Political Theory ‘olume'36 Numbee 5 Qecaner 2008, 683-707 © 2008 Sage Publications The Color of Memory 10.117 n0s0591 08301084 bhippbxsage pb com Reading Race with Ralph Ellison tr wero W. James Booth Vanderbilt University In this article, I am concerned with the relationship between the visibility of race as color, the memory of injustice, and American identity. The visibility of color would seem to make it a daily reminder of race and its history, and in this way to be intimately a part of American memory and identity. Yet the tie between memory and color is anything but certain or transparent, Rather, as I shall argue, itis a latticework composed of things remembered, forgotten, glossed, or idealized, and the traces they leave in our world, traces that keep that past from falling into the oblivion of forgetfulness. Finally, color, memory, and identity together belong to the struggle over racial justice in this country, a battle in part to recognize the past, of which color is the visible reminder, and to fashion an American identity that does not seek to render it invisible. Ralph Ellison's writings on memory and race, and particularly his defining work, the Invisible Man, map these issues and some of the ways of approaching them. ‘The present essay is an exploration of those issues, conducted through an engagement with his work. Keywords: color; Ellison; identity; justice; memory; race; Tocqueville Introduction: Memory and the Act of Writing rr this essay, I am concemed with the relationship between the visibility: of race as color, the memory of injustice, and American identity. The vis- ibility of color would seem to make it a daily reminder of race and its history, and in this way to be intimately a part of American memory and identity. Yet the tie between memory and color is anything but certain or transparent. Rather, as I shall argue, it is a latticework composed of things Author's Note: [ am grateful to the editor of Political Theory and to the journal’s referees for their very helpful criticisms of this text. I would also like to thank my colleague, Lucius Outlaw, for a discussion of Bllison’s “The litte man at Chehaw Station: The American artist and his audience,” and Brooke Ackerly and Robert Talisse for arguments over identity and responsibility. 683684 Political Theory remembered, forgotten, glossed, or idealized, and the traces they leave in our world, traces that keep that past from falling into the oblivion of for- getfulness. Finally, color, memory, and identity together belong to the struggle over racial justice in this country, a battle in part to tecognize the past, of which color is the visible reminder. Ralph Ellison’s writings, and particularly his defining work, the /nvisible Man, map these issues and some of the ways of approaching them.! The present essay is an exploration of those questions, conducted through an engagement with his work. The Invisible Man speaks to race, justice, and memory, but obliquely, refracted through the vernacular. Ellison's use of the vernacular, the “lower frequencies” of race, creates special challenges {and opportunities) for the political theorist: challenges because we are per- haps accustomed to a more clearly delineated political domain, evident for example in laws, court cases, constitutions, legislatures, parties, and so on, The indirectness of the Invisible Man thus gives rise to the question, “Where are the politics?” And it offers opportunities, as for example in Ellison’s suggestion that an important dimension of polities is to be found outside of the domain of high civics and in the vernacular, in how citizens live together, speak to one another, in what they remember and forget, in what they hope for, or in a future they ignore or reject. From that oblique vantage point is to be seen part of his contribution to our understanding of race in America. Further on, I will return to Ellison’s “lower frequencies,” but here allow me to start with some thematic remarks on reading the Imvisible Man. The story begins with this epigraph, a passage from Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno:” “You are saved,’ cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained: *you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” To be saved, yet still to be darkened as if by a shadow. In Melville's novel, Delano, an American, makes this remark urging Benito to forget the past, just (he says) as the sun, sea, and sky “have turned over new leaves.” Benito answers that the sea and sky “have no memory . . . because they are not human.” The shadow here is cast by the memory of a slave revolt on his ship, or perhaps by slavery itself. Delano’s (characteristically American) appeal to turn away from the past expresses an optimism, and a future- directed gaze, made possible, in part, by forgetting,‘ Ellison, too, wrote of shadows, and in particular “the shadow of [the] past.”* His choice of these lines from Melville suggests that central to Ellison’s understanding of race and justice in America ig memory as a vehicle of the presence of the past, the shadows it casts, the resulting temptation to forget, and the relationship of past and future.Booth / Reading Race with Raiph Ellison 685 “To be saved:” the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights struggle, the ending of legalized segregation, and so on all had brought African Americans more fully into their country’s political and economic life. Yet, and at the same time, race and its history here remain a powerful and troubling presence, whether in the lingering and observable effects of past discriminatory policies, in ongoing debates over affirmative action, diversity, and reparations, or in their myriad daily forms.’ Theirs is surely also a haunting presence, the memory of past injustice. The shadows. of those centuries continue to fall upon America, however much the insti- tutionalized landscape of race relations may have changed, and however much, like Delano, some might wish to turn over a new leaf, America, on this reading, is caught between, on the one side, the enduring presence of the past and, on the other side, the belief or hope that a non-racial society is near, between a kind of memorylessness and sunny optimism and the sense that the past has not yet been mastered, or even fully addressed. Perhaps Ellison’s thought in choosing that Melville passage was that America is both Delano and Cerano, the will to forget, the orientation to the future, and the intrusive presence of the past in memory, and their impact on identity and justice.” For Ellison, memory was central. “The act of writing,” he said, “requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.”* In the Invisible Man, that maxim guides both the account of the particularity of the African American experience and the universal ambi- tions of the novel.° Here I want to unfold and refine that claim through these three more detailed observations. First, Ellison was sharply critical of what he took to be an oversimplifying emphasis on race, and a neglect of the “complex resources” of the African American heritage including its part in a shared American experience." He is therefore often read, and sometimes criticized or praised, as an author who resisted the idea of race and culture, offering in its place a view of (or hope for) the United States as post-racial, though fed from the tributaries of its many communities."' To be sure, Ellison objected to a narrow focus on race, and to the idea of a black cul- ure apart from its context, preferring instead to emphasize its diversity and its place in the confluence of American life.'? By the same token, America (its past, its identity, its remembering, and amnesia) was not one unitary thing. Rather, America in his view was formed by the interweaving of its constituent communities, communities that share a history of conflict and injustice and contribute their voices to its culture without losing their dis- tinctive paths on that common journey.’ So, too, what is remembered and forgotten belong to that American quilt work, present in different ways686 Political Theory across its breadth.'* When, with Ellison, J use terms such as American iden- tity, optimism, memory, or amnesia, it is in the sense just outlined: com- pound and shifting rather than unitary and stable. His is not an essentialist understanding of that experience, but rather rests on the thought that it belongs to a community of memory with a past of injustice, a heritage, and the culture it informs, and with color as a reminder of that particularity.'* Second, Ellison is also sometimes read (and criticized) as an author either lost in a bittersweet nostalgia for the past of his Oklahoma youth, or in a dreamy commitment to the future post-racial America of his hopes rather than to its far less attractive present. Ellison did refer to his “pioneer background” and to OKlahoma, the “young state” and the “territory of his [Ellison's] dreams,” as Lawrence Jackson calls it." In that same interview, though, Ellison recalled that his mother had been raised on a Georgia plan- tation, and that this famity history had given him a more complete “sense of the past.” In an earlier (1965) interview, he was confronted with this pointed critique, suggesting a too rosy future-oriented optimism: “you are expressing your own hopes and aspirations for Negroes, rather than report- ing historical reality” He responded that “hope and aspiration are indeed important aspects of the reality of Negro American history.” Hope and waiting, however, were always wedded to the fact that African American “conscious is a product of our memory” and not of “a will to his- torical forgetfulness.” American optimism, on the other hand, rested in no small part on just such a forgetting, a making invisible, of its own past. “We don’t remember enough; we don’t allow ourselves to remember events, and I suppose this helps us to continue our belief in progress.””" Ellison wrote not with nostalgia or optimism but with a concer for the enduring presence of the African American past, and thus for the place of memory in identity and in justice, Justice called for a dealing with the past, but it also tempered that retrospective glance by binding it to “hope and aspiration,” to what Ellison termed a “watchful waiting.” Memory work, then, was not a bitter reliving of the past but rather an insistence on its continued presence, trans- formed by present invention and always potentially emancipatory: “This is the use of memory: for liberation . . . From the future as well as the past . . . See, now they vanish, The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” Third, Ellison explored the ties between color, memory, and identity in their everyday forms, their “lower frequencies.” and he came to understand them as richly as he did precisely because he attended to their place in the daily currency of life in America. In thinking about identity, memory, and race as they are given in that everydayness, Ellison draws us into meaningsBooth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 687 of these phenomena that can easily be lost sight of when they become, as they sometimes do in the scholarly literature, placeholders for an array of theoretical concerns and policy issues.” He was scornful of what he termed the “burden of sociology.” which tended, he thought, to subordinate the diversity of African American life to a “metaphysical condition.” The turn to the vernacular was, however, more than a rejection of the academic’s monochromatic abstractions as it was also more than the literary cultivation of a popular style. The vernacular, he said, was the dynamic process and interaction of the past and of present invention. It was the “stream of history” for a people denied a place in their country’s civic history. It con- tains the “reminders of the past as Negroes recalled it. . . [and] passed [it] along .. °° The many forms of the vernacular are the locales of the African American past. Yet as the passage above suggests, that act of finding also involved a dynamic interplay of past recovered and present invention, and of remembrance and a watchful hope for the future. The familiar and the past were, for him, midwife to the new.”* In sum, Ellison was concerned with the everydayness of race in America, its vernacular inflected by the past and the future, by memory and the hopeful waiting for justice. It belongs to the subtlety of Ellison’s writ- ing that he leads his readers to see the relationship between the weight of the unchosen past made available in memory and the future. with its char- acteristic indeterminacy and openness. This is apparent already in the locale in which the Invisible Man is set: a bustling, multiracial tableau, in a word, a place where the future or at least an intimation of it casts its shadow, too, There both the past and the future lurk and interact, neither entirely visible, the one “around the corner, the other the subject of a “watchful waiting.” There, too, the vernacular, the stability and fixity of color/tace rooted in memory, are in part disrupted or made ambiguous. In the preacher's words early on in the Invisible Man: “I said black is... an’ black ain't . . °7 One does not triumph over the other. The weight of the past is not lifted but nor does the shadow it casts overwhelm the watchful waiting for the future. Rather, memory and hope, past and future, race and American democratic life are all to be seen there, and together they mark out the horizon of Ellison's work. Yet within that complex horizon, the focus on memory in this essay is, I would suggest, appropriate and consistent with Ellison's argument. He thought that, in the end, the core American failing was a flight from the burdens of its own past, and he wanted to bring that deep flaw into the light of day even while pointing to its manifold interaction with the present and future. That explains Ellison's emphasis on memory and, I hope, justifies the reading to which I now turn.688 Political Theory An America “Humid With Memories”* I begin with Ellison’s background question of American memory, with his observation that “Americans are known as a people without memory.” His phrasing (“are known as”) suggests that this is how Americans are seen from the outside, in, for example, Tocqueville's account of a “society formed from all the nations of the world . . . a society without roots, with- out memories... What makes a people of all this?” An advocacy of the memorylessness of this polity is to be found among some of the American founders themselves, for instance in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, which vigorously rejects the idea that the past (and the memory of it) can have any role to play in a democratic rights governed community." There are, of course, critics who insist rather on the centrality of memory in American life, often focusing on political rhetoric, civic texts, and other public and intentional memorial devices.” We could say that on the one side America is seen as a land without a national memory, while, on the other side, it is said in fact to have such a memory, one inscribed in its civic chronicles, etched in stone memorials, speeches, texts, and so forth. America’s relation to its past, then, is tenuous in part because of the self- conscious novelty of the national project, and more generally because of the emergence in modernity of societies in which the traditional legitimizing functions of remembrance have lost their centrality. Now Ellison, too, argues that, like modems generally, Americans “give but a limited attention to history.” However, this inattention is the result of more than the pace of modern life. At the level of civie or high political memory, American society is marked, Ellison says, by the absence of a full chronicling of its own past. What chronicling there is tends to be saturated with a certain ide- alism or innocence, what “we would like to have been, or that which we hope to be,” with what Lawrie Balfour terms “the triumphalist narratives about American democracy.” In brief, American memory, whether civic or quotidian, is intermingled with the forgetting of injustice.’ Amnesia is not only part of a modem condition but is also and centrally for Ellison related to the injustices of the American past. “Perhaps more than any other people, Americans have been locked in a deadly struggle with time, with history. We've fled the past and trained ourselves to suppress, if not forget, trouble- some details of the national memory, and a great part of our optimism . . . has been bought at the cost of ignoring the processes through which we've arrived at any given moment of our national existence.” What presence and visibility blackness has is, Ellison argues, as a sign of something outside, negative, created by whites in order to affirm theirBooth f Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 689 identity.” When Ellison wrote of American identity, he meant, | think, to point also to the curious fate of whiteness here. The other side of this same making of American identity is that although blackness is a sign of other- ness, Whiteness remains invisible to itself, shrouded in a “broad, collective American silence.” Though, as I noted above, his principal focus (and so essay) was on the African American community, it is apparent that in Ellison’s account, American identity is woven of the presence of blackness as something alien but otherwise invisible, and of the silence that surrounds whiteness. Both serve to make identity something riddled with amnesia and falseness, a past yet to be faced.” Such forgetting is itself an injury and an injustice. The forgetful presentism of American life, born of its intertwining of amnesia, partial remembrance, and misplaced innocence. makes the past invisible. It thereby achieves a radical kind of dispossession, that of denying a community and its members their stories, their names their history, a word their identity. Thus arises the core problem of American identity: its unjust incompleteness born of a certain relationship to the community's past, and especially the past of race and injustice. America has been “been reluctant,” Ellison writes, “to pay the cast of its achievement” and the resulting injustice, forgetfulness and distortion have made the struggle over identity “the American theme.“° Yet Ellison’s account of memory suggests that we miss something important if we do not see the ways in which the past in all its manifold- ness nevertheless endures, if only obscurely, in the shadows and around the comers of the most ordinary phenomena of our lives together. Indeed, implicit in the idea of a flight from the past, and of the counter-struggle to retain it, is the recognition that the “limited attention” accorded the past does not mean that it has simply vanished. The past is there, often subter- raneanly, in the everydayness of American life. That continued presence means that forgetting, and the relief it promises from the burdens of memory, are always merely provisional, and therefore vulnerable especially to an unwilled resurgence of the past into its midst, to (in Baldwin's phrase) a “dangerous and reverberating silence,” and to the shadows cast by race on American life.*' Were the past simply done and gone (or if it could be made so), made into the past perfect so to speak, it would not be the troubling presence that it is. American identity, even if resting on false (and unjust) foundations, would nevertheless be stable: a “compromise with truth in the past to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future." Still, the presence of the past, forgotten though it may be in the foreground of citizens’s lives and in their official narratives, is an enduring and dynamic reality, That “unwritten history,” that “obscure alter ego” (of a radically incomplete690 Political Theory recorded history), is “always active in the shaping of events... always with us...” There, “in the underground of unwritten history, much of that which is ignored defies our inattention by continuing to grow and have conse- quences." Forgetfulness, then, does not obliterate the past altogether. Rather it places it in the shadows, around the corner: always present, if not in the conscious memory of Americans or in their civic autobiography, then beneath the surface, in the interstices, the shadowed places of their society, and in the habits of the heart of their life in common. In the light of that dis- tinction between the presence of the past made known and available in the foreground of national memory and a presence that stands not fully visible, a shadowed but real part of the fabric of our lives, we can better understand Ellison's remark that “our memory and our identity are ever at odds, our history ever a tall tale told by inattentive idealists.“ Ellison thus shows how both unjust and ultimately impossible is the view that nations can be built on a foundation of forgetting. Forgetting is unjust because it makes the political community rest on the radical dispossession of some of its members. In the end, also unachievable because the past, though frag- mented and interwoven with forgetting and distortion, is nevertheless car- ried forward in its traces, color being one of them, always threatening to intrude upon and upset a self-understanding fashioned out of a mixture of amnesia and comforting tales. The Color of Memory For Ellison, the past is present, if only in an undergrounded color/race, which thus might be said to stand at the juncture of vis invisibility, of the remembered and the forgotten, the explicitly recollected presence of the past and its shadow-like presence. J now want to explore that crossroads with him. First, though, allow me to use one of Tocqueville's observations as an entryway to Ellison on race and invisibility. Although Tocqueville argued that a shared memory is not the cement of American nationhood, he was nevertheless acutely aware of its presence in other parts of its life in common. In Democracy in America, he writes that “The memory of slavery dishonors the race and race perpetuates the memory of slavery.” Here Tocqueville means by “race” not a supposedly scientific, biological, view of the social world, but the fact of a certain kind of differ- ence. Color as a visible distinction between human beings, embedded in and given meaning by a particular American history, is the bearer of a past,Booth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 691 and a reminder of it. It is a bodily difference that elsewhere might be a source of surprise or wonderment, but is here “ravaged by experience and heavy with the weight of peculiar spoils . . ”“ Not only color as inflected by history, but color that also carries that past forward: we can read Tocqueville, then, as saying that the visibility of color serves as a mnemonic device, keeping the bitter memory of racial injustice alive.‘ In so doing, color causes the injustice of slavery and discrimination and the myriad social relations associated with them to remain an enduring pres- ence and wound, threatening to make the past and its injustices visible. It is the overcast landscape of national memory. “The conundrum of color is the inheritance of every American . . . It is a fearful inheritance . . . [that] has welded past and present . . :“* Color, Baldwin goes on to say, is a “force of circumstance . . . which cannot be overcome,” something “carried, quite literally on his [the African American’s} brow.” which makes visible the fact of injustice.” Color, this trace of America’s fearful legacy, is a “most complex... phe- nomenon” and (for Ellison) a core part of this complexity is that to be black in America is, perversely, to be condemned to a kind of invisibility, to a condition of dispossession especially in relation to one’s past. The past that color carries into the present is disturbing and a source of shame. Hence the wish to have color “thoroughly washed from the black face [in order that] guilt will have ceased to be visible.”' Visible yet denied and forgotten, there but in the shadows: the memory of color is the “past we deny, not dead but living yet.”* Thus arises the tension between the visi- bility of color in one sense and its invisibility in another, between memory and forgetting in his account of race and identity in the United States. For Ellison, race and its past in America have a surface invisibility coupled with a subterranean presence: there (“not dead but living yet"), but not held con- sciously before the mind’s eye, nor in the recording of that past (the “past we deny”). In short, the presence of color, its ties to the past and future, are distorted, and made unstable or contingent by the varied forms of forgetting that are, according to Ellison, so much a part of America. Color welds together the past and present of this society, and in this rela- tionship, of the present to memory and forgetting is, to be found its crucial importance for American identity. Color, its visibility and invisibility (for it is woven of both), is thus a central part of what it means to be American. The past and its injustices here have a latent, a haunting and enduring pres- ence in color, a memory-laden color the sense of which, though often undergrounded, does nevertheless from time to time become visible. Even in its absence, in its being forgotten, that past inflects the most ordinary of692 Political Theory daily encounters. That varied inflection suggests that it is an “error . . . to believe that the past is dead.” Yet this almost intrusive visibility becomes in Ellison’s account something the meaning of which is always beneath the surface, almost forgotten. Why it is invisible and how it becomes visible and restored to its rightful place in American identity are central themes of the Invisible Man and its narrative of dispossession and retrieval. That story is, in part, one of loss, and in particular, of the manifold ways of being invisible. More exactly, the story plots that dispossession as a kind of for- getful making invisible. At the same time, it also shows the countervailing forces of echoes, traces, and their work in drawing the narrator to look around the comer, to call memory back to color, disclosing to him what is there even if out of sight, invisible, in the world of forgetting and loss that is his present. Lastly, the Jnvisible Man ties all of this to identity, race, and injustice in the American context. I now take up these themes. Dispossession and Invisibility What stands around the corner, invisible, there but not apparent to the eye, is itself a mark of the injustice of dispossession. We are familiar with this, in among other places, Du Bois’s critique of the writing and teaching of American history. Ellison, because his register is the vernacular, portrays dispossession in its everydayness. Like that loss itself, his story is a kalei- doscope of fragments, the meaning and relatedness of which seem to emerge almost haphazardly and without being willed, mirroring the way they are experienced. The varied facets of this dispossession are revealed in a swirl of discrete episodes, in a kind of pointillism of words, connected only by the narrator's voice and vantage point.** Their common bond is that they belong to a black (and therefore, in America, invisible) man. They retain a unity in their focus on dispossession as an erasure of the memory of the past, on the African American experience of separation from one’s past. Consider what is perhaps the most striking face of dispossession in Ellison’s book: the absence of the narrator's name. That loss is at once indi- vidual and collective: of names as individuating markers and of the loss of them as part of a community's fate, of being black in America. “It is through names,” he remarks elsewhere, “that we first place ourselves in the world.” They are “our masks and our shields and the containers of all those values and traditions which we learn and/or imagine as being the meaning of our familial past.”"** Names, then, are echoes of a past, a thread of a conti- nuity through time, of family relations across the long duration. For AfricanBooth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 693 Americans, this temporal quality of names is bittersweet, “We bear, as Negroes, names originally possessed by those who owned our enslaved grandparents, we are apt . . to be more than ordinarily concerned with the veiled and mysterious events, the fusions of blood, the furtive couplings, the violations of faith and loyalty . . . through which our names were handed down unto us . . .”*? Looking around this corner is, Ellison writes, “charged with emotion,” because names here are reminders of a past of servitude at the most intimate, familial, level. He adds that some reject their names, bearers as these latter are of a “bloodstained,” “brutal,” and “sinful” past. Ellison suggests that the shedding of names in the pursuit of “new identities” is not his path. The narrator of the Invisible Man, in fact, fears the forgetting of his own name: “A tremor shook me. . . and I was over- come with swift shame. | realized that I no longer knew my own name.” To forget your name, even an imposed one, is to lose a part of who you are, of your past and therefore of your identity: “Who am I? I asked myself. But it was like trying to identify one particular cell that coursed through the tor- pid veins of my body . . . Try to think of your name.”** Names are part of a person's identity because they are the bearers of a cen- tral moment of his past, binding him in the present to others now gone, to their histories, deeds and so on as a living part of him. To be nameless, to be dispossessed of one’s name, is a loss of one of the markers by which “we first place ourselves in the world.” The loss of one’s name is a way of being made invisible, of making color and its past “blank.” The reader, like the narrator of the Invisible Man, is thereby led to sense the injustice of being given a new name and identity. ““This is your new identity, Brother Jack said. ‘Open it? Inside I found a name written on a slip of paper. ‘That is your new name,’ Brother Jack said’? The context of this passage is the need for secrecy in a clandestine organization, but its proximity to the practice of renaming African American slaves places it on the wider canvas of the Invisible Man where it joins other reflections on loss, invisibility, and forgetting. If names are among the traces of one’s place in the world across time and in common with other people, one can understand why being given a new name is so disturbing, It is a wrong because names are not just functional markers, substitutable by any other sign, but part of a person’s identity, weaving together past, present, and future. Dispossession, forgetting, being given a new name, and stripping color of its informing memory sever that connection between who one is and was, including the community of which one is a part.” The namelessness of the narrator, the ache left by the barely recollected world of past humiliations, and the disjointed way in which the past is made present to the protagonist are the marks of a particular and radical form of694 Political Theory loss, one that afflicts individuals as part of a community, Tocqueville too had observed some of this. The African American slave, he wrote, has “lost even the memory of his homeland; he no longer understands the language his fathers spoke; he has abjured their religion and forgotten their mores.” Yet, as Ellison’s account makes clear, the losses of a homeland, language, and religion are only the initial forms of the ongoing dispossession of the African American past. That dispossession, the loss of one’s past, means to be uprooted from oneself and to be invisible to others. To be oneself is to have not just a point like present, but also a duration across time, past, and into the future, including an embeddedness in an enduring community. To have an identity is to have experiences that form one, and a memory that weaves these together and makes them part of the present. It is to have a name, memory-bearing objects, and recollections that are the warp and woof of personhood. Zora Neale Hurston writes “I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say."*' To live then only in the present, to be separated from one's past, to have no answer to the question of “Who was I, how had I come to be?" is in key respects to be invisible to oneself and to others, to have only the transitory existence of “birds of passage . . , too obscure." ‘The loss of a past is then intimately related to identity as a problem, a question that, Ellison says, gives purpose to his writing.“ People place them- selves in the world, distinguish themselves from others, and come to recog- nize themselves through a gathering in of the past. This they do as individuals (as in Ellison's focus on the memorial power of names, objects, smells, and so on) and as a community. That past is made available to them in manifold ways. Identity is not always or even first and foremost con- structed out of remembrance’s explicit variants, histories, civic texts, and so on. The presence of that identity giving past is there in the habits of the heart, the ways of life of a community, expressed and encountered in its many ver- nacular forms. It is there, too, in the shadows or around the corners, there in an almost subterranean fashion reflected in that “undergrounding of American history” so crucial to the dnvistble Man.“ If “we are prevented from knowing who we are,” that is even if the past is not part of the recorded story of the nation (or at the individual level, the family for example) it is nevertheless “always active in the shaping of events. It is always with us . . 2 The past, he argues elsewhere, makes Americans what they are, and that is something that cannot be buried, cannot be consigned once and for all to an underground remote and therefore hidden forever. It cannot be hidden because it endures, if sometimes only around the comers and in the shadows, “We do not bury the past,” Ellison writes, “because it is within us.”Booth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 695 “With us” and “within us,” a “shadow.” an “obscure alter ego,” “always active in the shaping of events:” the Invisible Man lives with an eye oriented to the intersection of past and present, That junction is not so much a fron- tier between two distinct temporal registers as a meeting place in which the past always lurks in the present, though often only as an absence. The rea- son for this orientation is that Ellison was certain that identity, “the American theme,” was at its core bound up with continuity across time and thus with the living presence of the past. In Ellison’s work, the present and future are not free standing parts of identity, but on the contrary are informed by the past, just as that past is (in Eliot's words, quoted by Ellison) “renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.” He was also certain that modemity’s penchant for a forgetful presentism, exacerbated in America by the burden of a past and present severely tainted by racial injus- tice, made that presence of the past fragile and sometimes near to invisible. Traces of Injustice, in Small Things Remembered® The trace stands at the frontier between absence and presence. It is the reminder of something lying just out of sight, around the corner, and there- fore a partial antidote as it were to the poison of a lost past. The protago- nist of the Invisible Man encounters one such trace in the possessions of an evicted African American family. There, lying in the snow, are a greeting card, a manumission document, photographs, a yellowing newspaper por- trait of Marcus Garvey. The scene has a special melancholy about it, aris- ing out of the sense of loss that surrounds such jettisoned mementos. These objects are reminders of a past, often the common past of a family or com- munity. The sight of them, torn from their contexts, tossed into the street like so much detritus, is a harm to the living for whom these are the threads of their community’s continuity across time, and it is also an injury to that past community that, instead of being remembered, is treated as deserving only of oblivion. Now the “jumble” of these memory objects belongs to someone else and not to the narrator of the Invisible Man. They are the material vessels of the particular continuity of that one family, intimations of its persistence. Why, then, do they awaken such a reaction in him, a response that leads him to look away from what is before his eyes and to turn to “the dark, far-away-and-long-ago”® Part of the answer is surely the palpable wrongness of it: the sight of an evicted family and their most precious possessions cast like trifles into the wintry street. The wider injus- tice, which the narrator undoubtedly senses and which therefore embraces696 Political Theary him too in its evocative grasp, is its place in the strewenness of African American history, its past scattered and made into a loosely knit patchwork of the forgotten, idealized, and remembered. The possessions lying scattered at his feet are both an instance of, and an evocative pointing to, that dispossession. The power of that moment comes from the fact that the mementoes on the street act as a trace. They are the markers, the presence that intimates an absent or missing something, there if only inchoately. So he is drawn by these traces “to look around comers,” in this case into his own past (which is also in part theirs), into the past “of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not lis- tening at home.” The narrator says that he experienced this “as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing ... And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition’! Happening upon this scene of eviction and dispossession, his own memory, linked to it by an implicit mesh of connections, is awakened, and their loss bound to his own losses and to those of the African American community. Witnessing this begins the process of recognition, of making visible the invisible, the lost or in disarray. It awakens a recognition of the past (indi- vidual and shared) as the first step towards a securing of identity.” Those possessions are traces that stand at the frontier between presence and absence, the lost and the yet-to-be-found. They are, like memory itself, the representations of an absence and, at the same time (and relatedly), the wind in the narrator's sails urging him to restore the past from its condition of almost-being-lost. Those traces are the proximate cause of his wanting to look around the comer. Traces, however, cannot be simply tokens of a present-absence, of the shadows cast by something out of sight. Rather, these traces, to loosen the narrator from his forgetfulness, must draw the passerby toward them and toward the absence of which they are the signs. This they do by revealing absence as an absence, a missing something, and not simply a void or nullity. In so doing, they intimate or evoke a relation- ship of some kind between the observer and what is, ina manner of speak- ing, “around the corners.” In the case of the Invisible Man and its story of the narrator's encounter with the belongings thrown on to the street, the thread binding him to that sight is one of the shared fate of dispossession, both in the immediate sense apparent to his eyes, i.c., the aftermath of evic- tion, and in another more oblique sense as well, the loss of the past, theirs and his, that is part of being black in America. That moment of recogniti of pang and the struggle for remembrance, depends upon a next-to-invisible cluster of ties between that family, the narrator, and America.Booth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 697 ‘The traces that the protagonist chances upon on that snowy sidewalk, markers of a border between loss and restoration, forgetfulness and memary, are also at the heart of Ellison’s account of color and invisibility. Race, its past, and the injustices associated with it linger in Ellison's work, like those traces on the wintry street, at the frontier between visibility and invisibility, of what is all too plain to see and what is also there, but only furtively, in the shadows of memory and around the comer. His emphasis is on the not-quite- le, on forgetting and erasure, on the dispossession of the past evident in the street scene that the narrator witnesses. Yet at the same time, the protag- onist’s response to seeing this is to be drawn to look around the comer, to recall and make the absent visible. What seems invisible in not entirely so, but dwells like something just out of sight, announced by its trace, From that vantage point, Tocqueville's remarks on the visibility of color as a spur to the remembrance of racial injustice in the United States are not quite as opposed to Ellison's account of invisibility as they might first appear. Rather, they make clear the fragile, reminding, role of the trace (color) as something that carries an intimation of the past into the present. We can read Ellison as amending this to say that color as the bearer of the memory of injustice does not effortlessly yield its whole story. Color does not, that is to say, make immediately visible its past. On the contrary, it can be made near-to-invisible, “blank,” as Baldwin says, so that “the past [is] . . . thoroughly washed from the black face . . .” Color is then a trace, a fragile something that can lead one to peer into what was not apparent before and to struggle to bring out of those shadows that something of which it is a sign. Traces, including color, are evocative: things that call out, urging the passerby to pay them heed and to look beyond what is there before his eyes. In the depiction of the evicted family and its scattered belongings, the nar- rator is drawn to gaze around the corner, and this net so much by a willed choice but by a throbbing in him, by memories of distant voices “verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home." Through traces, the invisible becomes at least partially present; its presence signaled, from around the corner, unbidden and sometimes unwanted. We have discussed the ways in which, in the Invisible Man, the family’s scattered possessions serve as traces of an absent presence. In small things, remembrance: objects, to be sure, but smell and sound are powerful mnemonic devices, traces in much the same way as are the physical objects encountered on that snowy street. Songs heard, the odor of yams baking in a street corner food stand, the smell of cabbage cooking, all bring the narrator a “reminder of . . childhood” and a “stab of nostalgia." Others bind together the collec- tive and first-person, “memory from the long time before it even became his698 Political Theory memory.” For example, words inviting him to a romantic involvement with a wealthy white woman cause the narrator’s mind to whirl “with for- gotten stories of male servants summoned to wash the mistress’s back.” The small currency of everyday social interactions acts as a pointer to what is around the corner. They gesture towards a past that may well not be recorded in the public narratives of this society, to what is not even a part of its consciously-held memory, but which is real nevertheless. “It means nothing to say that it is all forgotten, that the Negro himself has forgotten it . The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever . . °°’ Poverty, dispossession, sex, and power all belong to that world beyond the corner, there “deep as the marrow of the bone,” though largely invisible.” They start to become visible in the small things remembered, in traces pointing to something there, but obscured by the shadows of forgetting and thus not entirely visible. In the midst of this story of loss and dispossession, of silence and obscu- rity, Ellison’s account lingers over these traces of a past dwelling in the small things of everyday life, in objects on a street, in the smells of food, a melody or in a chance personal encounter. The “transitory ones” with “no novels, histories or other books” do have a past, even if it is “under- grounded.” They therefore have an identity, though one still needing to be retrieved from its scattered elements and restored to wholeness. That past, the “unwritten” or “underground” history of African Americans, is ina way both istent in urging itself upon this society and yet only obliquely or indirectly visible. “It is always with us, questioning even when not accusing .. ."”” So the past both dwells in the obscurity of the shadows (of forgetting, loss) and itself casts a shadow of another kind (disturbing, questioning, accusing) over a complacent and forgetful present. That past is pervasive, inflecting “our definition as Americans .. . the way we walk, talk and move . ..” and defying “our inattention by continuing to grow and have consequences." It both lives in the shadows of forgetfulness, “under- grounded,” and occasionally more than latently present, it quits them and intrudes upon the comfortable present. These intrusions, for example, the possessions of the evicted family or the encounter with the white woman, are at the same time calls to look around the corner, to “confront, to peer into, the shadow of [the] past.”*! That is the evocative function of the traces scattered, kaleidoscope-like, throughout the Invisible Man, They mark out an uneven social landscape in which the past protrudes, incompletely but insistently, into the here-and-now. Traces are, in short, the memory devices that do not so much reveal the truth of who one is and was, visible in theBooth Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 699 full light of day, but rather direct the person back to what lies around the comer, there but not (yet) before one’s eyes. The traces that are the signposts of that border between the shadows of the forgotten or dispossessed past and the present are at the heart of Ellison’s account of the visibility and invisibility of the past, and thus of color, identity, and injustice in American society. “But first I had to discover,” Ellison writes, “that Tam an invisible man,” to “[recognize] my invisibility,” that is to see absence as an absence of something and not as a mere emptiness." How does this discovery and recognition occur? Ellison describes it as an act of looking around corners, a looking that awakens memory. “And now all past humiliations became precious parts of my expe- rience, and for the first time... I began to accept my past and, as I accepted it, I felt memories welling up within me. It was as though I’d suddenly learned to look around comers; images of past humiliations flickered through my head and I saw that they were more than separate experiences. They were me; they defined me. I was my experiences and my experiences were me, and no blind men, no matter how powerful they became . . . could take that [from me]. Those words signify that the absent past is what is being looked for, and with it, a part of one’s identity. Absence, traces, and recognition: these are the three pillars that undergird Ellison's reflections on race, identity, and memory in America. It is traces, markers of a present absence, that set the narrator on a voyage to self-recognition. Looking around the corner, drawn by traces to see what is there but not or not yet wholly visible, to recall or better to be called to that past, through its shards, scattered haphazardly, is to do the memory work essential to securing an identity in the midst of such dispossession.** The Invisible Man itself can be read as one kind of “undergrounding,” as a tale of color in America, a tale as oblique as the phenomena of color here, ity and invisibility, as itself dispossessed of its past, And it is a story of remembrance and thus of resistance to allowing amnesia to abolish entirely the memory of color. In its pages, we never see race directly in its most evident, visual, form of color nor in the novel's attention to memory are we ever explicitly called to the remembrance of color. Rather, and because of its undergrounded presence, readers (like the story’s narrator) are led obliquely to the meaning of color and its reminding role, to what may be just out of sight, there in traces, to those things, smells, passing social encounters that are given in the full light of day, so to speak, but which point to what lies in the shadows, around the corner, undergrounded, forgotten. The narrator’s blackness comes to be known not through sight or explicit depiction, but in the small things of his daily life, in things both700 Political Theory absent and present. So the readers and the narrator of the Invisible Man encounter the color of memory, of race and injustice, as something linger- ing. They are never entirely brought out from the underground where Ellison tells us he has put them, and where in America they are put by acts of forgetting and dispossession. Yet they are, in a way, always present in traces that are “questioning even when not accusing.” In the recollections that those traces evoke, Ellison shows the color of memory, the memories that belong to being black in America, not as something given, and together with its significance, ready-to-hand, but rather as something present in myr- iad, often shadowed ways, distorted by forgetting and idealization. With that dispersion arises the problem of an American identity.® “High visibility’ actually rendered one un-visible’ The color of memory loses its direct memorial force in a society marked by the radical dispossession of the past, by amnesia and idealization, by the effort to make black faces “blank.” Dispossession strips color of the memory of injustice, of the past to which it is so closely tied. The guarding of the past as part of the living present is made more laborious, more of a task or struggle. The color of memory does not effortlessly bring to the narrator of the Invisible Man the manifold ties that bind who he is now to who he was, and to who he is as a member of a community of fate with the particular past it has. In that sense, he is invisible to himself and to others. Ellison’s protagonist must rather happen upon traces, and through these traces be led to the strug- gle to look around corners. He must in the end also do the work of restor- ing a unity to them, and thereby to the past they gesture towards, to gather into an identity these scattered, glossed over, or forgotten elements of what he was and is. To “know who we are,” in Ellison's phrase, requires that Americans do that memory work, that they restore the color of memory to its full signification and thereby to its place in their identity as Americans. Conclusion: Between Memory and Hope Here sketched in wide strokes is some of what we learn from Ellison about memory, identity, and race in America. His story draws much of its startling and counterintuitive force from the fact that Tocqueville is, in a sense, quite correct about color/race in America: it is “highly visible” and so therefore color should carry forward the memories of injustice and be an enduring reminder of that injustice and a source of continued critical self- reflection. Yet the Invisible Man makes clear that the visibleness of color does not by any means necessarily extend to a recognition of the historyBooth # Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 701 that it carries, Indeed, just the contrary: it “rendered one un-visible.” This “undergrounding” is a severing of the link between the high visibility of color in the daily bustle of life in this society, and its mnemonic role as a token of the long duration and meaning of race and its associated injustices. That severing leaves the visibility of color suspended in a kind of empty, unmooted isolation. That is so even or especially for the protagonist of the Invisible Man. Witness the surprise he expresses when memories of the past well up in him, as if he were seeing them for the first time only in the same moment to recognize their proximity to his past and that of the African American community. In a way, he is seeing this for the first time, although in another sense it has been there all along. This undergrounded nexus binding color to its deep past is never entirely a nullity. Rather it is there, waiting to be looked for, a waiting signaled in the evocative traces that it leaves scattered across the surface of our present. The gathering labors of memory begin, Ellison tells us, with those traces and the recollections they kindle. That struggle is central to the restoration of identity from the shards of the past with their meanings strewn across the here-and-now, and central therefore to race and justice in America. “In the two hundred years of our national existence a great deal has been over- looked or forgotten” . . . “[WJe live simultaneously in the past and the pre- sent... all too often... we pretend that the past is no longer with us.” The color of memory, then, might better be described as its shadow, its incompleteness, until that memory work is done. That work is both a project of justice and of the construction of a more democratic American identity. “This is the use of memory: for liberation,” Ellison wrote quoting T. S. Eliot. “Being a Negro American,” he says, “has to do with the memory of slavery and the hope of emancipation.”"* Memory is related to the recollection of past injustices, to acts of recognition of those injustices, and to the future: as well: looking around corners, into the shadows of a common past, and also facing the future in “watchful waiting” and in a “hopeful suspension of final judgment? To wait and suspend judgment means that the memory of the past must be counterbalanced by other goods, those that lie not in the shadows of the past but in the as yet to be determined future. Memory as liberating does indeed require a looking around the corner into the past (“to pay the cost,” as Ellison says) just as it needs a hopeful waiting. In a complex way, then, it also requires “freedom from the bonds of history,” not in the sense of denying the past but rather of binding that remembrance to waiting and hoping, so that in Toni Morrison’s words about the lessons of jazz, “the past might haunt us, but it would not entrap us. It [jazz] demanded a future . . ”**102 Political Theory So the color of memory in America is shaped by a commingling of look- ing into the past, watchful waiting, and a hopeful suspension of judgment. Ellison brings us to see this in a number of ways, though perhaps none more striking than the place where the Invisible Man is enacted. The story’s pro- tagonist moves from the South, the principal site of the American memory of race, a place “humid with memories,” to the anonymous, bustling, multiracial world of Harlem. Ellison described this “vortex”-like transition as a kind of “displacement” or deracination, where time, past, present, and future, is tele- scoped. “One’s identity drifts” and the “folk” African American is “tran- scended.”™ If memory is rooted in locales, and in the mesh of enduring human relations that make those lived spaces, then Ellison’s Harlem is a site where memory ceases to be all-shaping, a place uprooted, floating, “nowhere.” Even the vernacular expressions of memory are eroded there.” The sense of uprootedness is evident in the Invisible Man: in the protagonist’s memories of home (“seeking the homeness of home,” Ellison writes else- where) and, in a different way, in his watching of the family’s possessions being scattered on the sidewalk. Yet because of that same uprootedness, it is also a place where waiting and hoping become possible. Harlem (in the words of Jazz) is where “everything’s ahead . . . Here comes the new . . ‘There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff. The way everybody was then and there. Forget that. History is over and everything's ahead at last.’ Ellison, | think, would have seen in that senti- ment something emblematic of American life, both of its forgetful optimism and (at its best) of a hopeful waiting for justice. To the former, the feeling of having broken with the bonds of the past, he would have responded that Harlem's freedom is not quite as complete as one might imagine, being bur- dened (as the protagonist of the /nvisible Man shows) with the weight of the past that never is (or can or should be) entirely cast off. To the latter, the emancipatory resonance of this view, Ellison would have added that it is only won in conjunction with the struggle to remember. We might say then that Ellison shows us that American justice and iden- tity stand at the juncture of past, present, and future: never forgetting the past (for that, he says, is the price that must be paid), but not letting it become a barrier to a watchful, waiting comportment towards justice in America. Given what he took to be the unfounded innocence and optimism of a society that had built its identity and hopefulness on forgetting, Ellison chose to emphasize the resistance of the past to erasure, its stubborn tendency to insist on its continued presence. The past in that sense weighs on the present. At the level of high policy debates, we see the truth of his argument about the persistence of the past in the continued debates overBooth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 703 race and justice in all its dimensions: affirmative action, diversity, repara- tions, and so on. Ellison’s characteristic voice, however, is not that of mon- umental history or high policy. “Who knows,” he wrote, “but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” His lower frequencies were the ver- nacular, the everydayness of race, memory, and injustice. This emphasis emerges from the thought that democracy needs to be understood not only in its institutions but also via a meticulous attention to the fine-grain of its daily life. Justice as it bears on the past is here not expressed in lapidary legal decisions or events, €.g., Brown vs. Board of Education, the March on Washington, or in the great exemplars of political rhetoric that have accom- panied the struggle for racial equality in the United States. Rather, Ellison brought us to see color, jity, and memory, their justice and injustice, the presence of the past and the waiting for a different future, forgetting and a too rosy optimism, in the small exchanges of our lives, where we daily live as citizens of a democracy, and enact and struggle over its justice. Notes 1. On the polities of race and the responsibilities of writers see Ralph Ellison, “The World and the Jug,” (WJ) in The collected essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F, Callahan (New York: The Modern Library, 2003) (hereafter CE), 155-88 and Ralph Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline,” in CE, 737, 744, 2. Danielle Allen, “Ralph Ellison on the Tragi-Comedy of Citizenship,” in Ralph Ellison ‘and the Rafi of Hope, A Political Companion to Invisible Man, ed. Lucas E. Morel (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 37. See Charles “Pete” Banner Haley, “Ralph Ellison and the Invisibility of the Black Intellectual: Historical Reflections on Invisible Man,” in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope. A Political Companion to Invisible Man, 160, Fot a history of these debates see Amold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison. A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 306-7, 408-3 3. Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 101 4. See Glenn C. Altschuler, “Whose Foot on Whose Throat? A Re-Examination of Melville's Benito Cereno,” in Melville's Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 302-3. Altschuler observes that Delano’s offer of the healing powers of the Trade Winds rests on forgetting that those same winds also carried slaves to their fate in America 5. Ralph Ellison, “Introduction to Shadow and Act,” in CE, 56, 59. 6, See Ira Katenelson, When Affirmative Action was White (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), xi, 149, 154, 161, 7. I discuss issues of memory, identity, and justice in W, James Booth, “The Work of Memory: Time, Memtity, and Justice.” Social Research 75, no, 1 (Spring 2008): 237-62; Communities of Memory. On Witness, Hdentity, and Justice (ithaca, NY; Cornell University Press, 2006); “The Unforgoiten. Memories of Justice,” American Political Science Review 95, no, 4 (2001): 777-91; “Communities of Memory: On Identity, Memory, and Debt." American Political Science Review 93, no. 2 (June 1999): 249-63. in. Melville's Short Novels, ed. Dan McCall (New104 Political Theory 8, Ralph Ellison, “Introduction,” 56, Memories, Toni Morrison writes, are “the subsoil of my work.” Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Fnventing the Truth, The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 192. 9, Ralph Ellison, “On Initiation Rites and Power: A Lecture at West Point, 10, Ellison, “Introduction,” 39, 11, Beginning with Irving Howe's 1963 Dissent essay, “Black Boys and Native Sons.” See also Banner Haley, “Ralph Ellison,” 160; Robert G. O’Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 4. Rejoinders to the dnvisible Man can be found in The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison, edited by Robert J. Butler (Westport, CT: Gieenwood Press, 2000). 12, See Ralph Ellison, “Study and Experience: An Interview With Ralph Ellison,” in The Critical Response to Rulph Ellison, ed. Robert J. Butler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000). 7-9; Ralph Ellison, “Very Stern Discipline,” in CE , 730-1, 756; Ralph Eltison, “Some Questions and Some Answers.” in CE, 292-3; Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” in CE, 584; Ralph Ellison, “That Same Pain, That Same Pleasure: An Interview.” in CE, 80. Ellison wrote that he hoped for the “inclusion, not {the} assimilation of the black man.” Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” 586. 13, Ellison argued that “American diversity is not simply a matter of race, region ar reli- gion, It is a product of the complex of intermixing of all these categories.” Ellison, “On Initiation Rites and Power: A Lecture at West Point,” 527, See also Banner Haley, “Ralph Ellison,” 160 and Gregory Stephens, Qn Racial Frontiers. The New Culture of Frederick Douglass, Ralph Ellison, and Bob Martey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2, 114. 14, Ellison called the hermetic view of African American culture the “opaque steel jug” interpretation and countered it with the argument that “if we are in a jug it is transparent.” ie. open to the rest of America. Ellison, WJ, 163-64 15, Ellison, WJ, 171, 177; Ellison, “A Very Stern Discipline;” 741. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr, Figures in Black Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 39. 16. Ellison, “That Same Pain,” 63-72. See also Elison, “Going to the Territory.” (hereafter G7) in CE, 606tf; Ralph Ellison, “A completion of personality’: A talk with Ralph Ellison.” in CE, 792 See also Lawrence Jackson, Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius (NY; Jon Wiley & Sons, 2002), viii; Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 1ff, 283-86: Stephens, On Racial Frontiers, 115, 118. 17, Ellison, ““A completion of personality,” 792. 18. Ellison, ““A Very Stern Discipline” 741, The poet Keorapetse Kgositsile argues that “Ellison seems unable to distinguish the America of his imaginative projection and. pressing hopes from the America we know . .." Quoted in Rampersad, Ralph Ellison, 435, 19. Ellison, WJ, 171 20, Ellison, “A completion of personality,” 817. 21. T.S. Eliot quoted in Ralph Ellison, Junetzenth (New York: Vintage, 2000). See relat- edly O'Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison, 103 22, The vernacular helps, O"Meally argues, to convey the “invisible history” of race in America, Robert G. O"Meally, “On Burke and the Vernacular: Ralph Ellison's Boomerang of History” in History and Memary in African American Cutture, ed. Genevitve Fabre and Robert G. O' Meally (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 245. Charles W. Mills notes the centrality of the body, and of color in its everydayness, to the African American experience of racial injustice, Charles W. Mills, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 16, 23, Ellison, WJ, 1777; Ralph Ellison, “Blues People,” in CE,279; Gates, Figures in Black, 274. 24. Ellison, GT, 612 in CE, 539.Booth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 705 25, Ralph Ellison et al., “The Uses of History in Fiction,” The Southern Literary Journal 1, no, 2 (Spring 1969); 69, Emphasis in the original, For further analysis see O"Meally, The Craft of Ralph Ellison, 2, 93, 103, 26, Ralph Ellison, “The little man at Chehaw Station. The American artist and his audience,” in CE, 496; Allen, “Ralph Ellison.” 55. 27. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1995) (hereafter IM), 9. For com- mentary see Gates, Figures in Black, 274. 28. The phrase “humid with memories” is Zora Neale Hurston’s. Dust sracks on a road: An autobiography (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006), 98, 29, Ralph Ellison, “Commencement Address.” in CE, 415. 30. Alexis de Tocqueville, “Voyage en Amérique,” in Alexis de Tocqueville, Oeuvres, ed. André Jardin (Paris: Gallimard. Biblioth?que de la Pléiade, 1991}, 29. 31, Thomas Paine, “Rights of Man,” in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip §, Foner, vol. 2 (New York; Citadel Press, 1945), 250-51, 255, And see Catherine A. Holland, “Notes on the State of America: Jeffersonian Democracy and the Production of a National Past.” Political Theory 29, no, 2 (April 2001): 190-216; Catherine A, Holland, The Body Politic: Foundings, Citizenship, and Difference in the American Political Imagination (NY: Routledge, 2001), xxi ff, 3-4. 32. See for example Sanford Levinson, Written Jn Stone. Publie Monuments in Changing Societies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) and Barry Schwarts’s many fine studies, including “Memory as a cultural system: Abraham Lineola in World War IL” American Sociological Review 61, no. 5 (October 1996): 908-27. 33, Ralph Ellison, “Fhe Golden Age ie Past,” in CE, 239; Ralph Morality and the Novel," in CE , 705, 707. 34. Ellison, “The Golden Age; Time Past,” 237; Lawrie Balfour, “Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 1 (February 2003): 35. 35. James Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” in James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998) (hereafter /BCE). 292; Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 27. 36, Ellison, “Blues People,” 280. See also Ellison, “Soeiety, Morality and the Novel,” 710. Relatedly, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (Philadelphia: Albert Saifer, 1935), TAME, 727 37. Ellison, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” 586-87: James Baldwin, “The White Problem” in 100 Years af Emancipation, ed. Robert A. Goldwin (Chicago: Rand MeNally, 1963), 88. 38. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness. The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890- 1940 {New York; Pantheon Books, 1998), xi, 9. 39, Gates, Figures in Black, 274-75; Hale, Making Whiteness, 295, 300 note 3, See Baldwin's remark that “[T]he loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his [the African American’s).” “Many Thousands Gone,” (M7) in JACE, 20; Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 345, 40, Ellison, “Society, Morality and the Novel,” 710; Ellison, “The Ast of Fiction: An Interview." in CE, 219, 4L. Baldwin, MTG, 19: Ellison, GT, 600. 42. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 72]. 43. Ellison, GT, 598, 600. son, “Society,106 Political Theory 44. Ellison, “The Golden Age: ‘Time Past,” 237 45, Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, translated by George Lawrence, edited by J.P. Mayer (New York: Anchor, 1969), 341 46, James Baldwin, “Color.” in JBCE, 673. Baldwin's account of being called “Neger" by schoolchildren ina Swiss village, and the difference the American experience of race makes to the meaning of that word, is a fine illustration of the way in which color and memory inter- set. James Baldwin, “Stranger in the Village.” in JBCE, 119,123-24 47. Jefferson wrote of “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites: ten thousand ree- ollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained . ..” Quoted in Holland, The body politic, 36 48, James Baldwin, “Introduction to Notes of @ Native Son, 1984," in JBCE, 810. 49. Baldwin, MTG, 23-24; Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time.” 335. See also Mills, Blackness Visible, 16, 50, Baldwin, “Color:" 676. 51. Baldwin, MTG, 20. See also James Baldwin, “The White Man's Guilt,” in JBCE, 725. 52, Baldwin, MTG, 22. 53, Baldwin, MTG, 22. 54, On the strong and clear presence of the narrator's voice, see Gates, Figures in Black, 246, 55, Note the emphasis “That part of the African American experience.” Ellison argued that this experience was complex. and rich, and that it should not be reduced to racial categories of blood lineage or to the fact of oppression alone, as central as that latter was to the Mf. “[Our) cultural expression has transcended race, our present social status and our previous condition of servitude . . .” Ellison, “Study and Experience,” 8, African Americans, he writes, are not what they are, “simply because whites would refuse us the right of choice through racial dis- crimination." Ellison, ““A Very Stern Discipline," 750-51, 56, Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate. A Writer's Experience in the United States,” in CE, 192 57. Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex every American Negro bears a name that ori he was.” Baldwin, “The Fite Next Time.” 33: 58. Ellison, M, 239, 240. 59, Ellison, JM, 309. 60. See Frangoise Zonabend, “Pourquoi nommer?” in L'fdentité, ed. Claude Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Presses. Universitaires de France, 1995), 262-63; Nicole Lapierre, Changer de nom (Paris: Stock, 1995), 134, 169; Booth, Communities of Memory, 77-78, 140, 169-70, GI. Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, 1. Baldwin speaks of these origins as “the key . . . to all that we later become.” Baldwin, MTG, 21: Baldwin, “Introduction to Notes of a Native Son, 19847" 810. Hurston was concerned with memory but “saw nothing but futility in looking back over my shoulder at the grave of some white man who had been dead (oo long to talk about.” Hurston, Dust tracks om a road, 229, 2 mn IM, 259, 63. Ellison, JM, 439. 64, Ellison, “Introduction,” 59, 65. Ellison, ““A Completion of Personality,” 818, 66. Ellison, GT, 598. 67. Ellison, “Commencement Address.” 417. 68. adapt this heading from James Deet7’s In Small Things Forgotten, An Archaeology of Early American Life. Second Edition (New York: Anchor Books, 1996). On objects as We," 193. Baldwin writes that “It is a fact that ally belonged to the white man whose chattelBooth / Reading Race with Ralph Ellison 707 monic devices see Mare C. Connor, “The Litany of Things: Sacrament and History in Invisible Man,” in Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope. A Political Companion to Invisible ‘Man, ed, Lucas E. Morel (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2004), 171-92. 69. Ellison, IM. 273 70. Ellison, £M, 273 71, Ellison, (M, 273 72. See Connor, “The Litany of Things,” 180. 73. Ellison, IM, 273. 74, Ellison, IM, 262, 296, 452; Connor, “The Litany of Things,” 174-75, 179, 75. William Faulkner, “The Bear," in Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1990), 198. 76, Ellison, 1M, 416. 77. Baldwin, MTG, 22-23. Baldwin says that “It is not a question of memory.” He means by this conscious or explicit memory. I use memory here to include the subterranean ways in which the past is present, in, for example, the habiis of the heart that Baldwin so powerfully describes. 78, Baldwin, “The Fire Next Time,” 342. 79, Ellison, GT, 598. 80, Ellison, GT, 600. 81, Ellison, “Introduction,” $9, 82, Ellison, JM, 15, 508. 83, Ellison, JM, 507-8 84, O'Meally reads the “around the corners” phrase as gesturing towards the future. However, bracketed as it is in that passage by references lo memory and to “images of past humiliations,” the retrospective orientation seems a natural understanding of Ellison's meaning. O'Meallly, The Craft of Ralph Ellison, 103. 85. “All my work there is an undergrounding of American history as it comes to focus in the racial situation.” Ellison, “A Completion of Personality,” 818. 86. See Mills, Blackness Visible, 8-9 and Katenelson, When Affirmative Action was White, 160-61. 87. Ellison, /M, xv. 88, Ralph Ellison, “Alain Locke, 89, Ellison, 1M, 273, 416. 90, Ellison, G7, 598; Ralph Ellison, “Address at the Whiting Foundation,” in CE, 856. 91. Ellison, WY, 177. 92. Fllison, WJ, I7L 93, Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Vintage, 2004), xvi; Ellison, “Society, Morality and the Novel,” 726, Ellison's phrase, “freedom from the bonds of history;” occurs in a discussion of Faulkner's The Bear. Like much of Faulkner's writing, those pages are redolent with the past as a living presence, 94, Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” in CE, 321-22, 325, See also Allen, “Ralph Ellison,” 38. 95. Compare Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” 325, and Ellison, G7. 615. 96, Morrison, Jazz, 7 97. Ellison, JM, 581. in CE, 450. W. James Booth is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Department of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. His most recent book is Communities of Memory: On Wimess, Identity, andl Justice (Corel! University Press, 2006)