The Black Ball Study Guide

Ralph Ellison, who was named after the writer and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, was born in Oklahoma City. His father died in an industrial accident when he was a young boy, so his mother took him and his brother to Gary, Indiana, where she thought they would find better opportunities. (This move is no doubt the inspiration for the first story in The Black Ball, “Boy on a Train.”) They eventually returned to Oklahoma, and Ellison worked a series of odd jobs while growing up. As a teenager, he was a star football player and became particularly passionate about music, which won him a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute (a prominent Black college) in 1933. While he found many aspects of Tuskegee frustrating, particularly as he was much poorer than most of the other students, it also gave him the opportunity to hone his musical skills and begin seriously studying literature for the first time. Instead of finishing his degree, he decided to leave and move to New York, where the Harlem Renaissance was underway. He met many of the movement’s most prominent figures, including fellow writers Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and began publishing articles, book reviews, and short stories. During this period, he also worked on the Federal Writers’ Project (a New Deal program to provide work for writers during the Depression), joined the Communist Party, and married the actress Rosa Poindexter (but they divorced in 1943). Ellison also joined the Merchant Marines near the end of World War II and then married the writer Fanny McConnell in 1946. He dedicated the next five years to writing his masterpiece, Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and made him an international celebrity. He spent the rest of his life writing and teaching at various universities, primarily in the Northeast of the U.S. Famously perfectionistic, Ellison was never fully satisfied with Invisible Man and spent the rest of his life writing a second novel, which he never finished. (Different versions were published after his death as Juneteenth and Three Days Before the Shooting…) In fact, the only other books he published during his life were the essay collections Shadow and Act and Going to the Territory, and to this day his name is virtually synonymous with Invisible Man.

Twenty-first-century readers most often encounter Ralph Ellison’s work through the lens of the civil rights movement, which began shortly after the publication of his major work, Invisible Man. Indeed, the stories in The Black Ball chronicle the harsh conditions that Black Americans faced between the 1920s and 1940s, and they show why major political change offered their only viable route to freedom. The injustice of segregation appears front and center in “Boy on a Train,” in which James and his family are forced to ride in the train’s sweltering baggage compartment because they are Black. And racism was still pervasive outside the South: for instance, in “The Black Ball,” John knows that his boss could fire him at any time and replace him with a white man, and he warns his son against playing with white kids because he knows that he will inevitably get blamed if they get into any sort of conflict. Major historical events play a greater role in “Hymie’s Bull” and “In a Strange Country.” “Hymie’s Bull” is set among freight-hoppers—people who illegally rode on commercial trains around the country—during the Great Depression. At the time, widespread poverty and unemployment led people to migrate around the country in search of work, and riding the rails was simply the cheapest way to do so. And “In a Strange Land” is set in Wales during World War II, when countless Black American soldiers found themselves fighting for freedom and democracy abroad, while facing segregation and repression at home. In fact, they brought together these two causes in the Double V Campaign, which called for victory both at home (over segregation) and abroad (in the war). Like the story’s protagonist, Mr. Parker, many Black soldiers found that white Europeans treated them far better than white Americans ever did—and this motivated them to participate in the civil rights movement later on. It also led many of them to migrate out of the South, just like James’s parents in “Boy on a Train.” Specifically, they took part in the Great Migration—the massive movement of six million Black Southerners to the North, Midwest, and West between 1915 and 1970, which is largely responsible for the distribution of the nation’s Black population today.

Ralph Ellison is by far best known for his complex, philosophical 1952 novel Invisible Man, which is universally considered a major landmark in 20th century American literature. However, he scarcely published anything else during his life—he left thousands of pages of drafts for an unfinished second novel, and different edited versions of it have been published in 1999 (as Juneteenth) and 2010 (as Three Days Before the Shooting…). The only other book that Ellison did publish during his lifetime was the essay collection Shadow and Act (1964). Many of Ellison’s early stories, including all of the ones in The Black Ball, were published after his death in the collection Flying Home and Other Stories (1996). (The most widely read of these is probably “A Party Down at the Square,” which is about lynching.) Ellison is often compared with other major writers of the post-Harlem Renaissance era, including his friend Richard Wright (whose major novels include the 1940 Native Son and the 1945 Black Boy) and who is best remembered for the 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain and the 1955 essay collection Notes of a Native Son. While few major Black American authors are known primarily for their short stories, virtually all also wrote them, from Wright and Baldwin to Langston Hughes and Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Many anthologies have collected their work, such as Clarence Major’s Calling the Wind: Twentieth Century African-American Short Stories (1993).