The Unferocious Negro

SHADOW & ACT by Ralph Ellison. 317 pages. Random House. $5.95.

According to James Baldwin, LeRoi Jones, Malcolm X and any number of other writers and seers, the U.S. Negro is consumed with hatred of whites and is on the verge of doing some foul and desperate deed. Negro Writer Ralph Ellison's coolly reasoned essays are a timely rebuttal of this extravagant thesis. In clean, brisk, unapocalyptic prose, Ellison denies that "unrelieved suffering is the only 'real' Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious. . . . What an easy con-game for ambitious, publicity-hungry Negroes this stance of 'militancy' has become."

Separate & Superior. Ellison is no Uncle Tom; his credentials as a "militant" are all in order. He has written what is generally agreed to be the best U.S. Negro novel--a good novel by any standards--The Invisible Man. Yet in these essays, written over two decades and covering matters of race, literature, music and his own upbringing, Ellison asserts that Negroes have no monopoly on tragedy. Life everywhere, he writes, is a "mixture of the marvelous and the terrible." To single out a particular people as special sufferers is a form of escapism.

Ellison, no less than Baldwin, indicts slavery and segregation for the lasting wounds that they have inflicted on the Negro. But he does not believe that the Negro's life in the U.S. has been a complete horror story. In spite of lynchings, beatings and everyday insults, the "harsh discipline of Negro life" has instilled in Negroes certain admirable qualities that are lacking in most whites: patience, humor, a "rugged sense of life." Ellison's own life in Oklahoma City, he reminisces, was happy and vital, even though it was segregated, even though his mother was thrown into jail several times on various pretexts because she insisted on living in a white neighborhood.

Early in life, Ellison developed a passion for music, black and white, classical and jazz. He was fired with ambition by a wonderful integrated assortment of boyhood heroes: jazzmen and scientists, cowboys and Renaissance artists. He read voraciously, thanks to a Negro who tried to integrate the Oklahoma City public library. The city fathers were so shaken that they hastily opened a separate Negro library and stacked it with every book they could lay their hands on.

Integrated Songs. However much white America has tried to segregate the Negro, mentally and physically, he has not stayed segregated. His slang, his poetry, his music (which Ellison fondly explores in a number of essays) have permeated and profoundly influenced white culture for the better: "Southern whites cannot walk, talk, sing, conceive of laws or justice, think of sex, love, the family or freedom without responding to the presence of Negroes."

It has been twelve years since Ellison published his only novel; for some seven years now, while teaching at various universities, he has been working on his second. While these essays are a notable stopgap in Ellison's career, a necessary breather perhaps, a reader can only hope that there will soon be a sequel to The Invisible Man; for brilliant fiction makes a better case against segregation than the best polemics. As Ellison notes: "I learned very early that in the realm of the imagination all people and their ambitions and interests could meet."

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