The Black Ball collects four of Ralph Ellison’s little-known early short stories. In “Boy on a Train,” a young boy (James) migrates out of Oklahoma City on a segregated train after his father’s death with his baby brother (Lewis) and his mother. In “Hymie’s Bull,” an unnamed Black narrator who lives as a bum, riding freight trains around the U.S. during the Great Depression, tells the reader about watching one of his white counterparts (Hymie) kill a railroad bull (security guard) who violently attacked him. “The Black Ball” takes the perspective of a young Black father and janitor named John, who meets a white union organizer and nearly loses his job after his manager, Mr. Berry, blames his young son for something he didn’t do. Finally, “In a Strange Country” focuses on a Black soldier, Mr. Parker, who arrives in Wales and is astonished that the locals treat him as an equal (something his white American fellow soldiers have never done).
The core issue in these stories is what it means for Black people to be American—or to find a sense of identity and belonging in a country that actively rejects, denigrates, and exploits them. All four of Ellison’s protagonists are outsiders in white-dominated spaces (trains, workplaces, and military units), and they all recognize that they will never be treated as equals because of their race. For instance, James and his family are forced to sit with the baggage in the back of the train, while John knows that Mr. Berry will probably give his job to a white man if he can find one willing to do it. In each case, the protagonists’ exclusion from such white-dominated spaces is a metaphor for Black people’s overall marginalization in American political, social, and economic life.
The protagonists’ frustration about this exclusion mirrors Ellison’s conflicting feelings about Black people’s attempts to achieve equality and integration in the U.S. Ellison and his protagonists struggle to love the U.S., a country that has enslaved, segregated, and lynched their people, and whose white majority has never truly seen them as fellow citizens. At the same time, they also recognize that the U.S. is the only country they have. These complex feelings about nation and identity are clearest of all in the final story, in which the protagonist, Mr. Parker, visits a local singing club and learns how Welsh people take pride in their identity as a subjugated nation within the United Kingdom. In fact, the Welsh men he meets understand and respect Black American culture in a way white Americans never have. At the end of the story, the Welsh choir even performs “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Mr. Parker’s honor. The performance causes Parker to feel “a wave of guilt […] followed by a burst of relief,” because for the first time, he is being treated as a true American—and he feels proud to be one. This relief represents the sense of national belonging that Ellison hopes Black people can eventually achieve in the U.S. Thus, while the four stories in The Black Ball show how racism has long prevented Black Americans from truly feeling at home in the U.S., it also ends with a vision of the inclusive, loving, diverse national community that Ellison believed the U.S. could become in the future.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Race, Nation, and Belonging ThemeTracker
Race, Nation, and Belonging Quotes in The Black Ball
There were many advertising signs in the fields they were rolling past. All the signs told about the same things for sale. One sign showed a big red bull and read BULL DURHAM.
“Moo-oo,” the baby said.
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.
Now when you hear that we're the only bums that carry knives you can just put that down as bull talk because what I'm fixing to tell you about was done by an ofay bum named Hymie from Brooklyn.
“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.”
Moving along the road in the dark he had planned to stay ashore all night, and in the morning he would see the country with fresh eyes, like those with which the Pilgrims had seen the New World. That hadn’t seemed so silly then—not until the soldiers bunched at the curb had seemed to spring out of the darkness. Someone had cried, “Jesus H. Christ,” and he had thought, He’s from home, and grinned and apologized into the light they flashed in his eyes. He had felt the blow coming when they yelled, “It’s a goddamn nigger,” but it struck him anyway.
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.
“Are there many like me in Wales?”
“Oh yes! Yanks all over the place. Black Yanks and white.”
“Black Yanks?” He wanted to smile.
“Yes. And many a fine lad at that.”
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.
Parker smiled, aware suddenly of an expansiveness that he had known before only at mixed jam sessions. When we jam, sir, we’re Jamocrats! He liked these Welsh. Not even on the ship, where the common danger and a fighting union made for a degree of understanding, did he approach white men so closely.
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.
And suddenly he recognized the melody and felt that his knees would give way. It was as though he had been pushed into the horrible foreboding country of dreams and they were enticing him into some unwilled and degrading act, from which only his failure to remember the words would save him. It was all unreal, yet it seemed to have happened before. Only now the melody seemed charged with some vast new meaning which that part of him that wanted to sing could not fit with the old familiar words.
He saw the singers still staring, and as though to betray him he heard his own voice singing out like a suddenly amplified radio:
“… Gave proof through the night
That our flag was still there …”
It was like the voice of another, over whom he had no control. His eye throbbed. A wave of guilt shook him, followed by a burst of relief. For the first time in your whole life, he thought with dreamlike wonder, the words are not ironic. He stood in confusion as the song ended, staring into the men’s Welsh faces, not knowing whether to curse them or to return their good-natured smiles.
