From “King of the Bingo Game” (1944) by Ralph Ellison, in Flying Home (1996) ed. by John F. Callahan
A man spins an electric wheel at a public bingo game in order to win $36; however, he refuses to stop.
Didn’t they know that although he controlled the wheel, it also controlled him, and unless he pressed the button forever and forever and ever it would stop, leaving him high and dry, dry and high on this hard high slippery hill and Laura dead? There was only one chance; he had to do whatever the wheel demanded. And gripping the button in despair, he discovered with surprise that it imparted a nervous energy, his spine tingled. He felt a certain power.
Now he faced the raging crowd with defiance, its screams penetrating his eardrums like trumpets shrieking from a jukebox. The vague faces glowing in the bingo lights gave him a sense of himself that he had never known before. He was running the show, by God! They had to react to him, for he was their luck. This is me, he thought. Let the bastards yell. Then someone was laughing inside him, and he realized that somehow he had forgotten his own name. It was a sad, lost feeling to lose your name, and a crazy thing to do. That name had been given him by the white man who had owned his grandfather a long lost time ago down South. But maybe those wise guys knew his name.
“Who am I?” he screamed.
“Hurry up and bingo, you jerk!”
They didn’t know either, he thought sadly. They didn’t even know their own names, they were all poor nameless bastards.
It’s hard to mistake this as an excerpt from Ellison’s later work – yet, it’s hard to mistake it as anything but Ellison. His imprint is embedded in the piece, a combination of deeply founded energy, simple beauty, and brutally explicit themes. In “King of the Bingo Game,” Ellison was both testing the application of his literary heritage and developing those landscapes later explored by a generation of his students: investigations of critical, personal socio-economic situations in flux, conditions of apparently inescapable poverty, and a haunting loss of identity. However, Ellison’s penetrating voice is rougher here than usual. The frenzied internal monologue is too direct, the political symbolism too overt, the action nearly surreal. The author would approach similar literary limits in his magnum opus Invisible Man (1954) – the method distinguishes that work – but he would do so with an experienced deftness not apparent in this early piece.
Indeed, the same could be said for each story in the volume of Ellison’s early works, Flying Home. Published posthumously in 1996, Flying Home includes nearly all of the extant stories Ellison composed prior to his only (finished) novel, among these six previously unpublished pieces. “King of the Bingo Game,” in fact, was Ellison’s last pre-novel composition. The stories bear hallmarks of an author emerging as such, testing the motifs and techniques that he would follow to fruition in Invisible Man. In fact, Ellison’s literary voice was just emerging – many of the stories, written throughout the 1940s, were originally developed, either in thought or on paper while Ellison was caring for his mother in Dayton, Ohio before her death. A student of music throughout his adolescence, Ellison turned to fiction as a medium through which to cope with the loss. It was his first attempt to write seriously.
Biographical knowledge informs our understanding of the directness of these stories, their bitterness, and the presence of a certain untempered radicalism later tamed in Invisible Man, a stark exhibition of political intensity. In Flying Home, Ellison launches a naked, moral attack on the prejudices scrutinized in his later work, those largely concerned with racial subjugation and integration, and touching upon income disparity, local corruption, and lack of economic opportunity. In novel form, Ellison would explore these themes by elongating his narrative and incorporating dense, subtle dialogue. There is value to the method. But I find his early work even more crucial for recent literature, embodying at times what is nearly a social militancy, a necessary exposure of humbling inequality that has receded in popular and critical acclaim, overwhelmed by tasteful dissections of the future of technology, conservative morals, and the middle class. Flying Home compiles statements of young urgency, which modern political struggles deserve, but which modern fictions largely neglect. Where is an early Ellison writing provocatively on public health crises, brutal authoritarianism in less-developed countries, rampant international economic inequality, and the unmistakable effects of racism that endure in America?