THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 19, 1997 TAG: 9701100658
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY EUGENE M. MCAVOY
LENGTH: 59 lines
FLYING HOME AND OTHER STORIES
RALPH ELLISON
Random House. 173 pp. $23.
In February 1994, eight weeks before his death, Ralph Ellison announced his desire to publish his short stories and suggested that more stories existed than even his wife and closest friends knew. Two years later, editor John F. Callahan discovered seven previously unknown and unpublished stories that provided the ``impetus and shape'' for the collection that Ellison requested. The result is Flying Home and Other Stories, a work of unquestionable importance in American fiction.
Ellison's first and only novel, Invisible Man, won the National Book Award in 1953 and established him as a major voice in American letters. His reputation has grown since the novel appeared, and the danger exists that some may view this collection as merely a footnote in Ellison's development as a writer. While the collection is clearly a presage of one of America's most influential novels, it is also significant in its own right, as meaningful now as when its stories were written.
The collection chronicles the experience of living as a black American between the Jim Crow era of the 1920s and the unfulfilled promise of World War II. Between these temporal extremes and in a panoramic sweep of the American landscape, Ellison experiments with technique, milieu and point of view. From his experimentation, his rifts and his breaks, a voice emanates that is distinctly Ellison's and unapologetically American - despite the unconscionable cruelty that blacks faced as Americans.
In ``A Party Down at the Square,'' the opening story in Flying Home, a young white boy witnesses the lynching of a black man accused of an unspecified and unproven crime. As the man writhes in flames, he cries to the crowd of whites, ``Will one a you gentlemen please cut my throat . . . like a Christian?'' From the crowd, a voice calls, ``Sorry, but ain't no Christians around tonight . . . We're just one hundred percent Americans.''
In the remaining stories, like the crowd gathered around the burning man, Ellison withholds his mercy. Like James Joyce before him, he subjects his characters to the tortures of self-exploration and cultural rejection. His lack of mercy, however, is not without compassion or redemption. Unlike his Invisible Man, his protagonists in Flying Home do not withdraw to the underground. Instead, they emerge from pain to awareness, from awareness to acceptance. For each, as for the downed pilot in ``Flying Home'' who distances himself from other blacks only to discover that they alone promise rescue, acceptance is ``a song within his head,'' a world in which inequality, a Jim Crow buzzard that hovers over the powerless black man, will ``glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold.''
In his introduction, Callahan notes that Ellison's fiction is an assertion of his own American theme, his ``belief in a common - not identical, but common - democratic identity.'' Hardly a footnote to any other work, Flying Home is an indictment of the distance between America's ideal and reality - its buzzard and its phoenix - a promise that the distance may be shortened, and a superlative addition to the art and artistry of America. MEMO: Eugene McAvoy is a writer who lives in Norfolk.