Shanna Greene Benjamin

There’s Something about Mary:

Female Wisdom and the Folk Presence
in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

Abstract
Little more than a decade after publishing Invisible Man (1952), Ralph Ellison published
“Out of the Hospital and under the Bar” (1963): an excised chapter of the novel that portrayed
Mary Rambo—a black woman represented stereotypically in the published manuscript—as a
necessary agent in the protagonist’s emergence from the paint-factory hospital. As scholars
have contested the significance of this chapter and Mary’s representation in it, the Invisible
Man drafts, made available to the public in 1998, reveal that this chapter is more significant
than previously thought: this section of the novel underwent more revision than any other and
is the sole portion of the drafts to be published as a narrative unto itself. This essay explains
how the expurgated chapter reveals how voice, agency, and memory affect Invisible Man’s
physical and psychological ascent and confirms Ellison’s deep respect for the wisdom imbedded
within black folk culture. By reading Mary Rambo alongside her peers who also represent a
folk past—namely Trueblood, Peter Wheatstraw, and Brother Tarp—this essay offers early
evidence of Ellison’s image of the modern black protagonist and prompts us to imagine what
might have been had Invisible Man been able to experience the fullness of Mary’s folk wisdom
as Ellison had originally conceived.

—imagine, indeed, what the American Negro would be without the Marys of our
ever-expanding Harlems.
Ralph Ellison, “Author’s Note” to “Out of the Hospital and under
the Bar” (Ellison 1963a)

[Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism 2014, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 121–148]
© 2014 by Smith College. All rights reserved.

121
 The trope of invisibility dominating Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)
transcends page and prose to characterize the absent presence of Mary
Rambo: a “woman of the folk” who lives a dual life as both a character in the
novel and as a figure beyond it (Ellison 1963a, 243). Present because she is
included in the novel proper yet absent because she is fully developed only
outside its bounds, Mary Rambo, one of many “un-visible” women in
Invisible Man’s journey, finds agency in “Out of the Hospital and Under the
Bar,” a chapter all her own (Eversley 2005, 173). In this, a chapter excised
from Invisible Man, Mary Rambo takes center stage and, in so doing, claims
space for explorations of the mechanisms that create opportunities for black
female expressions of agency, power, and wisdom in a novel long criticized
for its stereotyping of women in general and black women in particular.1
Printed for the first time in Herbert Hill’s edited collection Soon One
Morning: New Writing by American Negroes, 1940–1962, “Out of the Hospital”
rewrites the hero’s journey from “where the explosion occurs in the paint
factory” to when he finds himself on the streets of Harlem headed directly
to Mary’s care (Ellison 1963a, 243). Instead of depicting the hero’s escape
from the paint-factory hospital as an individual process, “Out of the
Hospital” portrays it as a communal one with Mary at the helm and
ancestral wisdom motoring behind. A fascinating look into what Mary
could have been had her role not been reduced due to “considerations of
space” (243), “Out of the Hospital” casts Mary as the impetus behind
Invisible Man’s escape, her ingenuity and folk wisdom facilitating Invisible
Man’s emergence above ground.
This Mary, this well-developed woman and fully formed folk figure, was
special to Ellison. In the “Author’s Note” to “Out of the Hospital,” Ellison
muses that expanding Mary’s presence would have improved Invisible Man.
He writes: “I am pleased for Mary’s sake to see this version in print. She
deserved more space in the novel and would, I think, have made it a better
book . . . ” (Ellison 1963a, 243). Adam Bradley confirms as much in Ralph
Ellison in Progress when he observes: “Ellison’s publication in 1963 of the
extended transitional scene between the paint-factory hospital and Mary’s
boardinghouse, ‘Out of the Hospital and under the Bar,’ already suggests
that Mary originally had a much larger role in the novel” (Bradley 2010,
195). What Ellison knew when he published “Out of the Hospital” was that
this published, extended take on Mary’s role was only the tip of the
iceberg: part of a large body of drafts representing his emerging thoughts

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on Mary Rambo as a vessel of black folk wisdom and as a symbol of black
folk life.
The drafts reveal a curious phenomenon: Ellison spent more time writing
and revising the section related to “the protagonist’s hospital experience and
subsequent encounter with Mary Rambo” than on any other part of the novel
(Foley 2010, 207). The sheer number of draft pages spent transitioning the
narrator from the hospital into Harlem explodes, as Barbara Foley elabo-
rates, from “little more than twenty pages in the published text” to “several
hundred handwritten and typewritten manuscript pages” (207–08). Foley’s
remark that this “section of Invisible Man underwent more rewriting” than
any other part of the novel suggests that this episode was important to
Ellison, a narrative moment he strove to get just right (207). It seems that for
all of his writing and rewriting, Ellison remained dissatisfied with the
version of the hero’s hospital emergence published in Invisible Man. At the
very least, he wished to circulate another version. Whether the result of
dissatisfaction or ambivalence, the fact that Ellison consciously selected and
intentionally published “Out of the Hospital”—coupled with its status as the
most rewritten moment in the Invisible Man drafts—indicates that this piece
warrants further inquiry. My essay digs deeper. Specifically, I read the Mary
Rambo we see in “Out of the Hospital” alongside a broader cast of folk
characters in the novel proper—namely Trueblood, Peter Wheatstraw, and
Brother Tarp—to differentiate among their approaches to the transmission
of folk wisdom, to detail how this alternative Mary embodies Ellison’s ideal
folk presence, and to imagine what might have been had Invisible Man
connected to a vibrant folk past through Mary’s wisdom.
The scholarship that references “Out of the Hospital” can be divided
into two critical strains: the first undervalues Mary’s significance, over-
looks her presence, or retreats from a consideration of her role in the hero’s
journey altogether; the second lauds the Mary of “Out of the Hospital” as
“community elder,” folk healer, and the “true” version of Ellison’s vision.
In the first strain, Susan Blake, Mary Rohrberger, and Daniel Kim offer
readings that minimize the significance of the Mary of “Out of the Hospi-
tal,” presuming they mention it at all. Blake contends that even if the Mary
we see in “Out of the Hospital” “were included, she would still have no
sustained effect on the novel” (Blake 1979, 130). Published a decade later,
Rohrberger’s “‘Ball the Jack’: Surreality, Sexuality, and the Role of Women
in Invisible Man” offers compelling ways to read the novel but overlooks

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 123

 the excised chapter by failing to mention it at all (Rohrberger 1989).2 Kim’s
“Invisible Desires” queers the critique of race and gender by focusing on
the story Invisible Man concocts about fleeing the South (did the hero kill a
white man in response to unwanted sexual advances?) and concerns
himself, primarily, with “the story [Invisible Man] tells” (Kim 1997, 322).3
My essay challenges assertions made by Blake and Rohrberger while
returning to Kim’s concerns with gender to suggest that Mary’s complete
portrait in “Out of the Hospital” delineates the features of the folk past
required to successfully negotiate the isolation that is part and parcel of
the protagonist’s experience as a modern man in the urban North.
The second critical strain features work by Robert O’Meally, Ann Folwell
Stanford, and Claudia Tate, scholars who postulate that the Mary we see in
“Out of the Hospital” exemplifies Ellison’s attempt to redraw Mary Rambo
as a figure critical to our understanding of the folk. For O’Meally, “Out of the
Hospital” grants readers “a wider view of Mary’s character as a community
elder, who, using ancient herbal formulas and ritualized words, is instru-
mental in saving Invisible Man from the ‘factory hospital’: from modern
racism, northern, urban-style” (O’Meally 2001, 19). Stanford argues for the
reinscription of Mary into the novel to better understand how the Mary of
“Out of the Hospital “functions as healer/rescuer/conjure woman to the
narrator, in contrast to the shapeless Mary Rambo of Invisible Man, whose
function as a healer is implied but only briefly evident and, in addition, is
diminished by sexual stereotype” (Stanford 1993, 24). Tate upholds the
excised chapter as the “true” representation of Mary, and thus privileges
Mary Rambo’s voice and experience in “Out of the Hospital” (Tate 1990).
Even without incorporating evidence from the drafts, these essays offer
reasons why Mary remained a persistent concern for Ellison even after
Invisible Man was published and Three Days before the Shooting was underway.4
This essay examines the expurgated chapter to reveal how voice, agency,
and memory impact Invisible Man’s physical and psychological ascent
while confirming Ellison’s deep respect for the wisdom imbedded within
black folk culture. Using past as prologue, my essay responds to a call
issued by Melvin Dixon over thirty years ago that scholars “not limit our
critical perspective to the textual borders of the published version” (Dixon
1980, 104). Dixon proposes that “Rather than forget [Out of the Hospital]
we should view the hero’s dilemma and progress in the larger context of
Ellison’s conception of the novel and the centrality of Mary Rambo” (104).

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Following Dixon’s lead, my essay delineates how Ellison documents the
keys to negotiating the black experience as a discipline: a practice of
living-while-black constituted by “its own strategies for survival” (Ellison
1963b/1995, 159). Thus, at the same time that the Mary of “Out of the
Hospital” embodies a cultural legacy that, for Invisible Man, evokes both
pride and shame, she teaches him and other “American Negro[es]” of our
“ever-expanding Harlems” how lessons of the past can order the ambigui-
ties of the black experience at present.

I Used to be Your Sweet Mama5

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience
alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not
by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic
lyricism.
Ralph Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues” (Ellison 1945/1995)

[The songs of blues women] implicitly emphasize the dialectical relation between the
female subject and the community of women within which this individuality is
imagined. In an aesthetic realm, these songs construct a women’s community in
which individual women are able to locate themselves on a jagged continuum of group
experiences.
Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (Davis 1998)

With its language of longing and ironic evaluations of the realities of the
black experience during the early part of the twentieth century, blues music
notates the ambivalence of the modern black experience. African Americans
who journeyed north during the Great Migration anticipated a milk-and-
honey reality replete with abundant industrial work and limited racial
backlash—a welcome alternative to their meager sharecropping existence in
the South. What many found, however, was that the racism they experienced
in the South was also in the North, where it manifested in ways that were
both direct and subtle, familiar and new. Invisible Man traces a similar
transition between South and North: a transition that is both geographical
and intellectual and involves the hero’s struggle to find a discourse to order
his ambiguous existence. The Mary Rambo in “Out of the Hospital and

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 125

 under the Bar” offers something that the Mary Rambo of Invisible Man proper
does not. With direct links to a women’s community rich with folk knowl-
edge, this Mary helps Invisible Man determine “what in [his] background is
worth preserving or abandoning” (Ellison 1955/1995, 213) in much the same
way the black woman blues singer offers up her “advice song” (Davis 1998,
57) with the hope that singing her personal missteps will keep others from
repeating them. Instead of rejecting the “jagged grain” of Ellison’s “brutal
experience outright,” Mary Rambo places herself on a “jagged continuum of
group experiences” (Davis 1998, 62), where the subordination of the personal
prioritizes the communal and supports “the group’s will to survive” (Ellison
1955/1995, 213).
Not unlike trimesters, the three sections of “Out of the Hospital” combine
to trace Invisible Man’s symbolic rebirth following the paint-factory explo-
sion. Reminiscent of the moments that mark the developmental milestones
of a child in utero, Invisible Man grows in knowledge and awareness from
one section to the next as he finds his way above ground and back to his
memory. Sections one and two, which are about equal in length, detail
Invisible Man’s emergence from the glass uterus of the paint-factory hospital
into the birth canal of the hospital corridors; section three, significantly
shorter than either of the others, traces the hero’s trek to Mary’s house after
he finds his way out of the underground and into Harlem. Within this
birthing metaphor, Mary Rambo physically labors to free Invisible Man. She
teaches him that voice, agency, and memory are three tools he will need to
navigate life above ground.6 In section one, Mary teaches these lessons to
Invisible Man directly; in section two, the protagonist applies Mary’s lessons
to his above ground journey; in section three, the pull of Mary’s presence
draws the narrator through the streets of Harlem and into her care. As a
physical or absent presence, Mary Rambo, in “Out of the Hospital and under
the Bar,” is the force behind Invisible Man’s emergence.7
Not to be limited by metaphors of midwifery, as powerful as they are in
characterizing Mary’s work in the paint-factory basement, the potency of
Mary’s labor in facilitating Invisible Man’s transition into the corridors of
the hospital basement is in her role as elder: she is a physical link between
contemporary thought and ancestral wisdom and facilitates the transmis-
sion of knowledge from the latter to the former.8 Toni Morrison’s “Rooted-
ness: The Ancestor as Foundation” explains how such connections are
maintained. As “timeless people whose relationships to the characters are

126 meridians 12:1

benevolent, instructive, and protective” Morrison explains, the ancestors are
responsible for not only transmitting a “certain kind of wisdom” (Morrison
1984/2008, 62), but for also affirming the value of community and exposing
the dangers of being “totally self-reliant,” bereft of any “conscious historical
connection” (64). Mary’s efforts to connect with Invisible Man in “Out of the
Hospital” succeed where the attempts by Jim Trueblood, Peter Wheatstraw,
and Brother Tarp fail because Mary, quite simply, uses her wisdom to
maintain conscious connections with history. Mary’s three-dimensional
depiction throws into stark relief the underdevelopment of Trueblood, Peter
Wheatstraw, and Brother Tarp—flat figures who, in Invisible Man proper,
paint an inadequate picture of the potency of black folk life. Without the
cultural grounding offered from the excised chapter’s fleshed-out Mary, the
novel’s protagonist emerges in dire need of cultural sophistication. In “Out
of the Hospital,” Ellison uses Mary to place an alternative reality, a culturally
grounded emergence, within the narrator’s reach.
“Out of the Hospital” opens with Invisible Man, quiet, restrained, and
under observation in the paint-factory-hospital basement. Enclosed within
a glass case bolted together along the perimeter, our hero awakes to find a
woman with “newly straightened hair” and a “blue uniform freshly ironed
and stiffly starched” looking at him from outside of the machine holding
him hostage (Ellison 1963a, 244). This woman is Mary Rambo. Not the
Mary Rambo described in Invisible Man as a “big dark woman” who speaks
in a “husky-voiced contralto” (Ellison 1952, 251); this Mary Rambo is neatly
dressed and pressed for a day’s work. To initiate a proper conversation with
the protagonist, Mary tinkers with the machine to free Invisible Man from
the contraption that imprisons him. But she does more than facilitate his
release for the sake of polite conversation; she does so to tap into the
possibility she sees in him and, consequently, to free him from the
confines of his own myopia. In this instance, Mary’s effectiveness as elder
is tied directly to her ability to invoke the wisdom of the ancestors and to
use that knowledge to engage with the hero and free him from the con-
fines of the machine and the modern. But the hero, despite his imprison-
ment, hesitates to be free. Unable to speak, he thinks: “‘Stop it! Stop
it!’ . . . For though I wanted release, I was frightened lest it should come
through this ignorant, unscientific old woman” (Ellison 1963a, 245).
The narrator, it seems, is not only bound by the machine that encloses
him, but he is also confined by his preconceptions of the folk: thinking her

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 127

 “ignorant” and “unscientific,” Invisible Man questions Mary’s qualifications.
Though bound tightly by leather straps, a specimen for the doctor’s experi-
ments, Invisible Man initially prefers bondage within the familiar over
freedom among the unknown. Mary resists the urge to waste energy
disabusing him of this notion and instead focuses her attention on undoing
his psychic ambivalence shortly after untying his physical restraints. As both
servant and spy, Mary Rambo moves easily through the corridors of the
paint-factory hospital masquerading as a serviceable black body when, in
fact, she is a fully integrated black female subject, an undercover liberator of
black boys. Mary knows what the doctors have in store for the young man
who cannot recall his name and intervenes to help him avoid the fate he is
unable to see. She begins by helping the hero emerge from the womb-like
glass encasement and connecting him to the folk wisdom he needs to
reclaim his self-worth and take his fate into his own hands.

Reverberations of Voice and Agency

Mary’s limitless sense of the narrator’s potential centers on his ability to

gain practical knowledge and assume agency by asserting his voice. To
draw him into a conversation, Mary initiates dialogue. Engaging him
kindly at first, old Mary becomes progressively more impatient as the hero
appears to ignore the woman who made his freedom possible in first place:

“How’s that?” she said, peering in through the crack. “I knowed I could
get that doggone thing open if I tried. How you feeling?”
  I stared dumbly into her bright eyes.
  “Well you could be sociable,” she said. “How come you don’t say
nothing? Is you all right?”
  I looked into her face, feeling things begin to rush inside of me. . . .
“Say, son!” she said. “Is you a dummy or something? You look intelli-
gent, so how come you don’t say something? . . .”
  A ringing set up in my ears. . . .
  “You must be awful strong for them to have to put you under all this
pile of pnk [sic]. Awful strong. Who they think you is, Jack the Bear or
John Henry or somebody like that? . . . Say something, fool!”
  Something seemed to give way. “You, you, you! . . .” I shouted angrily,
a vile name fighting for expression, and stopped short, surprised. I still

128 meridians 12:1

 had a voice! I could talk! My eyes filled with uncontrollable tears. My anger
faded. I looked at her and she seemed to understand. (Ellison 1963a,
247; emphasis mine)

With careful references to key figures in black folklore, Mary constructs a

narrative frame to account for the hero’s predicament. Is he Jack-the-Bear,9
lying in wait, hibernating as a trickster ready to pounce? Or is he John Henry,
the steel driving man who, as legend has it, beat the machine then died with
his hammer in his hand? Aware that any conclusion she draws without
dialogue is insufficient, Mary pushes further in her relentless desire to get
the hero to speak. In so doing, Mary establishes the first prerequisite for
above ground survival: asserting your voice. Notwithstanding his resistance
to conversation, Mary does not incite Invisible Man to make him weaker; she
does it to help him acknowledge his own power—a power as dormant as his
body before Mary frees him from the soundproof machine. Angry, at first,
the hero connects to compassion when he acknowledges Mary’s genuine
intentions not through words, but with a special glance: “I looked at her and
she seemed to understand.” The rage that prompts speech from the protago-
nist is the flint that eventually sparks his flight to freedom.
In contrast to a folk figure like Trueblood, who uses his folk wisdom to
manipulate the protagonist because of his lack of mother wit, Mary Rambo
shares her wisdom to empower, not to shame, the narrator. Consequently,
the silent exchange Invisible Man shares with Mary in “Out of the Hospi-
tal” after he regains his voice is noticeably different from his nonverbal
exchange with Jim Trueblood in chapter 2 of the novel proper. About
halfway through Trueblood’s account of how he supposedly impregnated
both his wife and daughter, he silently gestures to Invisible Man a message
from “behind his eyes” (Ellison 1952, 61). Almost immediately after
Invisible Man encourages Mr. Norton to leave Trueblood and his tale to
return to campus for an appointment (60). After Mr. Norton staunchly
refuses the protagonist’s proposal, our hero relates: “Trueblood seemed to
smile at me behind his eyes as he looked from the white man to me and
continued” (61). Given approval and license to go on by the college trustee,
Trueblood finishes his story. Invisible Man, embarrassed and over-
whelmed, knows there’s something going on but its meaning remains
elusive: “Something was going on which I didn’t get” (68).

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 129

 In missing the point, Invisible Man fails to understand the gesture that,
according to Gillian Johns, “serves as a rhetorical signal that Trueblood may
be a ‘liar,’ or raconteur,” a classification that gives us permission to “ap-
proach his story about committing incest with his daughter as a tall tale, the
genre of choice for raconteurs” and categorize it as a narrative “that says
nothing definitive about black sexual desire” (Johns 2007, 239). The root of
the hero’s misunderstanding of Trueblood’s manipulation of Mr. Norton
involves his idea of how best to impress the white, millionaire trustee: “Of
course I knew he was a founder,” Invisible Man narrates at the start of his
excursion with Mr. Norton, “but I also knew that it was advantageous to
flatter rich white folks” (Ellison 1952, 38). Hoping that his flattery will earn
him “a large tip, or a suit, or a scholarship next year” (38), the hero drives Mr.
Norton directly into Trueblood’s briar patch: a geographical and discursive
“bottoms” where lowbrow humor, and the playing upon whites’ stereotypes
of blacks, is the law of the land. It is here, unable to differentiate between a
lie and the truth, silenced by the patronizing patriarch fascinated by “Your
people” (39), that the hero becomes paralyzed by his lack of mother wit,
envious of the sharecropper who talks his way into the “hundred-dollar bill”
Invisible Man had hoped to receive (69).
Trueblood performs as a trickster, not unlike Charles Chesnutt’s Uncle
Julius: the raconteur of The Conjure Woman who plays upon a well-meaning
but naïve northerner who misreads black folks because he’s unable to see
past stereotypes, pity, or both. As one whose skin suggests he’s True-
blood’s “kin,” the college boy, Invisible Man, knows Greek drama but
misses Trueblood’s lesson. The sharecropper’s message is part and parcel
of his performance as a trickster, harkening back most notably to Esu
Legba, the Yoruba god of crossroads and thematic touchstone for Henry
Louis Gates’s seminal The Signifying Monkey (Gates 1989). In “Children of
Legba: Musicians at the Crossroads in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man,”
Thomas F. Marvin asserts that “Trueblood acts as a child of Legba” and, in
so doing, “link[s] the past with the present . . . by crossing cultural
boundaries and singing for whites” while “function[ing] as a translator
whose message varies depending on the listener’s point of view” (Marvin
1996, 590). Marvin continues: “Like Legba, who causes confusion in a
Dahomean myth by appearing in a hat that is black on one side and red on
the other, Trueblood stands between the black and white communities,
creating music open to radically different interpretations” (590).

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 What stands out in Marvin’s description of Trueblood as trickster, as a
child of Legba, is the extent to which Legba’s narrative hinges on his ability
to break apart rather than bring together. This is precisely where the folk
lessons of Trueblood and Mary Rambo diverge. Instead of highlighting the
instability of narrative, Mary Rambo earns the hero’s trust and inspires him
to find unity and a sense of wholeness through his connection to his folk
past, his elders, and his ancestors. Instead of embodying the space between
oppositional epistemologies, as Trueblood does as trickster, Mary Rambo
negotiates the space between these epistemologies to form a bridge between
one and the other. So whereas Trueblood speaks, perhaps, in hyperbole,
Mary Rambo makes it plain. She gives the hero news he can use. By follow-
ing Mary’s lead, Invisible Man in “Out of the Hospital” develops skills that,
for the time being, enable him to pursue freedom on his own, spurred on by
the hope of reuniting with Mary and the black community of Harlem.

Change Agent

Reconnected with the voice that remained dormant for the “eight or nine
days” Invisible Man spent in the hospital (Ellison 1963a, 248), next the
narrator learns how to be an agent of his own destiny and initiate a
personal fight for freedom. Contrary and resistant, the hero, once again,
questions both Mary’s motivations (“Who was she and why had she
bothered?”) and the credentials that license her to grant his freedom
(“Why hadn’t old Mary been a nurse, a technician, a doctor?”) only to find
that she alone—a woman of the folk—holds the power required for him to
exceed his own meager expectations (248, 257). The energy Mary transfers
to the hero comes from two specific, and representative, sources of
nourishment: a pork sandwich and her mother’s root, morsels symbolic of
the cultural and ancestral connections Invisible Man needs to internalize
before embarking on his journey above ground.
The folk delicacy Mary feeds the narrator—a pork sandwich—nourishes
him with the food a “down home boy like [him] needs” and fills him with
the same fuel that presumably sustained his ancestors (Ellison 1963a, 248).
In “Chicken and Chains: Using African American Foodways to Understand
Black Identities,” food studies scholar Psyche Williams-Forson observes
how, in many black households, chicken functions as an “object” that
“reveal[s] embedded associations that deeply affect individual and group

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 131

 identities” (Williams-Forson 2007, 127). This is precisely how Mary’s pork
sandwich functions in “Out of the Hospital and under the Bar.” Mary’s
pork sandwich not only feeds Invisible Man’s hunger, but it also nourishes
his spirit, causing him to recall that which was both “strange and yet
familiar” as he satiates himself bite after bite. In this way, the pork
sandwich is a “cultural product” meant to “invoke a range of individual
and collective memories” (127), thereby narrowing the emotional distance
between Invisible Man and Mary and deepening the hero’s experience of a
moment reminiscent of community, reminiscent of home:

For a moment [the bit of sandwich] balanced beneath my nose—long

enough for me to catch its odor and snap it up viciously. It was delicious;
strange and yet familiar in my mouth. So delicious that I swallowed my
anger with the bread and waited eagerly for the next morsel. She sat
beside me, looking through with a pleased expression—as though
actually feeding a baby. (Ellison 1963a, 249)

More than mere food, the pork sandwich becomes a proxy for the personal
connection Mary establishes with the protagonist and a symbol of the folk
past he needs to ingest, digest, and metabolize to continue on. Within the
context of the story, the sandwich is where Mary and the narrator come
together through a shared, communal experience that establishes platonic
intimacy and interconnectedness. Even though the hero is repulsed at first,
the rush of fresh air flooding the stuffy confines of the glass enclosure after
Mary has forced it open awakens the hero’s appetite. As Mary attempts to
free the hero from the glass case, she identifies an unspoken desire for
connection in the protagonist and wisely facilitates that connection through
the one thing our hero, ravenous and weak, would be a fool to refuse: food.
As easy as it may be to reduce Mary to a stereotypical mammy figure here,
Tate reminds us that mammies cared for white children, not black ones:
“Mary’s physical appearance and her folksy manner may resemble the
‘mammy’ of plantation lore, but she is not bound by this stereotype. She is
the nurturer of a black child, not the master’s white child” (Tate 1990, 168).
Mary nurtures Invisible Man not out of obligation, but out of desire. There-
fore, at this point in the text, Mary’s actions move her beyond the stereotypes
associated with her embodiment of black working-class womanhood.
Mary’s actions move her beyond the stereotypes that threaten to reduce her
to a serviceable black body and beyond the maternalism that instinctively

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drives her to risk her livelihood to rescue a black man with whom she has no
blood relationship. Mary is able to move beyond these boundaries because,
quite simply, she rejects their tenets. Mary is motivated by a belief system
organized around “those rites, manners, customs, and so forth” that would,
for Invisible Man, “insure the good life” (Ellison 1955/1995, 213); hers is a
belief system that makes her responsible for transferring folk knowledge to
a young man who needs it, whether or not he asks for it.
The subordination of individual needs in the interest of elevating the
group is another attribute that distinguishes Mary Rambo from the less
radical societal outcast Peter Wheatstraw: a folk figure of the novel proper
whose lesson, like Mary’s, risks being missed because it is rendered from the
margins. Wheatstraw is the buggy-pushing, blues-singing, shit-slinging
elder who dictates an enduring lesson on flow: a term that denotes the
mutability of black identity within what Edward Pavliæ calls a “mobile
place” (Pavliæ 1996, 167) while, at the same time, constituting the flow of
migration narratives outlined by Farah Jasmine Griffin in Who Set You
Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative. Pavliæ’s “mobile place”
represents a delineated space that is simultaneously static and dynamic;
Griffin’s migration flow features a push north characterized as a “confron-
tation with the urban landscape,” “the migrant’s” negotiation with this
landscape, and “a vision of the possibilities or limitations” of the territory
north, in comparison with the South (Griffin 1996, 3). Both approaches to
flow are perfectly applicable to Wheatstraw, whose shopping cart full of
unused blueprints signifies a movable place, and whose narrative voice is
reminiscent of the stories, calls, and language Invisible Man heard as a
child of the South, but can no longer remember.
As precursor to the episode where the hero learns the truth of Bledsoe’s
letters, Invisible Man’s brief exchange with Peter Wheatstraw, “the Devil’s
only son-in-law” (Ellison 1952, 176), introduces the flexibility of flow as a
prerequisite to finding one’s way in Harlem. The cornerstone of this
conversation, which takes place after a rapid-fire exchange between
Wheatstraw signifying and the hero nervously laughing, is the moment
where Invisible Man inquires about the contents of Wheatstraw’s cart only
to learn that perhaps even the best laid plans can end up in some random
blues singer’s buggy:

“You have quite a lot,” I said,

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 133

   “Yeah, this ain’t all neither. I got a coupla loads. There’s a day’s work
right here in this stuff. Folks is always making plans and changing
‘em.”
  “Yes, that’s right,” I said, thinking of my letters, “but that’s a mistake.
You have to stick to the plan.”
  He looked at me, suddenly grave. “You kinda young, daddy-o,” he
said.
  I did not answer. We came to a corner at the top of a hill. (175)

During a moment that mimics the hero’s Sisyphean efforts to secure a job
with recommendation letters written to do the exact opposite, both
Invisible Man and Peter Wheatstraw come to the top of the hill just as the
hero is about to be cast back down. The youthful optimism (or is it naïve-
té?) that the hero reveals in his commitment to “stick to the plan” begs for
balance (175). Invisible Man, as we know, makes his ascent north alone;
whether seen as the reason for or the result of his individual ascent, the
hero has no idea the extent to which he needs someone, a folk elder, to
impart the wisdom required to negotiate the reality of the “urban land-
scape” of Harlem. With streets and alleyways that look more like tar-baby-
laden briar patches than a crystal stair to abundant opportunity and
instant success, flow—which involves the ability to assess and adjust, to
evaluate and recalibrate—cannot be foresaken when survival is primary.
What the hero doesn’t know at the time of his encounter with Peter
Wheatstraw is that soon, he will need to be a quick study and learn, faster
than he can imagine, how to laugh to keep from crying and how to pocket
his plans and move on.
Peter Wheatstraw’s act of self-naming, a mark of his redefinition in the
North, and its textual transcription as scripto continua, teach the impor-
tance of deconstructing fast talk for its inner truth. In his polysyllabic
moniker—“I’maseventhsonofaseventhsonbawnwithacauloverbotheyesand
raisedonblackcatboneshighjohntheconquerorandgreasygreens—” Wheat-
straw, the “piano player and . . . rounder, “whiskey drinker and . . . pave-
ment pounder” (Ellison 1952, 176), performs a “psychovisualauditory
event” that symbolizes the bloated and misleading narratives the hero
swallows whole (Brody 2005, 682). Here, taken word-for-word and rewrit-
ten according to logical phrasings, Peter Wheatstraw’s scripto continua
melds his belief in his own inborn talent as birthright (he was the seventh

134 meridians 12:1

son of a seventh son),10 the power of sight even though blind (bawn [born]
with a caul over both eyes), and the power of root-working and pot liquor
(and raised on black cat bones high john the conqueror and greasy greens).
Imbedded within this “experimental typography” (682) are what appear to
be nonsensical folk axioms when in fact, concealed within, is the roadmap
to survival. Although the lessons of Trueblood and Peter Wheatstraw are as
important as the ones Mary imparts in “Out of the Hospital,” Mary’s
success is in the way she empowers the hero from within to take on the
hospital corridors, not in the way Trueblood and Peter Wheatstraw
paralyze the protagonist with fast talk.

The Root of Black Power

Mary represents the fundamental repository of black self-sufficiency and

cultural independence that the protagonist tragically lacks. After feeding
Invisible Man a pork sandwich, which gives our hero enough strength to
partially free himself from one of the restraints holding him, Mary Rambo
administers a root to empower the hero to release himself entirely. In
administering the root, Mary invokes a lineage of healers that moves from
her to other elders, namely, her aging but still spry 104-year-old mother.
Mary’s respect for the practical skills that have been passed on through the
generations keeps her stable and confident even as the hero, a youngster
she imagines as fearless, questions her incessantly about her motives and
methods. The remedy Mary offers to counteract Invisible Man’s impotence
is “Just a little something to give [him] some strength”: a folk cure, which
looks like “balled grape leaves that had dried without fading” that was
created by her mother, a woman who used to “grow the best crops in the
county” who now “knows more about roots and herbs and midwifery and
things than anybody ever seen” (Ellison 1963a, 260–61). At the very
moment Mary dispenses the root, she connects the hero to a body of elders
and ancestors that he has forgotten. But the hero is just as apprehensive
about the root as he was about being fed the sandwich: “I distrusted it, yet I
had to draw strength from some source” (261). He swallows a piece but
resists wholly yielding to the root’s power. Not until Mary is called away
from his side and he is left to fend for himself does Invisible Man willingly
swallow the rest and experience renewal, energized by the root’s power
flowing into his weak and atrophied muscles.

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 135

 The process the protagonist follows to find his way out of the machine is
eerily similar to Frederick Douglass’s transition from thinking like a slave
to thinking like a man in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(1845/1996). After being abused by Mr. Covey, the notorious slave-breaker,
Douglass goes to Master Thomas to ask him to intercede with Covey on his
behalf. After being denied, Douglass runs into Sandy Jenkins, a fellow
slave and “old adviser” (Douglass 1945/1996, 49), who gives him the root.
Promising to keep it on his right side as Sandy instructed, Douglass
returns to Covey and engages in a violent battle with him to assert his
manhood. As scholars have noted, this is the moment at which Douglass
realizes that slavery is as much a psychological condition as it is a physical
one. So although Douglass does not immediately become free after
fighting Covey, this is the moment where he becomes a man: not because
he can come and go as he pleases, but because he has been able to assert
his manhood against a white man, the ultimate symbol of black oppres-
sion, and find freedom in his mind. Similarly, after the explosion and
confinement in the hospital, the hero has yet to earn his freedom—either
physically or psychologically—because he has yet to engage in the active
process of remembering how or why to fight for it.
The trope of rootedness as a source of strength emerges in Invisible Man
through Brother Tarp, the chain-gang escapee who helps the hero see past
his insecurities by reconnecting him with a legacy of strength. After
receiving an anonymous letter warning him not to “get too big” (Ellison
1952, 383), the hero approaches Tarp for help in assessing his likability
among the members of the Brotherhood. As Tarp gives his assessment of
how the members “really feel about [him]” (384), reassuring the Invisible
Man that the others see him as a “real leader” (384) with ideas that
encourage progress in the Brotherhood’s outreach to “The Rainbow of
America’s Future” (385), Tarp psychologically returns to the South, the
place from which he ran, and invokes the terrain south of the Mason Dixon
as the point of origin for his story of psychological persistence.
Tarp’s psychological return to the South, signaled by his observation:
“When things get rough it kind of helps to know you got support—”
(Ellison 1952, 386), enacts what Pavliæ terms an “above-underground
mode” (Pavliæ 1996, 165), a moment where, working within an “aesthetics
of invocation,” black writers, literary protagonists, and culture workers
“use artifacts to facilitate connection with, or transfer of, deified energy

136 meridians 12:1

between and among members of the earth-bound community” (167). In
what is, at first, his recollection of “support” as an abstraction, Tarp’s
advice to Invisible Man invokes, for the teller, a concrete history of support,
emotional encouragement generated, perhaps, by the forced linkages of
the chain gang. Tarp invites the hero to return south with him and, in so
doing, carves out a discursive space for them to relate their stories of
forced ascent—the pull factors that lured them north, the push factors that
propelled them away—to the relatively safe territory of Harlem or Robert
Stepto’s symbolic North (Stepto 1979/1991, 152).
Not to be deluded by the milk-and-honey mythology of the North, or the
race-blind fantasies or ultra-inclusive rhetoric of the Brotherhood, Tarp, as
elder, passes along a link, a broken piece of the chain that held him captive
on the chain gang for “[n]ineteen years, six months, and two days” (Ellison
1952, 387), to remind Invisible Man of “what we’re really fighting against”
(388). The biblical subtext invoked by Tarp’s admonition suggests that the
hero, in his response to the anonymous letter, should focus, like the body
of Christian believers, on “principalities” and “powers” not on “flesh and
blood.”11 Invoking a broad purpose belied by its small dimensions (the
“thick dark, oily” (389) chain link is small enough to fit into Brother Tarp’s
pocket before being passed into Invisible Man’s hands) the twist of steel
represents the larger narrative tracing Tarp’s assertion of his manhood.
The rough marks around the break record his rejection of white authority
and symbolize the small, rugged distance between captivity and freedom.
The link also dramatizes how material objects, too, can ignite an “above-
underground mode” for those who feel disconnected from their past, their
people, or their purpose, thereby inspiring them to reconnect once again.
Invisible Man’s reflexive rejection of the link reveals the depth of his
need for rootedness. When Mary feeds Invisible Man the root in “Out of
the Hospital,” he is weak, contained, and nearly helpless against her
interventions. At the same time that this physical weakness makes him
vulnerable to the hospital staff, it makes him virtually helpless against
Mary and her folk cure. He may doubt its effectiveness, but in his hunger
he ingests it nonetheless. In contrast, despite being momentarily shaken
by the anonymous letter, the hero is not in a submissive posture when he
receives Tarp’s link. Empowered to reject the burden that accompanies its
possession and resentful of the implications that he continue a legacy of
fortitude and folk wisdom brought about by its bearer, his observations,

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 137

 quoted here at length, suggest that although he doesn’t know what to do
with it, he does know what it means:

I looked at the dark band of metal against my fist and dropped it against
the anonymous letter. I neither wanted it nor knew what to do with it;
although there was no question of keeping it if for no other reason than
that I felt that Brother Tarp’s gesture in offering it was of some deeply
felt significance which I was compelled to respect. Something, perhaps,
like a man passing on to his son his own father’s watch, which the son
accepted not because he wanted the old-fashioned timepiece for itself,
but because of the overtones of unstated seriousness and solemnity of
the paternal gesture which at once joined him with his ancestors,
marked a high point of his present, and promised a concreteness to his
nebulous and chaotic future. (Ellison 1952, 389–90)

Whether the hero accepts it or not, Tarp’s talisman links our narrator to a
“chain of tradition” forged by ancestors equipped with a ready supply of
support. When Invisible Man seeks help, Tarp encourages the hero in a
manner much like the way black churches support the gospel shout: an
“individual expression” that exists “within the context of the community”
(Morrison 1984/2008, 56). Invisible Man’s problem is this: even within his
community, a black community, he doesn’t know whom to trust. And
despite their efforts, the lessons of the male folk figures in the novel
proper fall on deaf ears.

Rebirth through Re-Memory

“Out of the Hospital” reveals the potential power of the folk—symbolized in

the root—when it is internalized as a source of sustenance, not externalized
as an appendage or accessory. Nourished by the food and wisdom of black
folk culture and empowered by his newfound agency, Invisible Man begins
to actively work to remember Mary’s street address, an act that becomes a
precursor to the restoration of his memory later in the chapter. Early in part
one, after Invisible Man shouts at Mary, she asks: “What’s supposed to be
wrong with you?” (Ellison 1963a, 247). Unable or unwilling to answer, the
hero sidesteps the question at first by claiming, “I’ve forgotten nearly
everything!” (247), and then by spinning a tall tale about running north
after killing a white man down south (256). Undaunted by the narrator’s

138 meridians 12:1

evasiveness, Mary leaves him with a final test to awaken the synapses in his
brain: she offers the hero her address but only orally, a fact represented in
the text itself: “The address _______. You remember it, you hear me” (262).
When Ellison inserts a blank space where the address should be, he calls
to mind the narrative gaps within slave narratives that protected fugitive
slaves en route to the North. Without a written record of Mary’s home
address, readers, too, are left without knowledge of the exact location of
Invisible Man’s destination. Even we, who exist beyond the novel, are not
even trusted with the information. Certainly, if it cannot get lost with us, it
cannot get lost with the hospital staff, either. By trusting the hero and the
hero alone with the details of her home address, Mary protects both the
escapee and the hiding place. In this final test, where the success of an
amnesiac is predicated on his ability to remember, Invisible Man is given the
opportunity to sharpen the last weapon in Mary’s above ground arsenal: his
memory. After Mary imparts the importance of voice, agency, and memory
through a chink in the glass womb, Invisible Man is ready to be reborn and
to try his hand at applying Mary’s lessons later in the chapter.
Energized by Mary’s magic root, the hero takes what he learned from
Mary in part one of “Out of the Hospital” and applies them to his solitary
trek out of the glass womb into the symbolic birth canal of hospital
corridors where he emerges reborn on the streets of Harlem. Although
Mary is not physically present in this section, she maintains an absent
presence as the initiator of the hero’s emergence. She is both the elder who
teaches him the tools for survival and the proverbial North Star who draws
him toward freedom. In part two, Invisible Man emerges as an agent who
proactively takes the steps to earn freedom, who vociferously asserts his
personal thoughts in a public domain, and who gradually regains his lost
and languid memory. In short, what is theory in part one of “Out of the
Hospital” becomes practice in part two as the hero physically, and inde-
pendently, applies the lessons he learned from Mary.
The hero relies on folk wisdom to become the architect of his future by
taking the initiative to free himself from the case and move himself
through the corridors that hold him hostage. At the beginning of the
chapter the hero, hesitant to release himself from the straps that keep him
immobile in the glass case, prefers to wait for an authorized member of
the hospital staff than have Mary release him. But by the end of part one,
after he eats the root, he can no longer be contained. The root is the

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 139

 product of folk wisdom and a symbol of the power that becomes available
when one intellectually and physically absorbs the energy of black folk
traditions. And even though Mary has been called away, every step forward
the protagonist makes is propelled by Mary’s work and wisdom. Here, at
the start of part two of “Out of the Hospital,” Invisible Man explains his
first steps and feelings about moving forward of his own volition:

It had to be now, alone. I raised my head to the cracked lid, listening.

Silence. My eyes pressed against a total blackness, without form. An
absolute, ether-drenched blackness that poured into my lungs as my
mind cursed the voice that called old Mary away. I would have to do it
alone. Go out there alone. But first I had to get from the inside. (Ellison
1963a, 262)

This passage marks a noticeable shift in the protagonist’s disposition.

Where he was once afraid to move, his personal investment in his freedom
makes it impossible for him to keep still. Moreover, stimulated by the final
bits of the root dissolving under his tongue, which provided “new
strength” by “act[ing] directly upon [his] muscles” (263), Invisible Man
lifts the lid of the case, places in the empty case the corpse of a young black
man lying lifeless on a gurney in the hallway, and begins moving toward
freedom. His momentum, resolve, and confidence grow “[w]ith each step”
(268). He explains “my legs seemed to grow stronger” (268) and what
begins as a walk turns into a run. Soon, the hero’s agency is at full throttle,
unleashed by the energy of the root and maximized by the power of his
persistence.
But before being thrust into the bar basement from which he will
emerge reborn, the hero must give voice to his newfound agency and
express his interior thoughts externally. In a small but insightful moment
after the hospital staff imagine themselves searching for a rat, an orderly
attempts to restrain a naked Invisible Man with a straitjacket. But instead
of yielding to defeat, once cornered the hero goads the employee into a
fight much like the one Douglass instigates with the slave breaker Covey in
the narrative of Douglass’s life. Invisible Man calmly states: “Come and get
me, . . . I’m already released” (Ellison 1963a, 273). At this pivotal moment
the hero comes full circle in recovering his agency by claiming the freedom
he believes he has, whether the hospital authorities recognize it or not. The
brief statement mirrors a profound change in the hero who is prepared to

140 meridians 12:1

engage in a one-on-one battle to physically earn the freedom which he has
already claimed psychologically:

I saw his head come forward, the light flashing downward, causing his
eyes to gleam for an instant as he lunged toward me—then the shock. I
grabbed, feeling the rough canvas brush my arm and him grappling for
me, his grip like steel. Skipping off, I jabbed, my fist going deep. He
grunted and I hammered him, feeling him burst away, grunting, his
head dropping down, and I was already running furiously. (274)

Driven by instinct the narrator, desperate for freedom, fights off the orderly’s
restraints. A few solid blows buy him enough time to flee while the orderly
struggles to recover. This assertion of physical agency allows the narrator to
remain in flight and continue in his single-minded pursuit of freedom. But
unlike Douglass who fought Covey to become psychologically free, Invisible
Man’s fight with the orderly is the final act in a chapter-length journey
toward both physical and psychological freedom. The narrator’s assertion of
physical agency affirms his earlier statement: “Come and get me, . . . I’m
already released.” More than a feeble threat, this statement is a warning
from a man physically and psychologically committed to freedom. Now that
the hero understands the prerequisites for self-actualization—voice and
agency specifically—his memory awakens with a new consciousness that
merges mind and body within this black man as subject.
Invisible Man’s internal, psychological rebirth requires him to reclaim
the memories of self and history that will ground and guide him in his
quest for self-discovery. At the beginning of “Out of the Hospital and under
the Bar,” the hero, ambivalent and amnesic, has more confidence in his
captors than in Mary Rambo, the woman who ultimately frees him. His
systematic devaluing of anything folksy, ancestral, or “unscientific” limits
his vision and stifles him psychically. Fortunately, by the end of the
chapter, the narrator experiences a change. The hero reflects on the
transformation he has undergone following his fight with the orderly and
explains how he is emerging anew:

And I was conscious of being somehow different. It was not only that I
had forgotten my name, or that I had been processed in the machine, or
even that I had taken Mary’s medicine—but something internal. My
thoughts seemed to be thoughts of another. Impressions flashed

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 141

 through my mind, too fleeting and secretly meaningful to have been my
own—whoever I was. And yet somehow they were. It was as though I
had become capable of new powers of understanding. Perhaps I was
insane. But it wasn’t so simple. . . . (Ellison 1963a, 274)

Similar to the “[n]ameless voices from the past” that “seemed to whisper
warnings” as he hurried through the hospital corridors like a rat in the
maze, the voices of Invisible Man’s past come to him when he: 1) asserts
the agency Mary cultivates, and 2) engages in a physical act that moves him
closer to freedom (268). But in order to find his way to safety and make his
way to Mary’s house, the hero must actively remember, not passively carry,
the location of his final destination; because he has no written record of
her address, the hero must approach his memory in a way that is active, not
passive. Simply put, he must work to remember Mary’s address. Forgetting
is not an option. So in the midst of being flooded with “nameless voices
from the past” and the internal whispers of those who came before, the
hero focuses intently on “trying to remember old Mary’s address” even in
the midst of immeasurable physical and psychological changes (276).
The final hurdle between the dark depths of the hospital corridors and
the hero’s rebirth above ground is the bar basement: a space that would be
the proverbial briar patch if the protagonist acted less like the Brer Rabbit
enmeshed in the Tar Baby and more like Brer Rabbit evading Mr. Fox. Fresh
from successfully dodging the hospital staff, Invisible Man finds his
antechamber to freedom behind a “deceptively hung” door in the under-
ground (Ellison 1963a, 276): the basement of a Harlem bar. Saturated with
the sounds of the blues and the smell of stale beer, he enters, sits beside a
coal bin, and contemplates his next move. The hero has barely enough time
to rest and recover from the high-energy hospital chase when a bartender
spots him—naked and, once again, on the move. Startled by the bartend-
er’s call for him to reveal himself, and fearful of being turned over to the
authorities, Invisible Man burrows into the coal pile only to be smoked out
by the bar dog “Little Brother.” With the black men employed by the bar
hot on his heels, the hero narrowly escapes through a manhole onto a
Harlem street.
Although the image of Invisible Man emerging from the manhole
represents his rebirth into a world above ground—specifically, a community
of black folk—his fear of the black men in the basement suggests that he has

142 meridians 12:1

yet to fully yield to his immersion in blackness as a viable source of security
and strength. This basement scene foreshadows the difficulty the hero will
have connecting with “all those values and traditions, which we learn and/or
imagine as being the meaning of our familial past,” values that Ellison
identifies in his essay “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” (Ellison 1964/1995,
192). Instead of finding respite in the bar basement, like the way Brer Rabbit
escaped Brer Fox in the briar patch, the pitch-black coal dust that must have
covered every inch of the hero’s naked body simultaneously represents the
blackness that he is unable to accept. Invisible Man’s rebirth is more
complicated than it seems, because he emerges renewed, not drastically
changed. He is still ambivalent. He desires to make connections with black
people but remains, at times, simultaneously repulsed by them. There is one
thing and one thing alone that pulls him forward—it is the memory: “I must
make my way to old Mary’s house” (Ellison 1963a, 283). As soon as he
emerges out of the manhole and onto the streets of Harlem, stark naked and
coal black, he “receives clothes from young men who attribute his nakedness
to a secret rendezvous gone awry” and moves along to old Mary’s house (Hill
and Hill 2008, 44).
By filling in the space between silence and voice, impotence and agency,
and amnesia and memory, Mary Rambo teaches Invisible Man lessons on
how to traverse the side streets, alleyways, and underground corridors of
Harlem guided by the memories and wisdom of the ancestors. Mary sustains
the psychological connections required for New Negroes of the urban North
to remain vigilant to the noise and distractions that mask the price of an
individual ascent: isolation and alienation from a community that supports
the voice of the individual, by creating a safe space for its expression.
Like his protagonist, Ellison, too, paid a price for his individual ascent.12
During a visit to Grinnell College, where he participated in a panel on
“Urban Culture and the Negro” alongside “Willie Morris, Martin Luther
King, Jr., Fred Friendly,” and others (Rampersad 2007, 439), Ellison found
himself cornered by an either “genuine or wannabe” black militant who
accused him of being an Uncle Tom (440). In the moment, Ellison was
composed and calculated in his response: “You don’t know what you’re
talking about. . . . What do you know about my life? It’s easy for you. You’re
just a straw in the wind. Get on your motorcycle and go back to Chicago
and throw some Molotov cocktails. That’s all you’ll ever know about”
(440). But after a participant “broke up the confrontation” and “Ralph’s

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 143

 accusers roared off,” Ellison “broke down into tears” (440). Despite
sobbing, “I’m not a Tom, I’m not a Tom” immediately after the incident,
Ellison later responded to Willie Morris, a participant who apologized for
the young man’s actions, “Why be sorry? I’ve heard that kind of thing for a
long time. I’m used to it” (440).
But maybe Ellison wasn’t. Surely, his tears suggest otherwise. The young
man who verbally accosted Ellison did so after getting into “‘a vehement
argument’ with him about Invisible Man” (Rampersad 2007, 440). Had
Ellison’s decision to shave large portions of the novel and eliminate,
among other black points of reference, “the interior ambivalence of black
hipster and jazz culture” (426) come back to bite him? Biographer Law-
rence Jackson has asserted that cutting the section later published as “Out
of the Hospital and under the Bar”—the expanded section of the hero’s
transition from the paint factory to the streets of Harlem—“made [Ellison]
even more vulnerable to the criticism of the radicals” from the left (Jackson
2002, 427). If this is the case, my analysis of “Out of the Hospital and under
the Bar” revises Invisible Man scholarship that criticizes Ellison and/or his
novel for failing to offer the guidance the hero needs to thrive above
ground by offering an alternative analysis of Ellison’s intention in the face
of intense editorial demands.
To that end, my focus on Mary’s subjectivity collides with a particular
feature of the analyses of Mary’s role offered by Lawrence Jackson and
Adam Bradley. When Jackson and Bradley write about Ellison’s decision to
cut the pages dedicated to Mary and her boardinghouse, instead invoking
Mary as a subject who deserves careful analysis for her contributions to the
hero’s emergence above ground, they use Mary as a tool by which to segue
into discussions of Leroy. Although losing Mary’s boardinghouse in the
editing of Invisible Man also meant losing Leroy, the “dead merchant
marine” whose journal “offered the hero guidance and insight throughout
the second half of the novel” (Jackson 2002, 415), both Bradley and Jackson
provide nuanced analyses of Leroy’s “sophisticated” politics (Bradley 2010,
196), yet fail to do the same for Mary. My essay privileges Mary’s oral and
folk-driven advice not to supplant the written and militaristic guidance
Leroy leaves behind in his journal, but to suggest that Ellison offers
scholars the perfect opportunity to imagine how the “American Negro” of
our “ever-expanding Harlems” needs male and female, written and oral,
ancestor and elder to negotiate modernity’s ambiguities. This essay has

144 meridians 12:1

given readers the opportunity to think in a more expansive way about black
women in the novel, the novel as Ellison conceived it, and how juxtaposing
the two deepens our appreciation for the richness of Ellison’s masterpiece,
drafts and all.

Notes
1. Yolanda Pierce offers techniques for teaching gender and invisibility in the
novel (Pierce 2003).
2. The Ellison scholarship that considers gender through a sexualized lens
diverges from sustained analyses of Mary Rambo’s impact on Invisible Man’s
journey. And although Kim’s analysis still considers gender insofar as it is
connected with sexuality, his essay does little to advance Mary’s cause. Singer
2003 offers another queer reading of Invisible Man. Like Kim’s essay, Singer’s
represents how sexuality is a consideration in issues related to gender, even
though he marginalizes race in his assessment of the same.
3. Ferguson 2003 offers another queer reading of Invisible Man.
4. Robin Lucy, among others referenced in my essay, acknowledges the removal
of the chapter but fails to resituate it within the context of the novel as a whole
(Lucy 2007). Marilyn Nelson Waniek’s essay lacks a discussion of Mary Rambo
per se (Waniek 1975), but it does offer an intriguing and timely reading of what
constitutes black literature that is useful even today, particularly in response
to Warren 2011.
5. I borrowed the subtitle for this section from blues empress Bessie Smith’s
song by the same name.
6. My essay offers an alternative reading of midwifery or “bearing” than the one
offered by Catherine Saunders in Saunders 1989. Where Saunders contends
that “bearing” meaning is less significant than “making” it, I suggest that
they are equally significant within the context of black cultural traditions. My
analysis also complicates Smethurst 2004 by reaching beyond his description
of Mary Rambo as a symbol of the “Negro mother,” and imbuing her arche-
typal presence with human and communal significance (Smethurst 2004, 120).
7. According to Joseph T. Skerrett, “Ellison has at least twice publicly wished that
he had not cut it out” (Skerrett 1980, 227).
8. When Ellison cut the section dedicated to Mary’s boardinghouse, he cut Leroy
as a consequence: a dead merchant marine whose journal in the drafts serves
as a guidebook for Invisible Man as he negotiates life above ground. Even
though Morrison uses the term ancestor to denote both spiritual and physical
energies at the same time, per Neimark 1993, I understand elders and
ancestors to be living and deceased sources of guidance, respectively.
9. See Duke Ellington’s “Jack-the-Bear.”
10. See Willie Dixon’s blues song “The Seventh Son.” Leon Forrest also states that
Peter Wheatstraw’s reference to the seventh son reflects “the Scottish-English

Shanna Greene Benjamin • There’s Something about Mary 145

 influence upon the former slaves and suggests how myth-bound and haunted
the slaveholders were and refers to one who is born lucky” (Forrest 2004, 277).
11. See Ephesians 6:12, King James Version, Cambridge Edition.
12. My observation connects the experiences of Ellison and Invisible Man but does
not intend to claim that the novel is autobiographical. Ellison attests to as
much in his opening statement to the interview “The Art of Fiction”: “Let me
say right now that my book [Invisible Man] is not an autobiographical work”
(Ellison 1955/1995, 210).

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