In The Black Ball, Ralph Ellison’s bleak portrait of American racism shows how racism prevents Black Americans from living free, prosperous lives and how, as individuals, they can do very little to stop it. At the same time, The Black Ball has an optimistic undercurrent: Ellison also suggests that Black people can achieve progress through political organizing, and specifically by building coalitions across racial lines. In these stories, Ellison captures Black Americans’ fundamental desire to live in a just, equal society. The family at the center of “Boy on a Train” dreams of a brighter future, and at the end of “In a Strange Country,” after seeing how the Welsh take pride in their unique identity and unite to fight for inclusion in the U.K. as a whole, Mr. Parker has an awe-inspiring, tear-provoking vision of how Black Americans could do the same.
Meanwhile, the other two stories hint at Ellison’s vision of how Black and white Americans must work together if they want to build a diverse, prosperous nation. “Hymie’s Bull” describes an interracial friendship between men facing the same dire social and economic conditions (the narrator and Hymie). And most importantly of all, the plot of “The Black Ball” focuses on a relatively poor, powerless worker—a janitor named John—deciding to join a multiracial labor union. At first, John doesn’t trust the union organizer, but in the story’s closing lines, he realizes that the union is his best chance at job security and decides to join it. Ellison suggests that, if John can get white faces and a major institution on his side, he will finally have the bargaining power he needs to improve his situation. John’s awakening represents Ellison’s belief—at least at the early point in his career when he wrote these stories—that Black people’s best chance for advancement was by uniting with working-class white people through labor unions and left-wing politics.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Politics and Solidarity ThemeTracker
Politics and Solidarity Quotes in The Black Ball
We were just drifting; going no place in particular, having long ago given up hopes of finding jobs. We were just knocking around the country. Just drifting, ten black boys on an L & N freight.
“What’s the matter son?”
“Daddy, am I black?”
“Of course not, you’re brown. You know you’re not black.”
[…]
“Brown’s much nicer than white, isn’t it, Daddy?”
[…]
“Some people think so. But American is better than both, son.”
There must be no flaws this morning. Two fellows who worked at the building across the street had already been dismissed because whites had demanded their jobs, and with the boy at that age needing special foods and me planning to enter school again next term, I couldn’t afford to allow something like that out on the sidewalk to spoil my chances.
Why, I thought, doesn’t he go on in and ask for the job? Why bother me? Why tempt me to choke him? Doesn’t he know we aren’t afraid to fight his kind out this way?
“Not used to anything like that, are you?”
“Not used to what?”
A little more from this guy and I would see red.
“Fellow like me offering a fellow like you something besides a rope.”
“You see, I come from the union and we intend to organize all the building-service help in this district. Maybe you been reading ‘bout it in the papers?”
“I saw something about it, but what’s it to do with me?”
“Listen, fellow. You’re wasting your time and mine. Your damn unions are like everything else in the country – for whites only. What ever caused you to give a damn about a Negro anyway? Why should you try to organize Negroes?”
“Daddy,” the boy called softly; it’s softly when I’m busy.
“Yes, son.”
“When I grow up I think I’ll drive a truck.”
“You do?”
“Yes, and then I can wear a lot of buttons on my cap like the men that bring the meat to the grocery. I saw a colored man with some today, Daddy. I looked out the window, and a colored man drove the truck today, and, Daddy, he had two buttons on his cap. I could see ‘em plain.”
“Well, if I ever see him around here again, you’re going to find yourself behind the black ball. Now get him on round to the back and then come up here and clean up this mess he’s made.”
My hand was still burning from the scratch as I dragged the hose out to water the lawn, and looking down at the iodine stain, I thought of the fellow’s fried hands, and felt in my pocket to make sure I still had the card he had given me. Maybe there was a color other than white on the old ball.
At first he had included them in his blind rage. But they had seemed so genuinely and uncondescendingly polite that he was disarmed. Now the anger and resentment had slowly ebbed, and he felt only a smoldering sense of self-hate and ineffectiveness. Why should he blame them when they had only helped him? He had been the one so glad to hear an American voice. You can’t take it out on them, they’re a different breed; even from the English. That’s what he’s been telling you, he thought, seeing Mr. Catti returning, his head held to one side to avoid the smoke from his cigarette, the foam-headed glasses caged in his fingers.
The well-blended voices caught him unprepared. He heard the music’s warm richness with pleasurable surprise, and heard, beneath the strange Welsh words, echoes of plain song, like that of Russian folk songs sounding.
As the men sang in hushed tones he felt a growing poverty of spirit. He should have known more of the Welsh, of their history and art. If we only had some of what they have, he thought. They are a much smaller nation than ours would be, yet I can remember no song of ours that’s of love of the soil or of country.
But what do you believe in? Oh, shut—I believe in music! Well! And in what’s happening here tonight. I believe … I want to believe in this people. Something was getting out of control. He became on guard. At home he could drown his humanity in a sea of concealed cynicism, and white men would never recognize it. But these men might understand. Perhaps, he felt with vague terror, all evening he had been exposed, blinded by the brilliant light of their deeper humanity, and they had seen him for what he was and for what he should have been.
