STANLEY CROUCH
How Long? So Long
As
I
observed in a recently published eulogy, Ralph Ellison (1914-1994),
alone of the world-famous Afro-American novelists, never denied his
American identity, his American birthright, his complex responsibilities as
a participant in the analyzing of American meaning, which is the job of
the intellectual, and the remaking of American life in the hopefully
immortal rhythms and tunes of art, which is the job of our aesthetically
creative. Ellison had no interest in the overpaid chitlin circuit of
professional alienation and guilt-mongering. He knew that all distant
ethnic roots had been transmuted by the tragedy of American collison
and the intricate cultural blues of collusion.
That is why Ellison floated above the petty darknesses of race and
opportunism that have brought so many devitalized dissonances to the
orchestra of our national life. He was listening to a music more celestial
and more in touch with the earth of our culture, the score written in
the sky and in the mud, where the tales of heartbreak and hope, courage
and cowardice, ambivalence and absolute accuracy tell us of the cos–
mopolitan bloodlines that make us Americans - part Yankee, part
Indian, part pioneer, part Negro, part Christian, part Jewish, part
Hispanic, part Asian.
Ellison understood what Sergio Leone, the Italian filmmaker, meant
when he said that American cinema was an international language be–
cause it had spoken across so many barriers wi thin its own culture that it
touched everyone in the world. That is what our brown-skinned writer
from Oklahoma sought in his work. Those specific, those complex, those
delicate, those dancing, those wounded, those ribald, those elevated, and
those down-home rhythms and tunes of the U.S.A. were what he always
sought to bring to the page, allowing for liberation into the vast drama
of human life that knows no limits beyond those inherent in the
individual. Yes, he floated above the childish squabbles of the ethnic
barnyard in search of the epic voice of the American experience, which
speaks both to the ages and to the enjoyments and anxieties of the mo–
ment. Now truly an Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison is one we will miss un–
til we join him, but we were damn lucky to ever have had such a great
spirit, mind, and heart among us.
