Black & Blue

INVISIBLE MAN (439 pp.)--Ralph Ellison--Random House ($3.50).

Like any other Negro kid growing up in the South, Boy got the idea very fast: white is right. But he was a serious youngster, and sometimes the useful rule of thumb became confusing. When, for instance, the local big shots gave him a scholarship to a Negro college, his faith in the white man soared. But at the stag smoker where the scholarship was awarded, the men he looked up to forced him to look on while a naked blonde did a lascivious dance, and the town's best citizens got haywire drunk.

Invisible Man is a remarkable first novel that gives 38-year-old Ralph Ellison a claim to being the best of U.S. Negro writers.*It makes him, for that matter, an unusual writer by any standard. His story of one Negro's effort to find his place in the world becomes at times a picaresque nightmare, full of bravura scenes in the South and in Harlem that are as original as they are imaginative. Not even patches of overwriting and murky thinking can dull the final powerful effect. For Invisible Man is no simple catalogue of hard-luck adventures in a world where might is white. Before it is over, Novelist Ellison's hero can face up to one of life's bitterest questions, "How does it feel to be free of illusion?" and give an honest answer: "Painful and empty."

Grandfather Said, "Grin." The adventures of the unnamed hero (he is called Boy, or Brother) take on the near-heroic quality of a modern tragic Odyssey. Simple and idealistic, he hopes to become an educator, to help advance his people. He loves his college, has unquestioning respect for its famed Negro president and its millionaire Northern benefactors. He is sure that his slave grandfather must have been wrong when he laid down his deathbed formula for dealing with the whites: "Live with your head in the lion's mouth . . . Overcome 'em with yesses, undermine 'em with grins, agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." But in his junior year, the visiting white philanthropist whose car he is driving asks to be taken off the usual showplace rounds. They spend part of the day at the shack of a Negro who has made his own daughter pregnant, wind up at a ginmill brothel where the white millionaire learns some facts of Negro life that shake his do-goodism.

These misadventures, handled with fine flair and gusto by Author Ellison, end the boy's college career. Kicking him out for irresponsible conduct, the president admits that, to get where he is, he himself had "to act the nigger." He hands out some advice for the road: "You let the white folk worry about pride and dignity --you learn where you are and get yourself power, influence."

Up North, after a humiliating first job in a paint factory, the boy winds up broke in Harlem. One day, watching the eviction of an aged Negro couple, he breaks into an impassioned speech to the crowd. It is the beginning of a new career. The "Brotherhood" (euphemism for the Communist Party) picks him up, makes a hero of him and gives him a job stirring up and organizing Negro resentment. Idealism and naivete working overtime, Boy falls for the whole line. Adoring white women make passes at him, his fame spreads. Then, slowly, he makes the embittering discovery that the sufferings of the Negro mean nothing to the Brotherhood, that both he and his people are being used to promote "the line."

"You Digging Me, Daddy?" Author Ellison's Harlem scenes are done with dash and flavor, and the lingo is right: "Well, git with it! ... You digging me, daddy? Haw, but look me up sometimes, I'm a piano player and a rounder, a whisky drinker and a pavement pounder. I'll teach you some good bad habits. You'll need 'em." Author Ellison knows all about the mountebanks and charlatans, political and otherwise, who prosper in Harlem, and his examples (especially Ras the Exhorter, who fancies himself as a black Messiah) are richly drawn. The book's final scene, a Harlem riot, has the sweep of an epic nightmare.

Not all Negroes are going to care for Invisible Man. Ellison, a Tuskegee graduate who has shined shoes and played first trumpet in a jazz band, obviously thinks little of Negroes who educate themselves beyond the point of sympathy for their underprivileged brethren. He has no prescriptions except that a Negro, or any man, had better learn to be what he is. "Whenever I discover whe I am, I'll be free," says the boy. "I always tried to go in everyone's way but my own." At the end, the fog of his confusions lifting, Author Ellison's hero thinks of his slave grandfather, knows that, "Hell, he never had any doubts about his humanity--that was left to his 'free' offspring."

*Other leaders: Novelist Richard (Native Son) Wright, Poet Langston (One Way Ticket) Hughes, Novelist Willard (We Fished All Night) Motley.

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