge to both liberal and radical readers seeking to consume heroic political narratives with self-affirming pleasure—with the “consolation of tears,” as Wright put it in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born”51—rather than with the epistemological consideration appropriate for a “philosophical novel.”

As I discuss below, Ellison’s own fiction of the 1930s explores similar thematic and conceptual territory. He thus dedicated himself in 1940 to defending Wright’s project to Harlem Communists who felt Wright distorted African Americans and the party. Ben Davis Jr. wrote a lengthy review in the Sunday Worker that especially irked Wright and Ellison. While mostly positive, Davis critiqued Wright for politically consequential representational inaccuracies: misrepresenting black people as “beaten and desperate,” ignoring “the progressive developments among the Negro people,” and failing to accurately document the cultural and political strength of the black masses and the antiracist efforts of the party.52

Wright was living in Mexico in the spring of 1940, and Ellison kept him updated on his efforts to defend the novel within Communist circles. “I have talked about the book, trying to answer attacks against it until I am weary.”53 They discussed criticism like Davis’s as a sign of the party’s inability to learn from revolutionary writing. Worried about the mimetic accuracy of Wright’s representations, Communist leaders overlooked the novel’s unorthodox insights. For example, Davis objected that the legal strategy Max uses in Bigger’s trial is one no Communist lawyer would implement: “Max should have argued for Bigger’s acquittal in the case, and should have helped stir the political pressure of the Negro and white masses to get that acquittal.”54 Davis, in his concern over how accurately Wright represented Communist legal activism, misses the connection of Bigger’s guilt to his discovery of agency and corresponding refusal to cede responsibility for his actions.

Ellison sent Wright a copy of the Baltimore Afro-American’s review of Native Son, which found that the novel reinforced racist stereotypes, was gratuitously graphic in its representation of sex and violence, and needlessly inflammatory in its inclusion of racial slurs and other “curse words.”55 Ellison complained to Wright that “practically every garbled opinion expressed in the piece has been expressed by” Harlem party leaders Abner Berry and Theodore Basset, “both of whom should know better.” Ellison ultimately doubted whether “cp leaders” really were “emancipated from bourgeois taboos.”56 In a later letter, Ellison asserted that they “refuse to see the revolutionary significance of Bigger and while professing to be revolutionaries they have yet to rid themselves of their wornout [sic] Christian ethics.” These so-called revolutionaries are concerned with moral palatability: “They worry about whether you justify Bigger,” and “fail to see that whats [sic] bad in Bigger from the point of view of bourgeois society is good from our point of view.” In other words, they read the novel through a lens of moral and ethical judgment rather than Marxist analysis. And ironically, as Ellison writes, Bigger’s actions and Max’s speech lay bare the function of “the whole ethic of moral justification” as an ideological cover for an exploitative social system.57 Bigger’s agency invokes the contours of revolution as the rejection of that system in its entirety, but Communist objections show symptoms of a decidedly nonrevolutionary attachment to ideological elements of that system. Ellison declares that “Native Son [sic] shook the Harlem section to its foundation and some of the rot it has brought up is painful to smell.”58 That rot is the party’s unconscious influence by the ideology of the present that it is supposed to be negating.

The insight of James Baldwin’s later critique of Native Son—that its political agenda entails a dehumanizing distortion of black life that undercuts its ambition to portray Bigger’s humanity—indicates that Ellison is too quick to discount the party’s concerns, many of which anticipate Baldwin’s, as bourgeois hang-ups.59 But the logic of his defense of Native Son reveals a theory of institutional leadership, one that stresses the need to evaluate the revolutionary will of a given institution. A radical institution should be able to incorporate, without ideological blinders imposed by its own doctrine or by the dominant social order in which it’s located, insights and practices gleaned from the fluidity—and in the case of Native Son, the illicit lumpenproletarian undercurrents—of American society.

Ellison’s brief time among the rail-riding transients of the Depression helped shape his development of a theoretical project that uses lumpenproletarian life to triangulate the form of modern US society, principles and origins of revolutionary action, and criteria for institutional leadership. In Tillman and Tackhead and Slick, Ellison mines this problematic at length in order to explore the radical stakes of black lumpenproletarian experience. Both works try to figure out chances for revolutionary practice obtaining not in proletarian subjectivity or class position, but in the socially marginal position of African Americans during the Depression.

Ellison’s Dayton Period: Tillman and Tackhead and Slick

Ellison began writing Tillman and Tackhead and Slick in the winter of 1937–38 in Dayton, Ohio. Ellison had travelled to Dayton for his mother’s funeral in October, and was forced to remain there until March, waiting for one of her life insurance policies to be paid. He and his brother Herbert struggled to make ends meet, hunting rabbits and quail to both eat and sell to local grocers.60 They moved between temporary lodgings, at times sleeping in garages and shops, battling, in Rampersad’s words, “hunger, cold, and homelessness.”61 Yet Ellison was also able to use this period to, as he put it, focus his “full attention to the task of learning to write fiction.”62 In Dayton, Ellison was relatively isolated from the Communist milieu of New York. He complained to Wright that he was unable to locate copies of the New Masses or Daily Worker, and that there was no radical political activity to be found anywhere.63 He managed to write by borrowing office space, a typewriter, and paper from a local lawyer and Republican Party figure known to Marian Minus, and from an architect named Frank Sutton.64 The two longer fictional works he began in Dayton, Tillman and Tackhead and Slick, reflect the circumstances of what Ellison called his “exile.”65 Both deal with protagonists who fall outside of established socioeconomic positions, and who must, like Ellison, shift on the illicit margins of social structures in order to survive. As Ellison took advantage of his poverty and limited resources in Dayton in order to write politically innovative fiction, his lumpenized characters access politically constructive knowledge and agency.

Tillman and Tackhead and Slick resemble Wright’s Depression fiction in their themes and characterizations. According to Ellison, Wright found his Dayton work too similar to his own, and his anger at Ellison formed an early rift in their relationship: “I never showed him another piece of fiction,” Ellison claimed.66 Yet this similarity in both writers’ 1930s work is inadequately understood if framed as a foreshadowing of their later break and the critical positioning of the two, by Cold War and Black Power-era critics, as polar alternatives for black fiction. Ellison and Wright were close during the 1930s in their understanding of Marxism’s conceptual applicability to US and African American circumstances, and while Ellison was certainly influenced by Wright, he was never merely derivative. Slick resembles Native Son in its treatment of the education of a politically unconscious black male protagonist, yet Ellison was writing Slick at roughly the same time Wright worked on Native Son: Wright began drafting his novel in earnest in the summer of 1938.67 Rather than seeing the Depression-era Ellison as laboring under the shadow of Wright or struggling to find an authentic authorial identity, we should see him and Wright as coarticulators of a lumpenproletarian black Marxism.

Tillman and Tackhead is set in a club in Oklahoma City. The protagonist Tillman is one of the African American waiters who work at the club and who, as the story starts, are moving tables in preparation for dinner service. As they pass the open door of one of the club members’ private rooms, another waiter, Tackhead, notices a painting of a black man hanging on the wall: “somebody done made a picture of a mose!” he exclaims in surprise.68 Another waiter tries to get them to return to their labor, but Tillman leads them into the room to investigate the painting. From their comments, it’s evident that the artwork in question is Winslow Homer’s 1899 painting The Gulf Stream, which depicts a black seaman adrift and alone in a shipwrecked vessel, surrounded by threatening sharks and an oncoming storm. The water runs red with blood, suggesting the sharks have already devoured the man’s crewmates. A ship appears in the far distance, but it’s unclear whether it will come to the rescue. The man himself seems passive in the face of these dangers: one art critic describes his “stoic resignation to his fate.”69 Or as one of the waiters puts it, “That mose is tryin t play like he dont see them sharks.”70

The waiters read the painting as a representation of black experience in America. One suggests that the central figure represents all black men, “The more Ah look at that mose the more he looks like a boy Ah usta know,” while another notes the origins of the man’s plight in racial oppression: “Wouldnt nobody but a white man put a mose in that fix.” Tillman, who used to harbor ambitions of being an artist himself, reads the painting as an instance of art’s complicity with racial rule. Since whites are “the only ones who paint,” when a white man appears in a nautical-themed painting, he has “pretty gals sittin all ova im” or he’s triumphantly wrangling a fish with “a fightin look on his face.” However, “when white folks went t paint a colored man they put him out in a piece a boat with a bunch of sharks around him. And instead of havin im fight t git out, hes jus laying back on his behin n lookin out cross tha water like hes waitin fo somethin t happen.” Tackhead defuses Tillman’s comments with a joke about how the man is safe from the sharks, who “dont care fo no dark meat,” and the rest of the men return to work.71 Tillman, however, stays behind to study The Gulf Stream further.

According to Peter H. Wood, interpretations of The Gulf Stream that move beyond a purely formalist approach have often seen it as either a universal allegory of the human condition, or as a narrative illustration of the drama of shipwreck. Taking into account Homer’s sympathy for African Americans and progressive racial views, and situating the painting within the racial struggles and discourses of the 1890s, Wood himself argues that The Gulf Stream encodes an allegorical protest against Jim Crow and the period’s racial violence.72 Tillman offers an illicit counterreading, one that assigns a repressive sociopolitical function to the painting. As Tillman’s comments indicate, the painting serves Jim Crow by fabricating essential natural differences between whites and blacks: the former are defined by mastery over their environment, and the latter as passive and powerless. The painting’s place in the club room indicates its function. Like other paintings on the wall, it is set in a “rich [frame]” and Tillman notices how “light from the chandelier played upon blue and red pigments” of the canvas: class rule both frames and animates the racial violence of the painting. The Gulf Stream aestheticizes and naturalizes the subservience of black working-class men like Tillman. “They said you didn’t fight. That was what the picture was saying.” If the painting reproduces the subservience of black viewers, achieved here when the other waiters laugh off the image and return to work, it also reproduces the power of white elites, who “probably laugh like hell” when they view it.73 In this setting, the painting reifies the power arrangements of Jim Crow and capitalism.

Through a cathartic sequence of reflection, Tillman reapprehends those objective arrangements as an occasion of subjective action. He begins by recognizing the falsity of the representation: it’s not that, as a black subject, “you didnt fight,” but that “you fought yourself into not fighting them. They dont know that. . . . Theyll never know that. When they know that itll be the last thing they’ll ever know.” When the elevator door in the outer hall opens, Tillman ducks deeper into the room to conceal himself. No one emerges from the elevator, but his physical response dramatizes both the illicit nature of his study and his commitment to it. And that instinctual movement of simultaneous self-preservation and resistance shifts his understanding of The Gulf Stream: “From where he stood the colors seemed brighter. He studied the Negroes face and the muscles of his arms.” The apparent passivity of the figure’s expression conceals the actual power lying dormant in his arms. The painting now subtly reveals the agency of black men that is contained but not cancelled by the enforced subservience black men must perform to survive under Jim Crow. This recognition makes Tillman reconnect with that agency inside himself, and the painting shifts from a pronouncement of white class rule to a catalyst for action: “The painting stirred something deep within him and a feeling of bitterness grew. As he watched the painting something vague stirred within him, which for a long time had tried to die away. Something he had tried to help die.”74

Ellison’s theoretical understanding of the folk here frames a sophisticated rendering of Tillman’s conflicted consciousness. Tillman’s irrepressible “something” echoes Wright’s description of “that fluid something that’s like iron” contained in “the heart of the Negro,” and expresses Ellison’s use of the folk as naming an irrepressible quality of human perseverance, desire, and action. Tillman describes the “something” as “that clear, sharp, penetrating feeling, this thing” that responds to the aesthetic beauty of the world about him. In his youth, the discovery of this “something” had led him to want to be an artist, an ambition thwarted by Jim Crow. Barred from art by racial rule, he can find no outlet for his aesthetic desires in the blues or African American Christianity, since both form the culture of an insular “black world” that is also defined by Jim Crow. “Whenever this thing rose up he became lost between two worlds, one too narrow and the other refusing him his needs.” The double consciousness imposed on him by racial hierarchy gives rise to a potent revolutionary “desire to create a new world, a world which he had not the strength to imagine.”75

If living under Jim Crow requires Tillman to routinely suppress that desire, the painting now brings it out as a motive force of agency, one that Ellison describes in terms of criminal violence, liberatory creation, and revolutionary action:

Standing before the canvas he experienced a longing to paint such a picture. But with the Negro fighting some enemy more human and more defeatable than the sea. He became gripped with a high sense of exhilaration, as when . . . he . . . fought, watching the face of his opponent change shape under the blows of his fists. Then his whole being seemed caught up and thrown into a region where he stood tall and free.

With a knife, Tillman slashes the painting into “colored shreds.”76 Symbolically, his act has both negative and positive political valences. It represents a liberation of the human agency visually suppressed in the resigned black victim and destroys the order of Jim Crow naturalized by the painting. It’s also an act of creation, giving an outward, if negative, representation of a new world defined by the shredding of race and class oppression.

Through this criminal act of vandalism, Tillman feels he has entered a new existence on the margins of Jim Crow’s familiar structures of racial and class power: “he had destroyed the picture of a Negro as white folks wanted him; even if in doing so he had suddenly found himself in a strange region where nothing was secure or familiar.” Tillman has deproletarianized himself and entered the ranks of the lumpenproletariat, those who no longer belong to any defined socioeconomic strata. He recognizes that he has redrawn the significance of the lone black figure in The Gulf Stream: “Now he was adrift in a current which swept in a direction he feared, yet a vague feeling of power pulsed deep beneath his dread of the journey.”77 He has painted his own image of black subjectivity, has undergone a cathartic transformation from the object of exploitation to the empowered subject of resistance. As discussed in chapter 1, the trope of the rag here suggests the liberatory, open-ended potential figured in lumpenproletarian experience. By turning the canvas to rags, Tillman opens exploitable gaps in the composed, framed articulation of Jim Crow rule.

His sense of power is quickly replaced by fear. Leaving the private room, he returns to the work of preparing for dinner service, hoping his act isn’t discovered before he can get away at the end of his shift. Returned to his proper socioeconomic location in the black working class, Tillman once again resembles the passive figure in the picture he’s just shredded. As he drapes a white cloth over one of the tables, it “billowed up and fluttered, settling down as he gave it a jerk and pulled the crease skillfully to the center.”78 The image of the tablecloth is here aligned with that of both the canvas and a sail: the routinized labor Tillman performs contrasts sharply with the rebellion enacted against the canvas, while his setting of the cloth invokes the labor of a seaman raising a sail. In the wake of his symbolic rebellion, Tillman has returned to the subservient position of the black sailor in The Gulf Stream.

Tillman’s cathartic response to the painting is later replayed in a direct confrontation with Jim Crow. At one point during dinner, Tackhead again draws Tillman’s attention to an unusual sight, this time directing him to the window of a hotel across the alley from the club. He spies the hotel’s black bellboy and a white woman having sex, “framed in the window” like Homer’s canvas. Tillman, who has witnessed the devastation of the 1921 Tulsa race riot, is angered by this illicit coupling, afraid that it will incite a similar mass lynching if discovered. Tackhead reassures him: the white women of the hotel are “high-class whores” who are “crazy” about the bellboy, and their servicing of wealthy white men grants them and the bellboy a degree of freedom from the racial and sexual prohibitions of Jim Crow. “Ain no cops gonna bother em,” Tackhead explains.79 Tillman discovers a lumpenproletarian underworld existing in the interstices of, and defying the normative operations of, white supremacy. He glimpses a measure of freedom and desire afforded by the overdetermined complexity of Jim Crow society.

Tillman then waits on a white couple who provoke him with racist remarks. When the couple return to their table from dancing, the woman “[brushes]” against Tillman, prompting him to recall his earlier fears about the scene in the window: “this crackerd raise hell if he could see” the white prostitute and black bellboy. Well aware of the violent prohibition of physical contact between black men and white women, Tillman’s unnoticed contact with the white woman reminds him of his social status, which recalls that of the sailor in The Gulf Stream. “The painting and window were becoming mixed in his mind.” If the window depicts resistance to Jim Crow through a defiance of its codes, the content of the painting reminds him that white racist narratives of such illicit activity form the alibi and occasion for the subservience-inducing violence of Jim Crow. Tillman next hears that the vandalism of the painting has been discovered and “had the sensation of falling. The painting came back to him vividly, giving him a sense of water and isolation.”80 Like his sense of the interracial coupling in the window, his destruction of the painting passes, in his consciousness, between being an emboldening act of resistance and a frightening infraction.

Agency and powerlessness, resistance and repression, are thus “mixed” in Tillman’s consciousness when the man he’s serving accuses him of stealing his companion’s purse. The man tries to attack Tillman, who protests his innocence, knowing that the charge could incite lynching and riot. He notices the window again, and he “became sharply conscious of his blackness. You were all of one miserable piece. If the Negro in the window was caught, other Negroes would suffer; just as he was suffering because someone had stolen.” As the man continues to hit Tillman, the “shipwrecked Negro flashed through his mind” but now, rather than signifying a passive “sense of water and isolation,” the painting strengthens his resolve to resist victimization. The “thing inside him,” that desire for a better world he has to suppress in order to survive, finally escapes as action, and he slashes the man with his knife. “He felt a strong sense of power, he was slashing the painting again.” His earlier fears about the bellboy’s irresponsibility are supplanted by the recognition that, under Jim Crow, black masculinity itself is criminalized: black men are “of one miserable piece,” their existence a crime regardless of whether they violate racist sexual taboos, destroy white-owned artworks, or commit theft. This recognition changes the nature of criminal resistance for Tillman from reckless behavior (sleeping with white women, destroying the private property of the club) to the necessary means of reclaiming black humanity. As he later reflects, “the knife had cut through a mold into which he had been forced and he had stood free and experienced for the first time a sharp sense of his manhood.”81 The story has built to this cathartic redefinition of objective structural powerlessness as subjective agency: in a social system in which blackness is criminalized, criminal action ceases to be merely for private or personal advantage, and instead becomes collective and political.

After this act, Tillman is able to escape the club through two strategies. First, he finds the switchbox and cuts off electricity to the building. Second, he encounters Breck, the club’s bellboy, who gives Tillman his uniform. Tillman “heard the rustle of cloth” as Breck takes off his jacket to give him: the sail-like tablecloth that earlier, like The Gulf Stream, signified his racial and economic subjugation, is now cathartically resignified as a means of escape from that subjugation.82 Taking advantage of the dark to elude the white owner’s searchers and obscure his own identity, he uses his disguise to convince Pop, an elderly employee of the club, that he’s a bellboy the club’s owner has sent to the hotel across the alley for tools to restore the electricity. The owner has ordered that no one can leave the building until Tillman has been found, but Pop lets him go anyway. The escape sequence allegorizes the revolutionary stakes of Tillman’s act. In defending himself against the white man, he has momentarily cut off and interrupted the operating “power” of Jim Crow. In the darkness and freedom that follow in the wake of that interruption, Breck and Pop are also moved to violate the rules of the Jim Crow club. Tillman’s individual act thus inspires collective black agency. By escaping in the garb of a bellboy, Tillman performs a symbolic re-creation of himself: he is no longer the passive, working-class black seaman in The Gulf Stream resigned to his circumstances, but the bellboy in the window who refuses to accept and who illicitly challenges the orders of white supremacy. His act provides him with an escape from his place in a repressive socioeconomic system into the possible freedom of lumpenproletarian social margins.

Tillman returns to the home he shares with his mother. He knows that she too will be wounded when she hears of his act, dismayed that he has not been able to accommodate himself to Jim Crow: “He had to drive the knife home again, even into mom.” His act violently rejects Jim Crow in its entirety, including the limited hopes it provides the black community. Tillman tells her he had no choice but to fight back if he was to reclaim his humanity: “Ah had t fight t live,” he explains, “n now Ah got to go on fighting and running.” He hops a freight train away from Oklahoma City, entering the socially unfixed fluidity of lumpenproletarian life. “He belonged to a different world now, a world he had created with his knife.”83 This ending is ironic: alone on a freight train, Tillman has come again to resemble the sailor adrift in The Gulf Stream. Yet unlike that sailor, Tillman has created his own circumstances, endowing them with the possibility for freedom and self-definition he saw in his glimpse of the lumpenproletarian underworld framed in the hotel window. Tillman’s act isn’t literally revolutionary, yet by destroying the “mold” of black subjectivity depicted in The Gulf Stream, a mold which Jim Crow enforces and on which it depends, Tillman’s vandalism allegorizes the stakes of revolution. Furthermore, the narrative enables Ellison to depict the turns of consciousness through which political agency can be realized by the subject caught within a social system dedicated to suppressing that subject’s humanity. Tillman and Tackhead is a tale of the political possibilities inhering in lumpenproletarianization, a story of how freedom, dignity, and action are accessed by the subject who drops out of his stable socioeconomic and ideologically codified position into the margins and interstices of the social.

Ellison also wrote Slick in Dayton, and while he excerpted an episode from the text for his first published work of fiction, “Slick Gonna Learn” (1939),84 he never finished the novel. Slick details the experiences of Slick Williams, a recently laid-off African American worker in an unspecified Northern city. Needing to support his pregnant wife Callie and his two children, and owing money to his white landlord Snodgrass, Slick is strained financially. And while Slick is at first oblivious to this development, the workers at his former factory have gone on strike and the city is embroiled in class struggle. When Callie falls ill from a pregnancy complication, Slick must resort to gambling in a dice game with the black pimp Bostic to win money to pay for a doctor. He loses, and pleads with Bostic to lend him the money. Bostic replies by suggesting Slick pimp Callie to raise the funds. Slick attacks Bostic, cutting his face with a bottle in the ensuing melee. When a white cop intervenes to break up the fight, Slick impulsively punches him in the face, an action he knows should seal his fate in a racist social system.

Here Ellison juxtaposes an orthodox Marxist critique of the lumpenproletariat with his own revisionary appropriation, contrasting the realistic and romantic valences of the concept described in chapter 1. Bostic, complicit with capitalism in denying Slick the material resources he needs, references the orthodox account of the lumpenproletariat as co-opted by, structurally aligned with, and emulating capitalist exploitation. Before Slick punches the cop, he confuses his “white face” with that of Bostic’s, as well as with that of the white foreman who laid him off at the factory in order to “make jobs for white folks.” Bostic is a black underworld operator, yet he participates in the socioeconomic oppression of white supremacy.85 Slick’s criminal actions, attacking Bostic and the cop as equivalent “faces” of that oppression, will thus induct him into a socially marginal mode of lumpenproletarian existence infused with politically productive possibilities of agency and knowledge.

Slick is arrested, and in jail he has a dream about fighting in World War I. In his dream, however, Slick and his fellow black troops are led by Joe Louis to fight not the Germans but a giant white figure wielding a noose and leading white troops. Referencing Wright’s 1935 essay on Louis, the scene figures the agency of African Americans through reference to Louis’s folk status as an avatar of black action. Just like the South Side celebrants who were encouraged by Louis’s victory over Max Baer, Slick dreams he takes on Louis’s power himself: “He was Joe himself! He had a machine gun.”86 Ellison adopts Wright’s reading of Louis’s fight and draws on the experience of blacks in World War I to underscore their collective agency, but at this point, Slick’s dream of violent resistance remains only a dream that indexes his real-world helplessness. Furthermore, it is not politically informed: like Jake Jackson in Wright’s Lawd, Today!, he simply dreams that all whites are his enemies and all blacks his allies. He longs not for transformative struggle but for race war. Slick’s dream thus resembles the fantasies of fascist and nationalist power that initially captivate Bigger Thomas. Like Native Son, Slick will explore how a passionate yet politically unconscious propensity toward action can be translated into revolutionary politics.

As Slick is brought to court, Ellison describes how, somewhere below the jail/courthouse, a building dedicated to white supremacy, “a motor was humming . . . causing the building to shake at regular intervals.” This technological symbol indicates the infrastructural determination of Jim Crow: capitalism is the “motor” of racial oppression. Yet it also hints at the irregularity of that determination. The social may shake at regular intervals due to its determination by the economic as a structure in dominance, but the possibility of irregular shaking, the disruption of dominance in the social occasioned by the unpredictability of economic overdetermination, is foreshadowed. That irregularity occurs when Slick enters the courtroom. Slick knows the rules of Jim Crow and expects to suffer, but economic class conflict disrupts those rules. The judge, not wishing to draw extra attention to the town’s legal apparatus in the midst of the factory strike, lets Slick go. “He had knocked the hell out of a white man and gotten away with it! The law had let him go. With this thought, something seemed to surge in his mind.” In an act that recalls the inherent, folk-inflected prowess he accessed in his dream, Slick challenges the cop who arrested him: “Someday . . . Yuh gonna learn to leave colored folks erlone.”87 In retaliation, a group of cops later kidnap Slick and drive him out to the country to lynch him. However, en route they receive a radio call summoning them to disperse strikers at the factory. After dealing him several blows, the cops let Slick escape, and he is picked up by a white truck driver. Noting the poor weather and Slick’s injuries, the driver is genuinely concerned for him, and the episode implies that Slick must learn to overcome his suspicion of all whites and see white workers like the driver as his objective allies against Jim Crow capitalism.

Ellison deploys technology in this episode to once again figure the emergence of political resistance from the ontology of social form. The “motor” beneath the jail/courthouse first references a straightforward Marxist analysis of Jim Crow law as not a premodern or regionally specific social order, but one determined by technologically advanced modern capitalism. Extended by Ellison as the motor of the police car, the motor also figures the extralegal violence of Jim Crow. Yet because the police car also contains a radio, the device that here ties Jim Crow to the overdetermination that interrupts its repression, the car can be cathartically refigured as an instrument of revolutionary action, the driver’s truck. “A man sure needs a car,” the driver tells Slick, hinting at the necessity of politics to overcome his current abused condition.88 Technology passes from an objective and oppressive force to a subjective and empowering vehicle. With this cathartic sequence of technological symbols, Ellison indicates how the complexity of social form gives rise to political opportunity.

Slick returns home but still needs money for Callie’s worsening condition. The next day, he goes downtown and sees a car full of white men returning from a hunting trip. He is reminded that he has hunted before when out of work, and had made money selling quail (which the law prohibits hunting) to rich whites under the table. Slick also recalls that last year, he had hunted with Dr. Baldridge, a white doctor who had offered to help Slick if he ever needed it. Slick visits Baldridge, who arranges for Callie to be taken to a Catholic hospital without charge. This is an act of off-market exchange, as Baldridge expects Slick to bring him a pheasant in payment.89 Hunting for this black market is the novel’s form of lumpenproletarian practice or hustling, the illegal measures to which those who fall out of economic production are forced to resort.

The Catholic hospital is a symbolic rendering of the complexity of American society. The novel suggests that it’s the Catholic specificity of the hospital that makes it willing to accept Callie: “they says theys good to colored,” Slick notes.90 When he later visits Callie in the hospital, he notices multiple statues of the Virgin Mary in the halls. For one, the statue signals the temporal heterogeneity of the hospital to the reader: this is a modern institution, but one containing residual cultural overtones, and the contradiction between the modern and the residual seems to partially account for why Catholic hospitals are “good to colored.” The differential element in this singular hospital, Catholicism, distances it from the organizing power relations of modernity, as Slick notes that one statue of the Virgin has “so many flowers it dont even smell like a hospital.” One statue resembles Callie: “Mary had a sweet expression on her face too. Callie had had that funny sweet look when she had the first baby.”91 The statues speak to a shared experience that transcends racial, cultural, and temporal boundaries. Manifesting that unelaborated human universalism implies a challenge to systems like Jim Crow and capitalism that define, divide, and hierarchize subjects, and the hospital figures the possibility of sociopolitical transcendence. Slick’s ability to hunt while unemployed, Baldridge’s willingness to help in spite of racial difference, and the willingness of a Catholic hospital to work outside the rules of Jim Crow, all combine to offer Callie a chance at survival.

Yet the Catholic hospital, like the social, is by no means free from racial and class rule. Initially, Slick is optimistic about the hospital because it is modern and will offer superior care. “He hoped Callie would not be afraid to go to the hospital. Last year Tom Slade wouldnt go when the doctor told him to and two days later his appendix had burst and killed him. Folks oughta git outa that kind stuff. This heahs a ‘enlightened age,’ he thought, remembering a phrase from a newspaper.” But even though he decries this apparent antimodern prejudice among blacks, he then intuitively grasps its legitimacy. “Hope that ambulance don come [for Callie] too soon,” he worries, because he recalls one night when he came upon an ambulance parked in the street. Its motor had broken down, and the attendants were trying to repair it. “As he came along side he saw a woman lying inside with her throat cut. It had been strange. The street silent, the attendants working silently and the big black woman framed in the glass like a picture, bleeding on the white sheets.”92

The scene recalls the framed image of the black sailor in The Gulf Stream, and offers a similar revelation. When the operations of modern society are interrupted, when the ambulance motor breaks down, Slick gets a glimpse of their ulterior purpose. This “strange” memory of his suggests how, as institutions of modern America, hospitals are implicated in the social death of black subjects. Callie initially fears the hospital, citing the real possibility of being subjected to forced sterilization: “Aw lawd, they gonna cut me up. Ah know it. That’s whut they [do] to colored folks. They gon let them student doctahs practist on me!”93 And while the hospital at first treats Callie, Ellison’s notes seem to suggest that he considered having Callie die because the Catholic hospital refuses to perform an abortion to save her life.94 The hospital is thus contradictory in multiple ways: as an institution, it offers modern medical care to all but also participates in a social system that routinely threatens black life. Catholicism, as its organizing ideology, both enables and delimits its ability to protect black life. The statues of the Virgin Mary symbolize a shared humanity that transcends racial stratification, but they are also white. The hospital thus represents American society itself as an overdetermined structure in dominance operating to maintain class and racial rule while still containing internal inconsistencies that make it possible to conceive of and enact resistance.

After Callie enters the hospital, Slick is visited by his white landlord, Snodgrass. Slick threatens Snodgrass with a fire poker when he asks Slick for rent: “I oughta take this poker and whip yo fucking head. You was trying to come in my house, thats what you was trying to do. You caint do that to me. Long as I’m renting this lousy shack dont you never let me even hear tell of you tryin that agin.” As with Bostic and the white cop, Slick again spontaneously defies racial and class authority. Slick defends “my house” as if he owned rather than rented it. By claiming it as his house, he expropriates the security and sustainability that capitalism and white supremacy have expropriated from him. Slick acts impulsively, but his acts have revolutionary significance.

Slick is terrified, afterwards, by his response to Snodgrass. He rightly fears retaliation, but he also cannot understand why he did it:

Any other time he would have hidden his anger and made an excuse about the rent money. He would have acted safe, as his life had taught him Negroes had to act. . . . It would have been like going to the grocery and asking the man for a dimes worth of sausage and the man giving you the sausage and you laying the dime on the counter and walking out of the grocery and forgetting it. But since he had been taken for a ride by the policemen he could no longer trust himself.

Slick’s personal safety and the operation of Jim Crow both depend on his passive acceptance of standardized codes of cross-racial and cross-class interaction. But since he escaped legal and extralegal victimization due to the overdetermination of Jim Crow repression, he feels he has “washed away his self-control. . . . And now he had to think to protect himself.” Slick acted out of ignorance—he doesn’t know why he punched one cop and challenged another, or why he threatened Snodgrass—because, like Bigger’s in Native Son, his actions are the precondition for knowledge. Slick can and must now think critically because he has “stepped outside the iron ring of action placed upon Negroes” by impulsively defying a social system designed to stifle any cognition by making him “act safe.”95

Ellison read psychology in an attempt to give Slick’s impulses a scientific grounding. He was especially influenced by William H. Sheldon’s 1936 study Psychology and the Promethean Will, from which he copied multiple passages.96 Sheldon identified the “Promethean conflict” as a conflict between two instincts of the human character: “The Promethean element of consciousness is the forward straining dream of a better world. When dominant, this element gives rise to radical idealism. The Epimethean or backward straining element is the wish for safety and for the security of righteousness. Epimetheanism is conservative idealism.”97 Sheldon primarily applies this distinction to the mind’s engagement with religion; Ellison adapts it as a model for the revolutionary stakes of human action. When Slick challenges Snodgrass, he renounces the Epimethean prioritizing of safety and security and makes a Promethean gesture for a “better world.” Sheldon’s vocabulary allows Ellison to ascribe a political dimension to untutored instinct. As Barbara Foley writes, Ellison gleaned from Sheldon how “the universals of myth provide access to a dialectical psychology that maps the conflicts within individuals along the axes of contradiction in society at large.”98

Two characters, the proletarian activist Liles Jackson and the Communist organizer Booker Smalls, seek to equip Slick with the sociopolitical cognition his Promethean impulse has enabled him to access. At the local pool hall, Liles commends Slick for his assault on Bostic: “I’m just naturally polite to prizefighters and guys like that,” he jokes. Liles’s comment transforms the novel’s earlier invocation of a prizefighter. In Slick’s dream, Joe Louis was the avatar of black strength in a race war. Liles suggests that such strength was more appropriately directed toward Bostic, the black pimp who, by refusing Slick a loan and suggesting that Slick pimp Callie, enacted the racial and class violence of Jim Crow. The struggle through which Slick’s problems can be solved is not waged against the white race, but against Jim Crow and capitalism, and Liles urges Slick to join the interracial striking workers. He speaks to the need for blacks to translate empowering black cultural practices into revolutionary struggle: “Nigguhs been knowing how to out smart white folks in little things. Now its time to learn to out smart em in the big things.”99 In this scene, lumpenproletarian experience—Slick’s exteriorization from production, his delving into the underworld, and his acts of criminal defiance—is not presented in orthodox Marxist terms as a mode of false consciousness that must be transcended. Rather, Liles indicates that it can furnish the very kernel of revolutionary consciousness and proletarian solidarity.

The final episode of Slick is Slick’s encounter with Booker Smalls, a black Communist intellectual. As Slick walks the streets one night, he finds himself pursued by police for violating a curfew imposed due to the strike. In his flight, he breaks into the Abraham Lincoln Republican Club, a room above a drugstore.100 In this socially marginal and politically suggestive social site—accessed through lumpenproletarian ingenuity manifested as the criminal defiance of social rules (the curfew, private property)—he encounters Booker. While Booker aims to bring theoretical clarification to Slick’s experiences in their long conversation, he also learns from Slick. Together, they form a Gramscian “intellectual-moral bloc,” synthesizing Booker’s theories with Slick’s experience. Their relationship models the ideal form of the revolutionary party as an institutional cohesion of agential passion and theoretical insight.

Booker explains the connection between Slick’s experiences with the police and the strike, so that for the first time, Slick realizes that “his life had been saved by the radio call, by the pickets.” He performs an act of cognitive analysis, connecting, through the technological mechanism of the radio, the immediacy of his experience to its larger structural causation. So it seems at first that Booker will be a political mentor who brings theoretical light to Slick’s experiences. But then they start discussing hospitals. Slick, based on his experiences with the Catholic hospital, thinks a hospital is “bout the best place to be in the whole damn town.” With no work available, and with the kinship structures of the Southern folk negated by Northern industrialization, Slick sees the hospital as the only place blacks can receive aid. Booker objects and tells the story of how Bessie Smith died after suffering a car accident and being refused treatment at a whites-only hospital in Memphis. Booker condemns hospitals as mere apparatuses of Jim Crow rule, and he denounces blacks’ reliance on them as an unconscious accession to their own social death: “we’ll have to keep dying like Bessie until we learn that they dont want us in the hospitals.” Slick concurs, but then tells him about Callie being cared for in the Catholic hospital. Booker is taken aback and apologizes. “Thass allright,” Slick responds, “Yuh didnt know nothin bout it.”101 On one level, this is merely a failure of etiquette and consideration on Booker’s part. But on another, Slick’s comment that Booker “didnt know nothin bout it” indicates how Callie’s admission to the hospital complicates Booker’s understanding of the form of American society, bringing to light the heterogeneity and inconsistency that complicate its functional domination. Slick provides an experiential corrective to Booker’s theory, offering the lesson foregrounded by Ellison’s Marxism: change and opportunity can happen because of disjunctures between racial and economic dominance and social complexity.

Eventually, their conversation turns to the lumpenproletariat. Slick tells Booker his plans to make a living hunting illegal game and selling it on the black market, which leads Booker to recall hunting in his youth. “We were poorer that winter than any I can remember and that was the winter I had the most fun.” Slick understands: “That was because of the hunting. . . . You caint beat hunting for sport. If I was well off that’s all I’d ever do.” Here, lumpenproletarian subsistence is symbolically transformed from desperation to potential. Slick’s illicit survival method, romantically amplified by Booker’s memories, foreshadows the pleasure and possibility of activity liberated from material need. The freedom of the lumpenproletariat from the economic mandate to labor, a freedom that enables creative practical activity like hunting for a black market, prefigures the freedom of all in postcapitalist society, when labor will no longer be a matter of necessity. Booker agrees to Slick’s proposal that they hunt together to make a living. “This will be like history repeating itself for me,” he exclaims, referencing his childhood. But the words immediately remind him of the famous opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Marx, he tells Slick, “meant that the first time an incident occurred in history it was tragic, like death. But the next time it happened it was foolish and something to laugh at, like Mussolini who tries to play Julius Caesar.” Slick asks him what that has to do with him and hunting. Booker responds, “I dont know yet.”102

In his subsequent effort to puzzle out that connection, he recasts the place of the lumpenproletariat within Marxist thought. He begins by telling Slick about Marx. Slick’s false consciousness makes him resistant. He is suspicious of Marx because “them Reds” like him, and because “he was a Jew wasnt he?” Booker educates Slick not by dictating over his ideological confusions, but by comparing Marx to Frederick Douglass. Both were brilliant and eager to fight oppression on the international level. Booker speculates that Douglass “might have met Marx in Europe when he met many of the other well known revolutionists.” Booker connects Douglass and Marx to Slick through a shared impulse toward action. Douglass, he explains, “was . . . a guy like you: mad and wanting to fight.” Douglass convinced Lincoln to arm blacks in the Civil War, and Booker describes the fight of blacks against the Confederates in Marx’s terms for the revolutionary struggles of the proletariat. Slick is impressed, both newly receptive to Marx and newly aware of his own agency: “It makes you feel proud. You can respect a guy like old Frederick Douglass.” Booker underscores the comparison by stating that Douglass and Marx resembled each other: “They both looked like lions. If you go down to the library and ask for pictures of them you’ll see that they both have big heads, thick manes of hair, with large beards and bushy eyebrows. And in the pictures I’ve seen of Marx he was almost as dark as a Negro.” Booker’s account causes Slick, much like Tillman after viewing The Gulf Stream, to “feel that he was remembering some long forgotten, necessary thing.”103 By imagining Marx and Douglass as both racially black, Booker seeks to empower Slick with a Marxism and a black political tradition both characterized by the lion-like strength of individuals who, like Slick himself, are “mad and wanting to fight.” Booker here performs the work of creative leadership that Ellison requires of revolutionary institutions.

Booker explains that his own knowledge of Marx and Douglass comes from an inherent political impulse, from seeking out others who felt the need to combat racist dehumanization as strongly as he did. Those others, he explains, were not traditional African American bourgeois leaders, who are radically unlike Marx and Douglass: “they dont have guts and they dont have hate and they have no yearning deep down in them for change, or for real freedom.” Those with Marx and Douglass’s guts, hate, and the desire for change are the black lumpenproletariat—“those who sing the blues, shoot crap, drink corn, and fight with razors and tell white folks to keep their distance”—and the Communists.104 This is a dramatic revision of Marx’s understanding of the lumpenproletariat’s political tendencies. For Booker, black lumpenproletarian figures with no place in and thus no investment in the extant social order are not self-interested and open to bribery by the ruling class, but, because of their total exteriorization, possess a powerful desire for social change, a desire productively harnessed by Communist activism.

Booker then realizes what his spontaneous citation of The Eighteenth Brumaire had to do with hunting. When he hunted for survival as a child, it was “tragic” because he didn’t understand the sociopolitical causation of poverty behind that necessity. But now it’s a farce, since he sees how he has been forced again, by racial and economic oppression, to this measure. He understands it not as fate, but as the consequence of a socioeconomic system. “When you see it as something that people could stop if only they would and they dont then its a farce,” he tells Slick. Slick objects that “a man cain do nothing bout being out of work.” To which Booker responds: “You could if you had enough people who wanted to stop it badly enough.”105 Here, the lumpenproletarian necessity of hustling, of hunting for survival, incites not, as classical Marxism would hold, false consciousness or reaction, but revolutionary consciousness. Booker here exemplifies the ideal analytical work of a revolutionary institution in his ability to recast fate as agency, objective conditions as subjective political resources. Booker connects Ellison’s theory of political possibility with his theory of the structure of American society, rendering the latter not as a set of given oppressive conditions, but as a farce in which the big joke is that Jim Crow capitalism, for all its oppressive power, is also fissured, inconsistent, irregular, and disruptable.

Ellison did not continue the narrative past this point, but this scene serves as a logical climax, since Booker and Slick’s conversation synthesizes the novel’s conceptual and political themes. Though incomplete, Slick offers the fullest theoretical explication of Ellison’s 1930s Marxism, which conceptualized revolutionary action in relation to both the possibilities inherent in the ontology of American society and the proper functioning of revolutionary institutions.