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It is the burden of a pioneer to be the presumed spokesman for all "his people." Ellison, a sensible gent, declined this honor. He was not every black writer; he was a black writer -- or, as he might prefer, a writer. And, for some blacks, he was guilty of having allowed himself to be praised by white critics. In the '60s, when the civil rights sing-along gave way to Black Power shock therapy, Ellison found himself overshadowed by more urgent novelists, such as Richard Wright (Native Son), who played Malcolm X to Ellison's Martin Luther King Jr. Ellison compiled two volumes of trenchant essays but never finished his second novel, on which he worked for four decades. Joe Fox, his editor at Random House, says he was told neither the book's subject nor its title, only that it was "virtually finished." Fanny Ellison, Ralph's wife of 47 years, may know how close he came to completing the novel. But it is possible that he worried over it so long because he felt that changing fashion had made his complex take on race antique.
The unfashionable fact is that Ellison's writing was too refined, elaborate, to be spray painted on a tenement wall. He was a celebrator as much as a denouncer of the nation that bred him. In his multicolored vision, America was not just a violent jungle but a vibrant jumble of many cultures and temperaments; it mingled melody, harmony, dissonance and ad-lib genius, like the jazz that Ellison played, wrote about and loved.
Today's music is more anarchic -- a rap on the thick skull of an oppressive society -- and the street mood is rancid, desperate. It makes one wonder if Ellison's message ever got through to the larger public. As he declared in his 1963 essay "The World and the Jug," he wrote not from a belief that blacks can only suffer and rage, but from "an American Negro tradition which teaches one to deflect racial provocation and to master and contain pain. It is a tradition which abhors as obscene any trading on one's own anguish for gain and sympathy; which springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done."
Through his writing, Ralph Ellison hoped to breed a race of heroes. Through his example, he was surely one of them.