Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Black Ball, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Nation, and Belonging
Racial Violence and Injustice
Politics and Solidarity
Childhood and Innocence
Summary
Analysis
A moving train whistles and lets off steam, which blows around the colorful autumn leaves that have fallen on the hills. A little boy (James) looks out the window; his mother (Mama) says that Jack Frost painted the leaves. James, Mama, and James’s baby brother (Lewis) are the only ones in the colored section. Their car carries the baggage, including a casket, and it’s unbearably hot because it’s next to the engine.
The family’s seat in the baggage car—ominously, alongside a casket—shows how Black people faced severe discrimination under Jim Crow. James’s conversation with his Mama about the leaves demonstrates that he is curious about nature and the world, just like any other young child. The story revolves around this tension between the purity and innocence of childhood, on the one hand, and the corruption and violence of racism, on the other. In it, Ellison asks how Black people can find joy in a society determined to deny them rights and freedom at every turn—and how they can both prepare their children for the dangers of racism and give them the carefree childhoods they deserve.
Themes
A fat white butcher repeatedly stops in the car to retrieve baskets of candy, magazines, and fruit, which he sells in the other cars. James hopes the butcher will give him some candy, but he doesn’t. Mama reads and glances at the butcher as he returns to the car. When she first got on the train, the butcher groped her. She angrily realizes that white men think they’re entitled to molest Black women.
Even if James sees the color line, he doesn’t yet understand how it structures his society, so he hopes that the butcher will show him the same regard that he would to a white child. Meanwhile, Mama’s fury at the butcher shows that she knows that Black women like her will always face sexual violence from white men under Jim Crow—but they also have no power to do anything about it.
Themes
The train leaves the hills and enters a large area of cornfields with wooden fences. Little James and baby Lewis watch birds flying around and a farmer boy leading his cow and dog through one of the fields. James decides that the dog must be a collie.
James, who is locked in the train’s stifling baggage car, looks out longingly at the white boy, who wanders freely through a field that his family probably owns. This is a metaphor for James’s gradual realization that the freedom and opportunities available to white boys will never be available to him. Yet it also represents the freedom and opportunities that James may eventually achieve through migration, as he moves from the city to the countryside.
Themes
A freight train passes them in the other direction. James wonders if it’s going to Oklahoma City, his hometown. He misses his friends, who he imagines are working for Mr. Stewart, picking peaches. But now that James’s father is gone, his family has to follow his mother’s employer, Mr. Balinger, to the rural town of McAlester instead. Little James hopes to one day be like his father, who was “tall and kind and always joking and reading books,” and who always took care of him, Mama, and Lewis.
Ellison finally explains why James’s family is traveling on the train. Their story is a thinly fictionalized version of Ellison’s own childhood experience: his father died, and then his mother took him and his brother from Oklahoma City, where they lived, to Indiana, where she thought the whole family would have better opportunities. Between migration, racism, and his father’s death, James has suffered a remarkable amount of loss for such a young boy, and he is only beginning to feel the complicated, adult emotions that coping with these losses will inevitably involve.
Themes
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A white boy and his father walk through the colored car, and James stands on his chair to watch them. The white boy holds a small dog and wears nice clothes, like kids in the movies; James wonders if he has a bike. A herd of horses runs by the window, and James imagines riding them, like a movie star. Lewis cheerily hits the window and yells “Giddap! Giddap!”
Like the white farmer boy, this white boy is also a foil for James: he represents the freedom, innocence, material comfort, and social inclusion that James will probably never achieve because of the color line. Meanwhile, baby Lewis’s enthusiasm about the passing horses suggests that he still has the curiosity and innocence that James is starting to lose, as he deals with thorny, mature topics. James likely sees Lewis’s innocence in much the same way as Mama does James’s.
Themes
The train stops at a small country town, where a group of serious-looking white men dressed in suits boards the train. They take a box from the baggage car, load it into their wagon, and ride away. Tobacco-spitting, bandanna-clad white men wait at the station, standing below an ad for snuff tobacco. They look through the train window at James and his mother, and James wonders “why […] white folks stare at you that way.”
James’s confusion about the staring white men shows that he sees the color line, but doesn’t yet understand it. He knows that white people treat him as lesser for being Black, but he doesn’t know how the world became this way, or what he can do about it. Of course, Ellison reminds the reader why this is the case (because of slavery and its legacy) through two cleverly placed symbols relating to tobacco.
Themes
As the train leaves town, James sees a tall, round metal tower. He asks his mother what it is, and she explains that it’s a silo for storing corn. He sees the sun shining on her “strangely distant” eyes and notices that the silo is almost as tall as the Colcord Building that Daddy helped build in Oklahoma City.
Yet again, James is old enough to be curious and ask questions about the world around him, but not old enough to fully understand what is going on. This extends to his feelings about his mother, which will become the focus of the rest of the story. Namely, he sees that the family’s difficult circumstances are seriously affecting Mama, but he doesn’t quite know what she’s thinking or what she fears.
Themes
Mama starts crying, then she calls James and Lewis over to her row. She says that she remembers passing the same grain silo when she and Daddy first went to Oklahoma City. James loves Mama’s stories about life back in the South, but this one feels different. Mama tells James that he must remember this trip. He tries to hold back his tears. She explains that she and Daddy moved from Georgia to Oklahoma 14 years before to seek a better life for their children. But now, with Daddy gone, James is the man of the house. Life is hard for Black people, she continues, so she, James, and Lewis have to stick together.
For Mama, the grain silo represents the promise of a better future. This was her motive for coming to Oklahoma City in the first place, as part of the Great Migration. But it got snatched away from her when her husband died. Now, she is again seeking a better future by leaving the city with her children. Curiously, this is the first time in the story that the reader actually hears James’s name—until this point, Ellison just refers to him as “the little boy.” This reflects the way that, in all of the stories in this book, Ellison begins in medias res, revealing crucial context gradually so that his readers only grasp the true significance of the story’s setting once they are already partway through it. Finally, Mama’s comments about James’s newfound responsibilities underline how Daddy’s death effectively cuts his childhood short—which is a metaphor for the way that racism denies Black children a true childhood.
Themes
James embraces Mama and promises to remember her story. He didn’t understand every word of it, but he gets what she means in a deeper way. Mama says a prayer, asking God to protect her children and bestow them with strength and bravery. James feels “tight and smoldering inside”—he remembers Daddy singing in the church choir, and he wishes that he could “kill this mean thing that made Mama feel so bad.” He wonders if this thing is God. Mama continues praying; she tells the Lord that she is only living for her sons’ sake. James is uncomfortable to see her cry, so he looks out the window. When she finishes wiping away her tears, he’s glad that the white butcher won’t see her cry when he comes back.
In this, the story’s central scene, Mama’s prayer demonstrates how Jim Crow takes an incredible emotional toll on ordinary Black people—and particularly Black women. It requires profound willpower for Mama just to survive in a system that is intent on breaking her down. Her prayer also marks James’s early coming-of-age: when he sees her beg for strength, he realizes that she can no longer protect and provide for the family alone, which means that he must now take some responsibility for it, too. He doesn’t fully understand the problem (racism), which is everywhere yet impossible to see with the naked eye. Again, this limited understanding clashes with his sudden adult responsibilities.
Themes
The train passes over a red river and past a grazing cow. Confused, Lewis says “Bow-wow?” James tells him that cows go “Moo,” and Lewis gleefully repeats the sound. Meanwhile, As the train passes through an oil field, James decides that he’ll kill whatever is really making Mama cry, even if it’s God. The train passes several tobacco billboards, including one with a red bull on it for the Bull Durham company. When Lewis sees it, he cries out, “Moo-oo.” James and Mama smile at each other, and he remembers how beautiful she is. He promises himself that “This is 1924, and I’ll never forget it.” And he wonders what life will be like in McAlester.
Ellison again sets up an analogy between Lewis’s ignorance and James’s gradual self-education about racism. James only sees the animal on the billboard, while James sees what it’s really advertising. Yet he will miss the billboard’s deeper meaning, which only readers are likely to grasp: the system of tobacco and cotton plantations that enslaved Black Americans is still alive and well. In turn, this represents how Black people remain subjugated and unfree in the early 20th century U.S. Finally, James’s promise to “never forget” this day suggests that Ellison wrote this story because his own childhood migration was such an important turning point in his life. Likely, it opened his eyes to racism and forced him to start accepting adult responsibilities for the first time.
Themes
