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The Family Life of Ralph Ellison

February 4, 2021 by Anne Holmes

The following guest post was written by Barbara Bair, curator of literature, culture, and the arts in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

The family beginnings of novelist, essayist, and literary critic Ralph Ellison centered on his mother, Ida
Milsap Ellison; his brother, Herbert; and mentors he found among his teachers. Ellison’s experiences of
hardship and encouragement in his early life helped direct him toward a college education at Tuskegee
Institute. He used his three years there as background in his iconic 1952 novel, Invisible Man
(//lccn.loc.gov/52005159?loclr=blogpoe) , which he wrote in the 1940s. As he entered an independent
adulthood in New York City, he found new brothers-in-spirit among writers, artists, and activists in Harlem—
and one evening in June 1944, when ideas for crafting Invisible Man were still swirling in his mind, he met
Fanny McConnell at Frank’s restaurant. The two fell in love over dinner and conversation. They wed in 1946 (//www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2
and remained married for the rest of Ellison’s life. loclr=blogpoe)
Ralph and Fanny
Ralph Ellison’s coming of age was both loving and challenging. He was born March 1, 1913, in a family McConnell Ellison smile
boardinghouse in Oklahoma City. His brother, Herbert, arrived as a newborn in June 1916. Their parents, at each other as Fanny
holds a stack of “The
Lewis and Ida Ellison, had moved from their native South Carolina and Georgia in 1910, not long after
Invisible Man.” Photo by
Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory became the state of Oklahoma. As they took up residence in Layne’s Studio [1952?].
Oklahoma City, the state was—as it remains today—the sovereign home to many tribal nations. It had also //hdl.loc.gov/
long been a post-Emancipation destination for Black settlers, especially those seeking areas where they loc.pnp/ds.09168
could establish small Black communities and farms.

In Ellison’s early childhood, Jim Crow codes and practices of white supremacist racial segregation were well in
force. His mother worked in domestic service and his father made a living delivering ice for use for cold
storage of food. Just weeks after the birth of Herbert, tragedy struck the family. Ellison was sitting atop his
father’s ice wagon when Lewis was injured in an accidental fall down the steps to a cellar. He died soon after
of infection due to internal injuries. While the grieving Ida regrouped, three-year-old Ralph went to live for a
time with his grandfather, Alfred Ellison, in Abbeville, South Carolina. The impressive patriarch made a distinct
impression upon young Ralph. He later wrote about his grandfather in his letters and spoke about his influence
in his last public address, in 1992, when most of his own life and stellar career was behind him.

(//www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2019635223/?
Ralph Ellison started his formal education at the segregated Frederick Douglass School in Oklahoma City in
loclr=blogpoe) 1919. In 1921, the year of the race riot (//blogs.loc.gov/catbird/2020/06/ralph-ellisons-juneteenth/?
Ida Bell, mother of loclr=blogpoe) during which white mobs attacked the Black business and residential district of Tulsa, his
Ralph Ellison. Photo mother Ida turned to extended family. She moved with her boys for a short time to Gary, Indiana, where her
by Sevedra Barnum,
brother worked in a steel mill, and she hoped for better prospects for her sons. Poverty persisted and Ida was
1935. //hdl.loc.
soon looking for work again in Oklahoma. She married James Ammons there in 1924. In the year and a half he
gov/loc.pnp/ds.13273
lived after the wedding, Ammons taught young Ralph to hunt birds and small game. This was a skill Ellison
continued to use to feed himself and loved ones in the following years, and a life lesson he refigured in
imagery of fauna in his later creative writing. His youth in Oklahoma was also a time when Ellison developed his deep love of language,
classical music, and jazz. Listening to Count Basie and Coleman Hawkins were among his inspirations, as were the harmony lessons he
received from another important woman in his life, his music teacher and Frederick Douglass School principal Zelia Breaux.

In late 1929, Ellison’s twice-widowed mother married a third time, to John Bell. The difficulties of that marriage, along with
encouragement from Breaux, helped the teenage Ellison set his sights on studying music at Tuskegee. His experience and need for
money in this period at school in the early 1930s is documented in correspondence with his mother, brother, and stepfather. “This is a
beautiful place and it looks like a small town,” he said, while still in awe of the campus, in a “Dear Mama” letter written on June 26, 1933.
He then asked his mother to send hats, a raincoat, towels, and other practical items, and “All the Books on Music and all the music
paper” he’d left behind. On July 4, 1933, he wrote John Bell to say that his beloved trumpet had arrived in good condition. Lessons at
Tuskegee, and his continuing identity struggles with social caste and economic hardship, resulted in a life transition for Ellison. He left
Tuskegee after three years and made a shift from Oklahoma City to New York City as his chosen home.

Arriving in Harlem in early July 1936, Ellison developed a family of choice. It started by serendipity the
moment he ran into poet and writer Langston Hughes outside the Harlem YMCA soon after Ellison’s arrival
in the city. It continued with sculpture lessons from Richmond Barthé, and was solidified when he met
novelist and essayist Richard Wright, then an editor at the Harlem office of the Daily Worker. In a July 17,
1936 letter to Hughes, he laughingly reported he was following Hughes’s advised “formula” with success,
namely being nice to people and letting them pay for his meals. He reported to his mother in September
1936 that he was “working and studying” and that one of the short-term jobs he obtained was with the
sculptor Augusta Savage. On August 30, 1937, he wrote to Ida about the effects of the Depression. He was
disheartened by the widespread joblessness and economic disparity (“I am disgusted with things as they
(//www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2
are and the whole system in which we live”). He referred to the difficulties of a lifetime of minimum wage
loclr=blogpoe)
employment, and how his father toiled every day of his life, and his mother’s efforts to find better work
Fanny Ellison taking
“From Okla. To Gary, to Okla. only there was no work. . .”. He observed that despite these conditions, the
photograph of Ralph
rich were trying to end New Deal programs. And still, he went on to write beautifully of city life and the Ellison and Langston
change in the seasons, the gulls flying overhead, kids flying kites, and the full fruit stands in some Hughes at the Newport
neighborhoods, and the picket lines in others. Jazz Festival, ca. 1959.
//hdl.loc.gov/
loc.pnp/cph.3c37231
It was one of the last letters he would write to his mother. Ellison’s efforts at a
new life were interrupted by sudden news that Ida Bell had taken severely ill in
Dayton, Ohio. Ellison rushed onto a train from New York and arrived in time to be at her bedside when she died,
unconscious, on October 17, 1937. Ellison unexpectedly found himself with family responsibilities. He served
as a parental figure for his brother Herbert, as they shared the winter together in Dayton homeless, taking
shelter in the automobiles of friends or at nighttime in closed shops or an attorney’s office.

Through it all, Ellison observed his calling. He continued to write, setting up a typewriter and producing drafts
of short stories and an intended novel, and corresponding with Wright in New York, keeping his dream of an
intellectual life alive. When Ellison returned to New York City, it was to do urban folklore fieldwork for the U.S.
(//www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2007680497/?
loclr=blogpoe) Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project (//www.loc.gov/collections/federal-writers-
Ralph Ellison, seated project/about-this-collection/?loclr=blogpoe) and write reviews and articles for the New Masses. His first
outdoors with a published short story, “Slick Gonna Learn,” was published in the September issue of Direction in 1939. He was
typewriter. Photo by on his way as a writer.
Jim Whitmore, 1958.
//hdl.loc.gov/
loc.pnp/cph.3c37239

A Note on Resources:

The Ralph Ellison Papers (http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/eadmss.ms002008) collection, including correspondence, drafts of Ellison’s
writings, and evidence of his full life, friendships, and career, are held by the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress, as are the
records of the U.S. Works Progress Administration Federal Writers’ Project (//lccn.loc.gov/mm82055715?loclr=blogpoe) folklore project.
Letters referred to here are among those included in The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison (//lccn.loc.gov/2018020868?loclr=blogpoe) ,
edited by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner (New York: Random House, 2019). Biographies of Ellison include Ralph Ellison
(//lccn.loc.gov/2006026464?loclr=blogpoe) by Arnold Rampersad (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007).

Posted in: Collections, Guest Posts

6 Comments | Add a Comment »

6 Comments
1. Nana
February 4, 2021 at 2:38 pm
Very interesting and educating article Mr. Ellison. I am happy that I subscribed to this blog.

2. Cathy
February 4, 2021 at 4:52 pm
Really interesting family information about Ralph Ellison. Concise and easy to read – thank you!!
 3. Carol Dunn
February 5, 2021 at 2:34 am
Thanks for this Wonderful detailed article about Mr. Ellison’s life. It was interesting to learn that he lived in Gary, Indiana for a short
time as I grew up in Gary & still reside here.

4. Mark
February 6, 2021 at 10:12 am
I appreciate this insightful article on Ellison’s early life & beginnings as a writer. I did not know his mother was widowed three
times. Hard to imagine the impact of that on the young Ellison. Thank you!

5. Robert J. Anderson
February 12, 2021 at 1:34 pm
Thank you for this brief history of the early family life of Ralph Ellison. As it happens, I lived across the street from his apartment,
occupied by his widow, Fanny, on Riverside Dr. in New York. Upon the dedication of the sculpture “Invisible Man” by Elizabeth
Catlett directly outside our apartment buildings, I saw Mrs. Ellison for the first time. I recall Odetta and Ruby Dee being in
attendance, among other luminaries, and the reading of a dedication by Columbia English and jazz professor Robert O’Meally.
Though bedridden (gurney), Mrs. Ellison seemed quite content.

6. Allen McFarlane
February 12, 2021 at 2:35 pm
…and be sure to make your pilgrimage the Ellison Library at the Library of Congress. If you are lucky like I was, hopefully Mr. Mark
Dimunation will illuminate the library like no other with a introduction and tour. My thanks for your thoughtful and detailed
accounting of Ellison’s journey. I think, albeit humbly, that Ellison would have liked how you captured his “individualism” and the
“complexity” of his journey that we lose in the collective narrative that overshadows, oftentimes, the definition of how to express
being an American.

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