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“I Yam What I Am!”

C.J. SentellDecember 2008

Moving through the cold streets of the city, the narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is unable to

decide where to go or what to do. In the swirling snow the “whole of Harlem seemed to fall apart,”

his mind blurred by the heat of an inner argument and his face burned with the brisk night air.

Suddenly sensing he is lost, he stops, and surrounded by an eerie quiet he imagines hearing the sound

of snow falling onto snow. Glancing down a street, he sees an old man standing next to a wagon

warming his hands against a stovepipe reeling off a thin spiral of smoke. And there, amidst that city

street and as far from home as he had ever been, the slowly drifting odor of baking yams brought “a

stab of swift nostalgia,” and plunged him into an affective yearning for home. “I stopped as though

struck by a shot, deeply inhaling, remembering, my mind surging back, back.” At home, he

continues to remember, they would “bake them in the hot coals of the fireplace” or carry “them cold

to school for lunch”; they would eat them in secret, “squeezing the sweet pulp from the soft peel as

[they] hid from the teacher behind the largest book, the World’s Geography.”

Yes, we’d loved them candied, or baked in a cobbler, deep-fat fried in a pocket of dough, or roasted with

pork and glazed with the well-browned fat; had chewed them raw – yams and years ago. More yams than

years ago, though the time seemed endlessly expanded, stretched thin as the spiraling smoke beyond all

recall.1

Moving forward in the midst of such memories, a voice crying “hot, baked Car’lina yams” disrupts

the sequence of memories. Approaching, he notices a sign to accompany the call and asks their

price. “Ten cents,” the man replies, promising if it isn’t sweet enough to give him another free of

charge. Recognizing their sweetness by the brown bubbling syrup beneath their skins, the narrator

assures him of the confidence of his desire by exchanging his coins for food. Upon taking a bite he

finds “it as sweet and hot as any,” and yet is again suddenly “overcome with such a surge of

homesickness” that he must turn away to retain self-control. Walking alone with the yam, however,

he is “just as suddenly overcome by an intense feeling of freedom” that came from eating in the

street.

It was exhilarating. I no longer had to worry about who saw me or about what was proper. To hell with all

that, and as sweet as the yam actually was, it became like nectar with the thought. If only someone who

had known me at school or at home would come along and see me now. How shocked they’d be! I’d push

them into a side street and smear their faces with the peel. What a group of people we were, I thought.

Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked. Not

1 Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man [1947], Second Vintage Edition (1995), pg. 263. All other references are to this work and editionunless otherwise noted.

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all of us, but so many. Simply by walking up and shaking a set of chitterlings or a well-boiled hog maw at

them during the clear light of day! What consternation it would cause!

Suddenly he imagines himself advancing upon Dr. Bledsoe – the college president who exiled him

from campus to the North – and, enraged, he whips “out a foot or two of chitterlings, raw, uncleaned

and dripping sticky circles on the floor” and shakes them, screaming:

‘Bledsoe, you’re a shameless chitterling eater! I accuse you of relishing hog bowels! Ha! And not only do

you eat them, you sneak and eat them in private when you think you’re unobserved! You’re a sneaking

chitterling lover! I accuse you of indulging in a filthy habit, Bledsoe! Lug them out of there, Bledsoe!

Lug them out so we can see! I accuse you before the eyes of the world!’

Continuing the scene, Bledsoe “lugs them out, yards of them, with mustard greens, and racks of pigs’

ears, and pork chops and black-eyed peas with dull accusing eyes.” He would let out a deep sigh and

hang his head in shame. “He’d lose caste. The weekly newspapers would attack him. The captions

over his picture: Prominent Educator Reverts to Field-Niggerism! ” To all of this the narrator

responds by letting out a wild laugh, “almost choking over the yam as the scene spun before” him.

“This is all very wild and childish,” he thinks aloud, “but to hell with being ashamed of what you

liked. No more of that for me. I am what I am!” Running back to the man at the stovepipe, he buys

two more yams, this time taking the melted butter poured over the broken vegetable flesh steaming in

the wind. “I can see you one of these old-fashioned yam eaters,” the man acknowledges with

obvious satisfaction. “They’re my birthmark,” the narrator responds confidently, “I yam what I

am!”2

* * *

Both in his fiction and essays, one of Ellison’s central concerns is the ongoing struggle of historically

situated individuals to find and form meaningful identities in the present. Throughout his work,

Ellison persistently explores the processes by which identities are formed and changed over time.

Insisting that identities do not depend upon any type of essence or essential attribute, Ellison presents

identity as a contingent series of performative responses deployed in the service of securing certainty,

order, and meaning in a world otherwise saturated with mystery and chaos. Thus, Ellison’s concept

of identity is one wherein identities are formed in the midst of lives variously lived. In particular

places, potential persons are possible only within an actual nexus of events, which is always

conditioned by the various inheritances at work within every moment; the warp and woof of

individual experience, in other words, forms the material through which real histories are continually

made in the course of the lives of actual people. Thus regardless of whether it is personal or social,

national or regional, or racial or sexual, identity for Ellison is a contingent process of formation

2 266.

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within a vast array of conditions and influences circulating around and through individuals

undergoing change over time.

In the scene above, the narrator explicitly affirms his identity with food. You are what you

eat, he proclaims, seeming to realize all at once the many implications of that trite but true phrase.

What is more, this identification occurs in the midst of a deep yearning for home, a nostalgia

occasioned by the sweet odors and tastes of the baking yams from the place of his birth, the

formational time-scene of that most nuanced, perhaps even ineffable sensibility: taste. Specters of

his past loom large, with Bledsoe at center stage as a figure ridiculed for his gustatory proclivities.

Being exposed and ashamed at his desire for “unclean” foods, Bledsoe is socially stigmatized by

consuming foods such as chitterlings, greens, and pig’s ears. By imagining exposing Bledsoe’s

desires for certain foods most commonly associated with the agrarian lives of slaves and former

slaves in the South, he loses standing in the social hierarchy for having “reverted” to a prior, more

“primitive” stage of development.

At work within this social process, of course, are two distinct groups of stigmatized

comestibles, namely, those drawn from racially drawn stereotypes of black agrarian life in the Deep

South, and those deeper ritualistic and religious mores about hygiene and status within the social

order. The point, however, is that the juxtaposition between hidden, private desire and exposed,

public propriety with respect to certain foods illustrates the sui generis character of food and its

function as an expressive outlet for personal identities arranged in their various social and political

orders. As a contingent necessity of human life, foods form a central symbolic marker by which the

narrator frames his past and present identity. By providing a structure around which everyday life is

shaped – day in and day out, three times a day among the lucky, less among the not, but always

forming a contingently universal object of desire that is necessary for the continuation of life – foods

function as unique indicators of particular aspects of identity precisely because they represent a type

of gustatory authority, which call us to order in different ways and situate our sense of self within the

social order. Thus, the contingent necessity of food is precisely that feature that makes it such an

interesting – indeed, perhaps even necessary – theme to track in terms of the formation of everyday,

lived identities.

Throughout the course of the novel, moreover, particular foods repeatedly occasion an

awareness of the material and symbolic relationships situating the narrator with respect to

communities historically associated with a particular place. It is important to recognize the

specificity of the foods occasioning a heightened awareness of such relationships, which are by and

large culturally connected to the experience of African-Americans, particularly those in the South.

These associations and connections between particular foods and particular peoples, then, are neither

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simply coincidental nor merely stereotypical. In the scene above, the significance of yams lies in

their dual symbolic function: on the one hand, yams invoke a food enjoyed in the safe confines of

childhood, stimulating the narrator to remember the joys associated with that particular comestible

and his home, while on the other hand simultaneously invoking the historical conditions around

which yams came to be a common foodstuff for black folks in the South. Yams – like okra, peanuts,

watermelons, black-eyed peas, rice and others – were introduced to the Americas by way of the

trans-Atlantic slave trade and were among the most common foods fed to slaves during the Middle

Passage.3 In this instance, then, yams symbolize both a personal as well as a cultural or historical

horizon of meaning that situates the narrator in place and time. Again, an analogous function is at

work with Bledsoe as well: the stigmatization over eating chitterlings, mustard greens, pig’s ears, and

black-eyed peas stems from their centrality to the diet of slaves and former slaves in the South.

For the narrator on his journey, then, the relationships between specific foods and place are

important because they serve to simultaneously invoke and evoke certain tacit features of identities

formed in place. For Ellison, place is an active, constitutive feature for fully realizing meaningful

identities, and particular foods serve to occasion a set of shared symbolic meanings always already at

work in the ongoing formation of identities in the present. The narrator’s experiences of eating a

yam on the corner of a Harlem street serve to conjure, contrast, and re-imagine his experiences of

home in the rural South. By undergoing experiences different from those into which he was born, he

is able to understand more fully his place and identity in the present and how it relates to his past. So

the sense of place occasioned by various foods forms a dynamic conceptual and affective structure

that constitutes an important horizon of understanding. Importantly, the suggestion here is not that

food occasions an awareness or sense of place per se. In the sense I am suggesting appropriate for

understanding Ellison’s conception of identity, place is not a thing one can have a sense of. Rather,

place is what we might take as a material transcendental: it is the environmental condition without

which existence and experience are rendered meaningless.

In this way, specific foods occasion an awareness of the relationships and shared

understandings that make social life possible in a particular place at a particular time. Functioning as

a marker for the various contents of identity construed along socialized lines – and thus, in the U.S.,

racialized lines as well – such foods simultaneously situate individuals and their identities within and

against the boundaries of an irreducibly particular place. Very often, and especially for the narrator,

that place is called home. For the narrator, these foods occasion important sequences of memory,

especially about his natal home in the rural south, which is then incorporated into his present

3 Joseph E. Holloway, “African Crops and Slave Cuisine”. Drawn from Slavery in America, March 10, 2009.http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_cuisine.htm.

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experience with novel, often-dramatic consequences. Through an arduous process of trial and error,

the narrator develops an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the role place plays in the

formation of his identity.

In this essay, I examine the relationship between identity and place through the thematic lens

of food so as to articulate Ellison’s conception of their respective roles in the processes of identity

formation. Thus, in the first section I explore the narrator’s sense of natal place, i.e., the rural South,

as it is occasioned in the early stages of his journey, while in the second I turn to the narrator’s

experience within the urban environs of Harlem and inquire as to how various foods occasion

reflection on past and present aspects of his identity. My overarching aim is to examine Ellison’s

conception of identity in terms of a hermeneutical or phenomenological account of identity.

Ellison’s phenomenology of identity, I suggest, ineliminably turns on an embodied interaction within

a particular environment, which I discuss in terms of place. In this way, the confluence of lives and

things in a particular place forms a necessary horizon of meaning and understanding for a given

organism, conditioning their habits and habitats in ways more or less unnoticed and unintentional. In

short, I argue that Ellison’s conception of identity turns on an embodied phenomenology and bodies

are always in place.

This conception of in-placed identities is what I call ecological: in-placed identities are

ecological identities and fully relational selves are ecological selves. While I explicate below what I

mean by ecological, it suffices to note here that when Ellison’s phenomenology of identity is fully

situated with respect to place, the result is a robust hermeneutical conception of the self that is

increasingly aware of the relationships obtaining within a given environment. So if food is often the

occasion for the narrator’s memories of his past, these memories must be situated within the context

of a young man coming to be – of a particular human being of a particular lineage in a particular

place – undergoing change over time and coming to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of

his place within the world he inherited. The phenomenology of memory and awareness, as well as

the hermeneutics of understanding, then, are as central to my analysis as food, identity, and place,

forming a parallel set of subtended concepts that drive my analysis. Finally, because my concerns

here revolve largely around the narrative arc of the novel – that is, they concern the development of

the narrator’s coming to his present self-understanding – I largely follow its chronological

development and weave together the various threads of my analysis in due course.

The Spectre of the Rural

In a certain obvious sense, Invisible Man is not a novel that deals directly with rural or agricultural

themes. In fact, it may be sensible to think about the book precisely in terms of its rejection of the

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rural, as much of the literature of the Harlem Renaissance is so cast. While the narrator’s journey

begins in the rural South, the arc of his journey takes him out of that place and into the urban

environs of Harlem. And so it is within the city that most of the narrator’s reflections on his rural

past occur, which are occasioned by an increasingly sophisticated sense of place and a progressively

complex sensibility to his environment. In this sense, an analysis that focuses on themes such as the

rural and the agricultural could be an inquiry into what Ellison elides by focusing on the urban. But

this is not my concern here, for I do not intend to claim that the novel, the narrator, or Ellison denies

the rural past. Or rather if such a denial is at work, the one thing that becomes clear over the course

of the narrative is that this is a past that persists, shaping and conditioning life and experience in

ways that grow obscure over time.

In this way, Ellison explores a certain type of understanding of the past – of a past that

persists, refusing to vanish entirely in the face of the present – that simultaneously tracks the broad

contours of a historically specific movement of people. Especially after the Civil War and the end of

Reconstruction, many African Americans – most of whom were former slaves or the children of

former slaves – followed one of several migratory routes out of the deep South and into the region’s

growing cities, up the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Detroit, and Chicago. Others went west to

various points along the frontier, while still many others moved into (or ended up in) the burgeoning

metropolitan areas of the Northern-eastern corridor. Likewise, the narrative arc of the novel involves

the narrator moving through specific places at particular times, each in their own way occasioning

reflection upon the various contingencies, histories, and forces that coalesced to form the field within

and against which he experiences himself in the world. And so because I take it that the movements

of the narrator over the course of the novel broadly track the movements of a people, the places from

which and to which the narrator moves is an appropriate place to begin.

Beginning with the end, the novel opens with the narrator underground. In this sense, it is

important to consider how the entire novel is a memory retold after the fact, thus making the

memories internal to the narrative twice removed (at least) from their origin. The events of the

narrative having already occurred, the narrator has discovered his invisibility and is recounting how

he came to such a realization. Again, this realization is a certain type of self-recognition that is not a

recognition of some true or authentic identity; rather, as the narrative unfolds it becomes clear that

the recognition at which he arrives concerns the process of identity formation. Yet, even as the

product of such a process, the narrator finds that he is “anything but an aberration.” He says:

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And yet I am no freak of nature, nor of history. I was in the cards, other things having been equal (or

unequal) eighty-five years ago. I am not ashamed of my grandparents having been slaves. I am only

ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed.4

And so while the narrator understands that is he not a type of historical aberration, this perspective is

the result of what he learned through the course of his journey. Put differently, while the narrator

certainly did not think this way in the beginning, the reader begins with this understanding of the

narrator’s life as having emerged from a particular historical trajectory, that he has been flung into

the world from a particular place and time, out of a particular womb whose conditions continue to

condition his own thrown life. Once ashamed of this past, the narrator is now only ashamed at

having been ashamed of this part of his past. Given the very specific historical timeframe the

narrator recognizes as relevant to his life, i.e., the eighty-five years since Emancipation and

Reconstruction, the specific background conditions for understanding his movement are based within

the history of racial slavery in the United States of America.

At work within this history are many factors, including a certain violent discontinuity of

memory, tradition, and experience; the savage displacement of humanity in the service of the

accumulation of wealth and power; and the barbarism triumphant occupying the rotting core of

“enlightened” civilization. But for the narrator, slavery is a symbol less dramatic and more specific.

This symbol, in short, is embodied in his grandfather, whom he is told he takes after, and who stands

as both a figurative and literal spectre of a past that persists in the present, of a past that refuses to be

forgotten and demands to be remembered if meaning is to be made of experience. The sphinx-like

advice of his grandfather on his deathbed to “keep up the good fight” returns again and again in the

course of the narrator’s journey. Transmitted to the family by way of his father, his grandfather

warns:

I never told you, but our life is a war and I have been a traitor all my born days, a spy in the enemy’s

country ever since I give up my gun back in the Reconstruction. Live with your head in the lion’s mouth. I

want you to overcome ‘em with yeses, undermine ‘em with grins, agree ‘em to death and destruction, let

‘em swoller you till they vomit or burst wide open.5

Having been “the meekest of men,” this advice alarmed the family, and the children were told to

forget it immediately. Throughout his life, however, his grandfather’s advice – and even his actual

apparition at one point – returns to pose hermeneutic difficulties for the narrator’s ability to judge his

own actions. Whenever he perceived his life as going well – which, importantly, was largely based

around the standard of conduct set by the white individuals (and particularly men) dominating his

social world – he would think of his grandfather and feel guilty and uncomfortable. For the narrator,

4 15.5 16.

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the puzzle arises out of the way his grandfather posed such success in terms of treachery, duplicity,

and betrayal. This, of course, begs the question as to the object to which he ought to be loyal,

authentic, or true. But the narrator experiences the question in this way only in retrospect, for when

he begins his journey he cares only to find ways of succeeding within his social world, making for

himself a new place in a world sufficiently removed from what he took to be his backwards and

shameful past.

Leaving his natal community for the larger world of his state, the narrator’s journey begins in

a small town in the rural South and leads to a wider social context still in the South. At college, the

narrator finds himself in a new world, green and magical with the opportunities it represents. In his

junior year the president of the college, Dr. Bledsoe, asks him to drive one of the trustees who has

come to town for the annual celebration of the school’s Founder. The trustee, Mr. Norton, was a

white man from Boston, who for forty years had been “the bearer of the white man’s burden, and for

sixty a symbol of the Great Traditions.”6 After dinner one night, the narrator finds himself driving

Norton with little instruction and time to kill. Chatting as they drove, Norton informs the narrator

that, as a student at the college, he is intimately connected to Norton’s own destiny; that he must

keep him apprised of his progress in the future so that he “can observe in terms of living

personalities” the extent to which his time, money, and hopes have been “fruitfully invested,” thus

allowing him to “see the fruits produced by the land” that the great Founder “transformed from

barren clay to fertile soil.”7 Confused as usual, and no doubt caught up in the cryptic but seemingly

weighty conversation underway, the narrator continues driving through the rural countryside.

Passing a set of shacks worn by the sun and weather, they unwittingly arrive at the cabin of

Jim Trueblood, a sharecropper who had recently brought shame on the black community by

impregnating his daughter. Trueblood had had little previous contact with the campus except for

being brought up to sing “primitive spirituals” when important white folks were visiting the college.

All that having passed with Trueblood’s disgrace, the narrator silently reflects on what had before

been an “attitude of contempt blunted by tolerance, had now become a contempt sharpened by hate,”

and how all the people on campus “hated the black-belt people, the ‘peasants’” for the way in which

they pulled down what those at the college were working to build up.8 As they pass Trueblood’s

cabin, Norton notes how old the structures look, to which the narrator responds by informing him

that they were built “during slavery times.” “You don’t say!” Norton exclaims, “I would never have

6 37.7 45.8 47.

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believed that they were so enduring. Since slavery times!”9 Upon hearing this, Norton insists on

stopping and talking with Trueblood about his transgressions and his “enduring” way of life.

After a tense entrance into their world, Norton engages Trueblood about what happened the

night he impregnated his daughter. Dreaming, Trueblood recounts that it “was black dark and I

heard one of the kids whimper in his sleep and the last few sticks of kindlin’ crackin’ and settlin’ in

the stove and the smell of the fat meat seemed to git cold and still in the air just like meat grease

when it gits set in a cold plate of molasses.”10 The smell of fat meat both hot and cold dominates the

memory, invoking the satiation from the night’s meal yet pointing to a desire unfulfilled. Indeed,

Trueblood says later, “I don’t quite remember it all, but I remember that I was lookin’ for some fat

meat.”11 This image is at once about food – fat meat and sweet molasses grown thick in the cold –

and sex, about the memory of sustenance and the desire for the forbidden. But in continuing his

description, another image of food comes to the fore.

Then you hear it close up, like when you up in the second-story window and look down on a wagonful of

watermelons, and you see one of them young juicy melons split wide open a-layin’ all spread out and cool

and sweet on top of all the striped green ones like it’s waitin’ just for you, so you can see how red and ripe

and juicy it is and all the shiny black seeds it’s got and all…12

Otherwise protected by its hard outer rind, one melon lays busted open, exposing the sweet red juice

of the inner fruit. Splayed wide, seemingly waiting just for him, the watermelon and its shiny black

seeds stimulate and symbolize a forbidden desire that is simultaneously irresistible. Fat meat and

broken watermelons are important in that they constitute the object for which Trueblood was looking

and the insatiable hunger for the forbidden. By means of these foods, Trueblood sublimates his

taboo desire into a desire for sustenance, and this sublimation occurs within a context that sets the

stage for his being ostracized from the community, i.e., his identity and its place within the social

order. But for the narrator, these foods are intimately tied to Trueblood’s past that endures in the

present.

Like with the yams above, it is important to note the dual symbolic function of the foods in

this scene. That is, both the watermelons and pork are foods negatively associated, particularly in the

iconography of early twentieth-century American popular culture, with the culture of African-

Americans during and after slavery. But this association is not merely a present one, but actually

invokes the folk food ways developed during the course of enslavement. In this way, these foods are

ready markers for certain class and cultural identities that Ellison explores through the figure of

Trueblood.

9 47.10 54.11 57.12 55-.6

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Positively horrified, Norton leaves the slave cabin of Trueblood weak and silent. Asking for

whiskey, the narrator drives him to the Golden Day, a saloon and brothel where they encounter a

group of black veterans from World War I, institutionalized for various forms of trauma, on a day

trip to the saloon. Moving from one scene of social death to another, the Golden Day is filled with

veterans driven mad fighting for a country that did not yet accord them full rights and isolated them

as dangerous to the social order. By the time they arrive Norton is almost completely incapacitated,

forcing the narrator to bring him in draped over his own body. Once inside, and despite the obvious

differences in their skin colors and other corporeal features, one of the veterans declares that Norton

is in fact his grandfather. Challenged on his claim, the vet exclaims: “I should know my own

grandfather!...He’s Thomas Jefferson and I’m his grandson – on the ‘field nigger’ side.”13 Here

again, the spectre of slavery looms large in the figure of Jefferson, the founding intellect of the

American experiment who fathered several children with at least one of his slaves and yet still held

them to be less than full human beings.

Eventually passing out, Norton’s limp body is passed around by a raucous crowd of veterans

who carry him to an upstairs room used as a brothel. Upon waking Norton is confronted with several

women of the house and a veteran doctor who – much to Norton’s surprise – discerns his condition

immediately. As the conversation progresses, however, the veteran begins to speak to Norton with a

brazenness that sets the narrator ill at ease for the way it transgressed the accepted social protocols of

racialized interactions. Pushing Norton as to precisely why the campus and the narrator are tied to

his destiny, the vet points out to them both how they fail to understand what is happening. “You

cannot see or hear or smell the truth of what you see – and you, looking for destiny! It’s classic! And

this boy…he was made of the very mud of the region and he sees far less than you. Poor stumblers,

neither of you can see the other.”14 Growing infuriated with the vet’s indolence, Norton moves to

leave, angrily directing the narrator out of the room, down the stairs, and beyond the confines of the

Golden Day.

Intuiting that his adventures with the Trustee in the rural hinterlands were going to bring

trouble from Bledsoe, the narrator drives Norton back in silence while searching desperately for a

remedy to his situation. He anticipates his almost certain punishment and dreads leaving the place he

had called home for three wonderful years. The campus, the place for which he had left home, had

become his home, the place with which he now so closely identified, and he feared the coming exile

and what it held his future. He says:

Here within this quiet greenness I possessed the only identity I had ever known, and I was losing it. In this

brief moment of passage I became aware of the connection between these lawns and buildings and my

13 78.14 95.

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hopes and dreams. I wanted to stop the car and talk with Mr. Norton…to denounce all we’d seen and

heard; to assure him that far from being like any of the people we had seen, I hated them, that I believed in

the principles of the Founder with all my heart and soul, and that I believed in his own goodness and

kindness in extending the hand of his benevolence to helping us poor, ignorant people out of the mire and

darkness.15

For the narrator, the campus is the birthplace of his sense of self. Thus, in a sense, his self is most at

home in that place. The college campus, in other words, is the place that differentiates the backward

rural peasants from the progressive, educated citizens of the town. In this way, the disavowal at

work here is simultaneously a self-disavowal, a rejection of the place of his corporeal birth and direct

inheritance. And so with the only identity the narrator ever having experienced linked directly to the

campus, this disavowal is filled with shame, guilt, and anger whose conditions and consequences are

at once personal and political, individual and social. On the one hand, for example, Trueblood and

his primitive, savage ways stand to deflect him off his particular envisioned career path of being a

prominent race man. On the other hand, however, the rural population in general represented the last

vestiges of slavery. But according to many narratives both black and white, slavery was in a past

already reconstructed; completed and closed; over – or at least must eventually be over if their

descendants are to achieve social success – in any meaningful political sense. For the narrator, the

uneducated mass of black folks in the rural South stood as the living memory of a disgraceful past,

which in turn served as a social limit, or a boundary of differentiation, between the backwardness of

the rural agricultural peasantry and those who had left such circumstances to be educated and

civilized in town, and particularly on the campus.

Out of mire and darkness of the farm into the clarity and light of the town and campus the

narrator finally realizes and appreciates – walking to chapel on what would be his last night on its

grounds – how the campus functioned as a “family [that] sheltered [its members] from those lost in

ignorance and darkness.”16 Walking up to the edifice of the chapel, with its bells “stirring the

depths” of his turmoil, his mind is filled with a sense of doom, “rushing for relief away from the

time-scene of the crucifixion to the time-mood of birth.”17 And yet, as he has been trained to do, he

enters and takes a seat amid “the voices mechanically raised in the songs the visitors loved.”

“Loved?” he immediately asks to himself. No, demanded. “Sung?” No, the songs were “an

ultimatum accepted and ritualized, an allegiance recited for the peace it imparted, and for that

perhaps loved. Loved as the defeated come to love the symbols of their conquerors.”18

Remembering how such philanthropy had set him “in this Eden” in the first place, the narrator’s

15 99.16 111.17 110.18 111.

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mind rushes with thoughts of how the words of those same whites were trailed with blood and

violence, ridicule, condescension, and intimidation that simultaneously established the limits to their

lives and the scope of their potential aspirations.

At the climax of this service, a man of “striking ugliness” rises to speak. Having been seated

next to Bledsoe and missed by the narrator in his preoccupation with the president, Rev. Barbee rises

and speaks of the past, of those days spent with the Founder in the beginning. He described the early

“days of ceaseless travel” when the Founder broadcast his message that “fell like seed on fallow

ground.”19 “This barren land after Emancipation,” he intoned, was a “land of darkness and sorrow,

of ignorance and degradation, where the hand of brother had been turned against brother, father

against son, and son against father; where master had turned against slave and slave against master;

where all was strife and darkness, an aching land…”20 And into this land cursed by injustice, Barbee

continues, “came a humble prophet…a slave and a son of slaves…born in the lowest part of the

barren, war-scarred land, yet somehow shedding light upon it where’er he passed through.” This

prophet was the Founder, who – important for its reference to his grandfather’s advice – gained his

initial learning “through shrewd questioning of his little masters” who never suspected that he was

teaching himself the alphabet and to read the Holy Bible. Through an arduous and dangerous

journey, the Founder found freedom and set to work for his people. And then a great struggle began,

and a whole region was “caught in a terrible tension.”21 But this “godly man’s labors,” Barbee says,

worked to resolve this tension by establishing a school that was “conceived in the starkness and

darkness of slavery” and was fulfilled now, in this place. “This slave, this black Aristotle,” Barbee

preaches, made possible the experience that was happening right that instant, as each student,

“daughters and granddaughters, sons and grandsons, of slaves,” benefited from the “bright and well-

equipped classrooms” of the college. Just before his voice drifts off with a sigh of nostalgia, Barbee

exclaims: “Ah, those days in which he tilled his mighty fields, those days in which he watched the

crops take hold and grow, those youthful, summery, sun-bright days…”22 In this way, Barbee’s

characterization of the rural South as a land cursed by the historical injustice of slavery ties together

the soteriological narratives of the Founder’s life to the agricultural and educational aims of the

college. By casting the seeds that would rehabilitate the fallow fields of the South, the Founder

sowed the seeds of freedom in the barren soil of slavery.

At the end of chapel, as the narrator moves across the ground from which the only identity he

had ever known had grown, he recognizes that Bledsoe would have little sympathy for what

19 124.20 118.21 119.22 126.

13

happened with Norton. And as he stood in a darkened doorway trying to probe his future, he realizes

he cannot go home but must move on elsewhere; he realizes that Bledsoe will cast him into exile

from the Eden-like sanctuary of the campus.23 Nevertheless, the next morning home remains in his

mind. As the narrator moves across campus for his meeting with Bledsoe, he smells the “good white

bread of breakfast; the rolls dripping with yellow butter that I had slipped into my pocket so often to

be munched later in my room with wild blackberry jam from home.”24 And so with these rolls, his

life at school and his life at home found a common substance. Again, the jam made from wild

blackberries points to the improvised and homemade character of so much of African-American

culinary traditions.

Arriving at Bledsoe’s office, they meet and he is dismissed from the college under the

pretense of a temporary break to go North and work. In the conversation, however, Bledsoe berates

him for his ignorance and draws the comparison to the rural past by saying: “Why, the dumbest black

bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!”25 Such

common knowledge the narrator had not yet learned – obviously to his detriment – despite the

suggestion that such a strategy originated within the context of slavery. And yet again this tacit

social knowledge among black folks alludes to his grandfather’s advice to “undermine ‘em with

grins” and “agree ‘em to death and destruction.”

A Phenomenology of the Urban

After the meeting, the narrator decides to collect the letters of recommendation Bledsoe had

promised and leave campus immediately. Later that morning at the bus station, he sees two men

from the Golden Day. When the narrator tells them that he is on his way to New York, the vet

exclaims: “New York! That’s not a place, it’s a dream. When I was your age it was Chicago. Now

all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot.”26 Recalling the

migrations of African-Americans out of the South to the various urban centers of the North, the vet

suggests that the desire to leave is motivated by a dream to escape a particular place and a particular

history. The South is the place of the historical fire in which black experience in the New World was

forged, and so seeking to leave this place is merely a displacement into the undifferentiated mass of

humanity this fire has created. New York, then, symbolizes both the desire to escape a certain past

and the hope for a better future. And while this dream of freedom is alluring, it is ultimately allusive.

23 135.24 136.25 139.26 152.

14

“Harlem is nowhere,” Ellison says in an essay of the same title; “it is the scene and symbol of the

Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.”27 He continues:

[t]he phrase ‘I’m nowhere’ expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable,

recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly

held assumptions are questionable. One ‘is’ literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto

maze, a ‘displaced person’ of American democracy.28

Nowhere, Harlem is a utopian place, which is to say no place at all. Here Ellison recognizes that to

have a place – a recognized place – in the social world is the condition without which identities

cannot be formed.

Continuing their conversation, the vet asserts that he will be in Harlem for three months and

become an entirely different person. The narrator responds by insisting he is only going there

temporarily to work and will have little time for social and cultural activities, thus resisting the

transformative effects of the city. But the vet presses him: “Deep down you’re thinking about the

freedom you’ve heard about up North, and you’ll try it once, just to see if what you’ve heard is

true.”29 Alluding to the prospects of sleeping with a white woman, the vet continues to try to get the

narrator to see the import of what is happening to him. “Come out of the fog, young man,” he says.

And remember you don’t have to be a complete fool in order to succeed. Play the game, but don’t believe

in it – that much you owe yourself…Play the game, but play it your own way – part of the time at least.

Play the game, but raise the ante, my boy. Learn how it operates, learn how you operate…We’re an ass-

backwards people, though. You really might even beat the game.30

In yet another instantiation of his grandfather’s advice, the vet tries again to get the narrator to see the

ways of the world, learn them, and deploy them to his benefit. He must realize that blacks are an

“ass-backwards people” and that to help his people he will have play the game, but play it his own

way. “Then it was gone,” he says:

In less than five minutes the spot of earth which I identified with the best of all possible worlds was gone,

lost within the wild uncultivated countryside. A flash of movement drew my eye to the side of the highway

now, and I saw a moccasin wiggle swiftly along the gray concrete, vanishing into a length of iron pipe that

lay beside the road. I watched the flashing past of cotton fields and cabins, feeling that I was moving into

the unknown.31

Representing civility and cultivation, the campus was a place carved out of the primitive wilderness

of the countryside. Out of a shameful rural past and into an unknown urban future, the vet and

Crenshaw part ways with the narrator at the next stop. Before getting off, however, the vet turns to

27 Ralph Ellison, The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison. John F. Callahan, ed. (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), pg. 321.28 Ibid., 325.29 Op. cit., Invisible Man, pg. 152.30 153.31 156.

15

him and looks at him with kindness and compassion. “Now is the time for offering fatherly advice,”

he said. “Be your own father, young man. And remember, the world is possibility if only you’ll

discover it.”32 Leaving there on the bus that day, then, the narrator begins a new phase of his journey

that ultimately returns him – if but conceptually – to the importance of that place for understanding

himself.

Moving from the South to the North, the narrator moves from the place of his birth to what

becomes the birth of his sense of place. It is in Harlem, in other words, that the narrator comes to

experience the weight of his past in a place supposedly as far from that past as he could realistically

get. Away from the time-scenes of his birth and childhood, away from the social order that shaped

his personal comportment to the world, he would be free to assume a new self adapted to new

environs. Arriving in the city full of optimism and confidence, he imagines himself with notoriety on

its streets, his affect sophisticated and his speech “charming.” “Of course you couldn’t speak that

way in the South,” he immediately notes, “the white folks wouldn’t like it, and the Negroes would

say that you were ‘putting on.’ But here in the North I would slough off my southern ways of

speech. Indeed, I would have one way of speaking in the North and another in the South. Give them

what they wanted down South, that was the way.”33 Comparing himself to Bledsoe while

simultaneously invoking both his grandfather’s and the vet’s advice, the narrator believes himself to

have discovered a crucial aspect of this game whose rules remained largely illusive.

Proceeding to plan his itinerary through the city, the narrator lodges at the Men’s House and

begins the search for employment. Waiting for one of these unsuccessful interviews, he imagines

these important men will be surprised to see someone like himself with such important introductions,

reflecting on the “unseen lines that ran from North to South” that connected him to Norton’s

destiny.34 And yet as he walked the streets, traveled the subways, and ate in the cafeterias, he

experienced such a mix of white and black folks as never before and began to get the “eerie, out-of-

focus sensation of a dream.”35 His clothes felt ill fitting and he became unsure as to how to act. “For

the first time,” he says, “as I swung along the streets, I thought consciously of how I had conducted

myself at home… It was confusing. I did not know if it was desirable or undesirable.” As time

passed, his doubts grew. The next day he remained in his room at the Men’s Club all day. During

that time, he says, “I grew conscious that I was afraid; more afraid here in my room than I had ever

been in the South. And all the more, because here there was nothing concrete to lay it to.” That

evening he ventured out to a movie, which was “a picture of frontier life with heroic Indian fighting

32 156.33 164.34 168.35 168.

16

and struggles against flood, storm and forest fire, with the out-numbered settlers winning each

engagement; an epic of wagon trains rolling ever westward.”36 And even though there was no one

like him taking part in these adventures, he momentarily forgot himself, and “left the dark room in a

lighter mood.” That night, however, he dreamed again of his grandfather and awoke depressed,

walking out the building with a “queer feeling” that he was “playing a part in some scheme” that he

did not understand.37

The next morning, walking out into a clear bright day, the narrator encounters a man pushing

a shopping cart filled with blueprints and singing the blues. The man, Peter Wheatstraw, stops him

on the street asking him if he has “got the dog?” Confused, the narrator laughs nervously and steps

away. “Now I know you from down home, how come you trying to act like you never heard that

before!” Of course, “down home” is the South, and Wheatstraw immediately discerns – though by

what means remains mysterious to the narrator – that they both originate from that place. As they

talk, the narrator tries “to think of some saying about bears to reply, but remembered only Jack the

Rabbit, Jack the Bear…who were both long forgotten and now brought a wave of homesickness.”

Remembering the stories of his childhood, he continues to walk with Wheatstraw even though he

wanted to leave him, for he “found a certain comfort in walking along beside him, as though we’d

walked this way before through other mornings, in other places…” As they continue to walk and talk

amid the early morning city streets, Wheatstraw tells him of all the plans he carries in his cart.

Many, he points out, have never been used at all, discarded with the ongoing changing of plans.

When the narrator insists naively that “[y]ou have to stick to the plan,” the custodian of unfulfilled

plans casts a grave glance at him, comments on his youth, and says that it was good talking with “a

youngster from the old country.”38

As Peter Wheatstraw rolls away on his cart down hill, the narrator reflects that, “to travel far

you had to be detached,” and that he had “the long road back to campus” before him. Continuing

along the city streets, he recalls the day: “I strode along, hearing the cartman’s song become a

lonesome, broad-toned whistle…God damn, I thought, they’re a hell of a people! And I didn’t know

whether it was pride or disgust that suddenly flashed over me.”39 Here again there is an association

with the rural life of his past and disgust, though this time the feeling is experienced in the midst of

more ambiguity, more uncertainty as to whether or not the emotion might not be pride instead. This

feeling is complicated by the homesickness he experiences whenever “the old country” is mentioned,

which leads to the narrator’s growing identification between his own personal identity and that of his

36 170.37 170.38 175.39 177.

17

people from a particular place. The boundaries of identification constructed around the latter, of

course, are racialized ones, turning around the social capital or death carried by means of pigmented

signs of the flesh, but both depend upon a specific historical situatedness of a particular people in a

particular place, i.e., the southern United States in the context and aftermath of the abolition of

slavery. Understood in terms of location, then, the affective bond developing for the narrator

between his present place and his past home moves along an axis of association that begins in shame

and guilt and is disrupted and transformed by his outright yearning for a place so far removed,

displaced even further by disavowals and rejections of its place within the narrative journey of his

life.

Shortly thereafter, the narrator goes into a drugstore and takes a seat at the counter, where he

notes several men “bent over plates of food. Glass globes of coffee simmered above blue flames. I

could feel the odor of frying bacon reach deep into my stomach as I watched the counterman open

the doors of the grill and turn the lean strips over and bang the doors shut again.”40 The counterman

comes over to him and offers the special – pork chops, grits, one egg, hot biscuits and coffee – and he

wonders whether people could see that he was Southern. Intentionally defying what seemed a certain

social expectation, he orders orange juice, toast, and coffee instead. He stares into the juice:

A seed floated in the thick layer of pulp that formed at the top of the glass. I fished it out with a spoon and

then downed the acid drink, proud to have resisted the pork chop and grits. It was an act of discipline, a

sign of the change that was coming over me and which would return me to college a more experienced

man. I would be basically the same, I thought, stirring my coffee, yet so subtly changed as to intrigue those

who had never been North.41

Again, here is an explicit association of food with a particular identity – in this case, one projected

upon him by the white cook vis-à-vis his geographical origins and the comestible desires associated

therewith. Just why this is so obvious to others remains mysterious to him, but he feels pride at

having defied expectations. To return to the South with not only a more nuanced cadence of speech

and style, but with a more refined palate would lend a further sophistication to his newly found self.

At this point in his journey, the narrator is coming to understand more fully the variant social

expectations and forms of propriety relevant to his embodiment in both rural and urban environs.

If the experience of his self in the South was stable and certain, it is a plausible that this is at

least partly due to the phenomenology of social life in the South. There, social roles were (and

arguably still are) more rigidly defined, more governed by custom than by circumstance, and where

racialized forms organization still dominated the social order. The urban North, on the other hand,

was a much more diversified set of places, with vast conglomerations of migrants and immigrants,

40 177.41 178.

18

money and power, and a clear sense of interconnectedness due to its composition of overlapping

localities. Accordingly, the phenomenology of social life in the urban environment is characterized

by a concomitant degree of flux, motion, and even chaos so characteristic of large city life. If the

experience of identity in the rural South was stable or even ossified, then the experience of identity in

the urban North is equally in flux or even chaos. In this way, identity is both experienced and

constitutive of experience; it shapes experience while being shaped by undergoing change over time.

The experience of identity as stable or unstable is ineliminably contingent upon the relative stability

or instability of the environment. This environment, in turn, forms the determinate (but not

determined) scope of possibility for experience within a particular place. Thus, the narrator’s

increasingly sophisticated sense of place developed in Harlem points to an increasingly sophisticated

phenomenology, which is occasioned by the rich diversity of stimuli at work within and upon his

sense of self within the cityscapes of Harlem.

The development of this phenomenology, however, takes a decisive turn only after having

been in the city for some time, and more specifically during his employment at Liberty Paints.

Working in the basement of the factory that produces the white paint used for government buildings

– all of which contains a drop of black paint that gives the white is sheen – the narrator is injured in

an explosion and is subsequently hospitalized. Waking in the hospital, he is blinded by bright lights

and probed by machines and doctors as to his identity. Using a new machine being developed for

conditions left unsaid, his body dances with electricity as he “rolled with the agitated tide, out into

the blackness.”42 Passing in and out of consciousness, he continues:

I lay experiencing the vague processes of my body. I seemed to have lost all sense of proportion. Where

did my body end and the crystal and white world begin? Thoughts evaded me, hiding in the vast stretch of

clinical whiteness to which I seemed connected only by a scale of receding grays. No sounds beyond the

sluggish inner roar of the blood. I couldn’t open my eyes. I seemed to exist in some other dimension,

utterly alone… I was laved with warm liquids, felt gentle hands move through the indefinite limits of my

flesh… I listened intently…[b]ut still their meanings were lost in the vast whiteness in which I myself was

lost.43

On that hospital table, being shocked by the techno-scientific extensions of white men, the narrator

realizes with shame that he no longer knew his own name. In this way, the hospital scene is a crucial

turning point in the narrator’s understanding of himself. He becomes consciously detached from his

own name, no longer recognizing himself – or at least a certain self – and yet simultaneously

undergoes a new sense of his own corporeal reality. This newfound experience of his body is the

occasion for his altered sense of phenomenological understanding, which develops rapidly after

42 238.43 238.

19

being discharged. Such a phenomenology becomes more firmly grounded in his body, extending in

increasingly sensitive ways to account for and accommodate the environmental minutiae in which he

happens to find himself. Stepping out onto the street immediately after being discharged he says:

Things whirled too fast around me. My mind went alternately bright and blank in slow rolling waves. We,

he, him – my mind and I – were no longer getting around in the same circles. Nor my body either. Across

the aisle a young platinum blonde nibbled at a red Delicious apple as station lights rippled past behind her.

The train plunged. I dropped through the roar, giddy and vacuum-minded, sucked under and out into the

late afternoon Harlem.44

And so while this phenomenology may allow the narrator a more nuanced experience of his environs,

it is not limited to his body alone. Disrupting the hypostasized identities of the first, second, and

third person, this phenomenology, in a sense, is neither an object-centered nor a subject-centered one.

Rather, this phenomenology is ecological – rather than individual or social – precisely because it

incorporates and accounts for as many relations and qualities obtaining within the environment as

possible. By enriching and expanding sensory experience – rather than limiting it to some type of

sense-certainty – the narrator’s understanding of his own identity formation is transformed into an

ecological sensibility that situates the unfurling of experience within an organism undergoing change

over time, which is both originally from and presently in a particular place.

Throughout this essay I have suggested that Ellison’s conception of identity is one most aptly

understood as a process of identity formation. Identity, in the Ellisonian sense then, is not a static

thing; it is not a set of attributes drawn solely or even primarily from the standard generalized

categories applied to individual bodies. Identity is not a conceptual problem involving particulars

and universals. Ellison’s representation of identity, rather, consists of a dynamic development of

sensibilities arranged so as to provide a necessary affective horizon against which meaning and

understanding become possible for individual experience. Such experience, again, is always already

situated within a place. Experience is an in situ affair, contingent upon the relations and forces at

work within a given environment. It is within experience that identities are formed through lives

lived within horizons of meanings that are found in a particular place and are always being made

anew in the process of understanding. Understanding in the present, however, is intimately and

inextricably linked to the various historical legacies that form the condition without which the

present would not be possible. This, I suggest, is an accurate way to characterize Ellison

phenomenology, and is the expanded sense of what I mean when I describe this as an ecological

phenomenology

Later, the narrator finds himself sifting through the belongings of a couple being evicted from

their home on the city streets of Harlem, the narrator finds the papers that announced the freeing of a 44 250.

20

slave, one Primus Provo. Upon reading them, he drops the papers back in a drawer and recalls: “My

hands were trembling, my breath rasping as if I had run a long distance or come upon a coiled snake

in a busy street. It has been longer than that, further removed in time, I told myself, and yet I knew

that it hadn’t been.”45 Again forgetting how proximate the past of slavery really was, he is shocked.

Stumbling back and choking, nothing substantive would come up; “only a bitter spurt of gall” filled

his mouth, splattering on the possessions laid before him. He remembers: “I turned and stared again

at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a

corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered

words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home.”46 Here the narrator

explicitly acknowledges that his memory is not solely his own; that he has been and is shaped by all

those conditions that contribute to the possibility of his experience and understanding in the present.

Shortly after this, the eviction scene turns violent and the narrator intervenes, almost as if

some other person temporarily fills his body. Slipping into his oratory mode, he gives his first

Harlem speech to much success. After the speech the narrator accompanies an onlooker, Brother

Jack, to a diner where he is offered some cheesecake, which he has never heard of before. He smiled

as he watched Jack “cutting into his cheesecake with a fork and shoving far too large a piece into his

mouth. His manners are extremely crude, I thought, trying to put him at a disadvantage in my own

mind by pointedly taking a small piece of the cheesy stuff and placing it neatly into my mouth.”47 As

they talk, Brother Jack explains the process of dispossession by accumulation. “They’re living, but

dead,” Jack says of the evicted folks, “[d]ead-in-living…a unity of opposites.” “They’re agrarian

types, you know. Being ground up by industrial conditions. Thrown on the dump heaps and cast

aside. You pointed it out very well.”48 “Those old ones,” he said grimly, are “already dead, defunct.

History has passed them by…Men grow old and types of men grow old. And these are very old.”49

To this the narrator responds by saying, perhaps for the first time, that he liked them for the way they

remind him of folks he knew down South. “It’s taken me a long time to feel it,” he says aloud,

“they’re folks just like me, except that I’ve been to school a few years.” Jack swung his head around

and shot back cuttingly:

Oh, no, brother; you’re mistaken and you’re sentimental. You’re not like them. Perhaps you were, but

you’re not any longer…Perhaps you were, but that’s all past, dead. You might not recognize it just now,

45 272.46 273.47 289.48 290.49 290.

21

but that part of you is dead! You have not completely shed that self, that old agrarian self, but it’s dead and

you will throw it off completely and emerge something new. History has been born in your brain. 50

“Look,” the narrator says in response, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve never lived on a

farm and I didn’t study agriculture, but I do know why I made that speech.” Going on to explain that

he was simply upset at seeing elderly folks being kicked to the street with such impunity, Jack calls

the argument off and instead offers him a job working for his organization. Within this scene,

however, the narrator begins to sense more explicitly that moving to Harlem does not automatically

rid him of his rural past, which returns time and again to define the parameters by which the narrator

understands and is understood by others.

After their conversation, the narrator leaves Jack feeling disconcerted and depressed and

makes his way back across Harlem to the apartment he had rented from Mary, a fellow southern

transplant. By the time he reached Mary’s apartment, however, his depression had begun to lift. But

when he arrived an odiferous wave of cabbage immediately changed his mind. “Standing engulfed

in the fumes filling the hall,” he recalls, “it struck me that I couldn’t realistically reject the job.

Cabbage was always a depressing reminder of the leaner years of my childhood and I suffered

silently whenever she served it.” And given that this was the third time this week she had served it,

he continues, “there was no mistake, Mary loved a variety of food and this concentration upon

cabbage was no accident.”51 With that he decides to accept the job, and leaves the house without

eating to find a telephone booth in the cold. And as if “haunted by cabbage fumes,” the little

luncheonette in which he found a telephone was reeking of the cole crop, urging him on from the past

as he pressed on into his uncertain future. The sense of smell here is predominant, and occasions yet

more memories of home and the circumstances of his childhood. Like with the narrator’s yams,

Bledsoe’s chitterlings and mustard greens, and Trueblood’s watermelons, cabbage here functions in a

dual capacity that occasions both an awareness of personal relationships particular to the narrator, as

well as a historical-cultural invocation that situates that awareness within a particular place.

Meeting Jack for his interview, he is whisked away in a car to go to party. Riding silently

across town, they arrive at what was obviously a very expensive place. Upon entering, he is pushed

into the hostess, her exotic perfume arousing a strong sense of familiarity, though he is unable to

discern whether it was from a book or a movie, or from some real sense of déjà vu, or “from some

recurrent but deeply buried dream.”52 Pressed on the type of drink he would like, he “remembered

the best the South had to offer” and orders Bourbon.53 The discussion quickly turns to how the

people “throw up” their leaders, much in the vein of organic intellectuals, and Brother Jack says: 50 291.51 296.52 300.53 302.

22

“During these times of indecision when all the old answers are proven false, the people look back to

the dead to give them a clue.” In such times of crisis, that is, the past is especially operative by

confronting present experience with a range of historical facts arranged around a selective emphasis

aimed at some purpose. Jack’s conception of history presented here must be seen within the context

of having offered the narrator the chance to be “the new Booker T. Washington.”54 Incredulous in

the face of such a claim, the narrator engages Jack in a biographical analysis as to the relative merits

of the Founder as compared to Booker T. Washington. Pulled by the sense of importance attached to

such words and figures, he is pulled into Jack’s narrative through the strange excitement he felt at

“the sense of being present at the creation of important events.”

From here, however, the biographical turns hagiographical. Raising specters of the likes of

“Jefferson, Jackson, Pulaski, Garibaldi, Booker T. Washington, Sun Yat-sen, Danny O’Connoll,

Abraham Lincoln,” Jack explains how historical crisis is averted by his theory of performative

resurrection. By invoking his name and acting through his ideas and principles, Jack suggests,

“Booker Washington was resurrected today at a certain eviction in Harlem. He came out from the

anonymity of the crowd and spoke to the people.”55 The identities of past leaders, that is, come to be

operative in the present by means of enacting or performing certain actions in accord with certain

symbolic principles taken up in the name of a given figure. Importantly, such performances always

occur at a distance, for ends other than the lives represented by their names intended. Actions are

completed and diverted; consequences both anticipated and not are encountered; symbols are remade

in light of present problems and circumstances. And once stripped of a certain historical

determinism, which so often accompanies a particularly masculine and triumphal hagiographical

temperament, this conception is compelling for the way in which the past and the present are taken as

co-constitutive of one another in the ongoing experience of life in an uncertain and mysterious world.

By means of actions, enactments, and performances, identities are constructed out of the past in the

present toward the fulfillment of future aims.

The next morning the narrator awoke to someone pounding the steam line of the building,

which made a “brash, nerve-jangling sound.” As he sat there upright in bed with his hands over his

ears, he “stared helplessly for what seemed minutes,” his ears throbbing and his insides itching

violently.56 Jumping out of bed to dress to meet Jack, the narrator loses his temper and grabs an early

Americana statue that was also a bank. This piece, a “cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and

wide-mouthed Negro,” whose “expression seemed more of a strangulation than a grin,” its throat

choked with coins. He slams the statue against the pipe, causing others to join in the cacophony,

54 305.55 307.56 318.

23

screaming: “Why don’t you act like responsible people living in the twentieth century?” Striking

another blow, this time shattering the statue, he yelled: “Get rid of your cottonpatch ways! Act

civilized!”57 Again disavowing any association with such people, this time the disavowal stems not

from guilt or shame, but from the anger aroused by the caricatured figurine and his indignation at

how Mary came to own such a thing. But in attempting to dispose of the smashed bank and coins out

on the street, the narrator is stopped by “a short yellow woman with a pince-nez on a chain” who

confronts him with the very image he has destroyed and is in the process of throwing away.

Screaming at him she says: “We keep our place clean and respectable and we don’t want you field

niggers coming up from the South and ruining things.” Reaching into the trash can, down through

the fumes of rotting food, he grabs the package and shoots back angrily: “That’s enough out of you,

you piece of yellow gone-to-waste.” Disrupting social expectations with his response, the woman

recognizes him to be no gentleman at all, the charge of which he willingly accepts, and moving down

the street he places the broken pieces of the statue in his briefcase to deal with later.

The important feature of this expression of anger, though, is not the destruction of the statue,

nor is it the racialized epithet leveled at the woman. Rather, it is the explicit articulation of a deeper

sentiment – a habit of thought prevalent in himself and in those around him – about certain classes of

black folk who have migrated to the city from the Deep South. Built into this sentiment are certain

normative, aesthetic, and political judgments, generally negative in value, as to the social worth of

those people who fail to adjust their behavior in the socially appropriate and expected ways for their

new lives in the swirling city. While obviously the narrator remains connected to this social

sensibility, the remainder of his journey can in many ways be seen as the conduit through which this

sensibility is reconstructed into a more expansive aesthetic of experience.

And so the question is not whether or not the narrator ever “escapes” from this sensibility;

not whether or not he achieves some “higher” perspective from which a judgment of certainty can be

made. The point, rather, lies precisely in the other direction. Sensibility is not some thing to be

escaped or transcended; it is a constitutive feature of experience that is transformed in the process of

experience. In this sense, sensibility is simultaneously a product of experience and a necessary

condition for the possibility of experience. And as I have suggested throughout, one central element

to this reciprocal, mutually constitutive motion of identity formation is the environment, place, and

the markers within that environment that bring different sensibilities into comparison and contrast.

Thus, the very differences of affect and culture, taste and speech, looked down upon within this

network of judgments as to the value of certain rural forms of life may, in fact, be the very conditions

for the cosmopolite urban environment otherwise celebrated in the implication of the sentiment.

57 328.

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From Phenomenology to Ecology

Given this characterization of Ellison’s conception of identity formation, I have suggested that a

helpful way to understand its central aspects is through the language of ecology. Ellison’s

conception of identity, that is, is an ecological one: it seeks to situate the experience of individuals

within their environments so as to understand the conditions under which certain aspects of their

personal identity are formed and become salient. Analogously, as a natural science, ecology seeks to

understand the relationships obtaining between different organisms in an environment, to discern the

forces at work conditioning the field of possible movements for a given set of organisms within a

given place. When this conception is focused on human organisms and their environments, ecology

is social and ranges in scope from the separatist living in the woods to the small town farmer to the

big city urbanite: all the environments where the presence of human beings has intended or

unintended consequences are possible fields for social ecological inquiry. Social ecology, in other

words, seeks to understand the relationships obtaining between humans and between humans and

various other organisms and aspects of their environments; it seeks to account for the operative

forces at work upon and through the bodies of human beings in terms of their immediate and

anticipated consequences; is an integrative mode of inquiry that seeks to understand how various

elements are conditioned-conditioning constituents of a moving – indeed, often even living – system.

In this way, it becomes clear that Ellison’s characterization of the process of identity

formation as transactional, situated, and experiential, he is speaking about a social ecology in which

individuals live, thrive, and undergo change over time. Within the course of social life, there are

wide arrays of networks whose function is to coordinate activity and contact between their

constituent elements, shaping habits of action according to need, desire, and consequence. In this

sense, to call Ellison’s conception of identity ecological is to highlight the ways in which a very

particular range of human experience – the experience of personal identity – is formed by means of a

contingent process of development. This process, moreover, is not simply a subjective affair of some

unmediated consciousness for-itself alone, but is constructed out of a vast array of influences –

choices made poorly or well, expectations fulfilled or dashed, and opportunities expected or not – all

encountered within a particular environment.

Thus, ecology in general, and Ellison’s ecological conception of identity in particular, is

situated within a temporal and geographical network that emphasizes the transactional, relational,

and experimental aspects of experience so as to reconstruct the possibilities for present and future

forms of life. Ellison describes this comportment to identity most succinctly in his essay “Harlem is

Nowhere” when describing how staff approach patients in a local psychiatric clinic. He says:

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…each patient, whether white or black, is approached dynamically as a being possessing a cultural and

biological past who seeks to make his way toward the future in a world wherein each discovery about

himself must be made in the here and now at the expense of hope, pain, fear – a being who in responding to

the complex forces of America has become confused.58

In this way, like the environments in which they are situated, individuals undergo change over time,

realizing their various possibilities but always and forever within a determinate set of actualities.

And with this change, naturally, follows a respective change in that narrow slice of experience we

call our personal and social identities. But such actualities – however they may appear as the brute

facts of our condition notwithstanding – do in fact have a history, a genealogical narrative whose

character forms the condition for the possibility of experiencing the world in such facticity.

In a certain sense, then, it may be appropriate to think of Ellison’s ecology of identity as an

ecology without nature. That is, the importance of Ellison’s conception of identity may lie in the

way in which it displaces the common conception of identity as some native, in-born trait of body or

culture. By means of a strange semiotics of flesh and concept, such a trait is often taken as a

“natural” aspect of the identity of the organism to which it is attached. This naturalization, however,

is precisely what Ellison calls into question. Instead of understanding the various facets of personal

identity in terms of “natural” characteristics, Ellison suggests that even these – in any meaningfully

complex social sense – are contingently constructed out of the various experiences undergone in

place and time. Identities emerge within environments, both of which are always in motion,

changing amid a vast field of forces past and present. That said, just because Ellison characterizes

identity as a contingent process always already located in a particular place does not mean that he

considers identities to be ineffectual or in any way not real. Almost wholly to the contrary. In a

masterful way, Ellison develops his conception in the midst of a life lived – its fictional ontology

withstanding – and shows rather than says how his identity is constructed out of a wide array of

influences and events that comprise a real, effective personality in the face of what is otherwise a

mysteriously thrown existence.

All this is to say that just because something is constructed does not mean that it is unreal;

just because identity is decoupled from naturalized essences or attributes does not imply that it is

“merely” social or “merely” constructed. Ecological thinking seeks to efface just such conceptual

binaries – which are, of course, in fact hierarchies – by reconstructing the boundaries between the

natural and the social such that more synthetic, integrative, and transactional conceptions of

organisms in their environments may begin to construct meaningful and sustainable alternatives to

contemporary forms of life. Within such a framework, differences are the necessary products of

58 Op. cit., The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, pg. 321.

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adaptation modified in the course of experience, both individual and social, over time. Such

differences, moreover, are desirable precisely because they make possible the continued

diversification and differentiation of those very same experiences over time, enriching and expanding

their potential for making new meanings in the service of new ends. Pasts are invoked and

incorporated in novel ways and for new ends; presents are understood as the actual confluence of

bodies in motion and at rest; and futures are continually re-imagined within this network of

actualities as the hopes and dreams of individuals engaged in the ongoing struggle of understanding

the world and a place within it to call home.

In the end, Ellison suggests that it is to these historical and genealogical assemblages that we

must look to understand how “our unknown histories don’t stop having consequences even though

we may ignore them.” The question of identity, then, is particularly salient in light of Ellison’s

plausible claim that “Americans can be notoriously selective in the exercise of historical memory.”59

The American experience is, Ellison suggests, based largely around the question of identity. Who

am I, a many of the mysterious American one? How did I come to be here? How did we – the many

who find ourselves thrown here into this one – come to be here? The conception of identity Ellison

develops through Invisible Man, and particularly through the narrator, is one wherein identity is a

phenomenological unfurling of a situated body. When identity is so conceived, the role of place in

the formation of identities is as constitutive of the self as the social group from which that identity

finds its scope, as well as that unique aspect of experience known as individual subjectivity. The role

of the individual in creating and perpetuating certain forms of identity is then thrown into relief

against the backdrop of an entire web of ecological relations.

59 Ibid., 594.