Ralph Ellison’s Trueblooded Bildungsroman

Abstract The several pages I wrote you by way of first draft have vanished. One usually feels either desolate or furious about such a slip, depending upon one’s inclination to think of the notes as either lost or pilfered. But in this case I am neither. For I had already decided on a new start, and my first effort hadn’t seemed quite right, anyhow. I had taken off from comments in my Rhetoric of Motives (1950) with reference to “the Negro intellectual, Ralph Ellison,” who said that Booker T. Washington “described the Negro community as a basket of crabs, wherein should one attempt to climb out, the others immediately pull him back.” I sized up the black man’s quandary thus: “Striving for freedom as a human being generically, he must do so as a Negro specifically. But to do so as a Negro is, by the same token, to prevent oneself from doing so in the generic sense; for a Negro could not be free generically except in a situation where the color of the skin had no more social meaning than the color of the eyes.” I moved on from there to a related “racist” problem, sans the accident of pigment, as dramatized in the role of Shakespeare’s Shylock; and then on to promises of being purely and simply a person (and visibly so) “thereby attaining the kind of transcendence at which all men aim, and at which the Negro spiritual had aimed, though there the aim was at the spiritual transcending of a predestined material slavery, whereas the Marxist ultimates allow for a material transcending of inferior status.”