“A Piece of Early Americana”

Chapter 15 of Invisible Man opens with the narrator being rudely awakened by the clanging of pipes in Mary’s apartment. In a rage to try to get the “ignorant fool” doing the banging to knock it off, the narrator looks around for something to bang back with. He spots something on the floor that, incredibly, he’s never noticed before: “the cast-iron figure of a very black, red-lipped and wide-mouthed Negro, whose white eyes stared up at me from the floor, his face an enormous grin, his single large black hand held palm up before his chest. It was a bank, a piece of early Americana, the kind of bank which, if a coin is placed in the hand and a lever pressed upon the back, will raise its arm and flip the coin into a grinning mouth” (319). The narrator has never seen this particular bank in this particular spot before (in the room he’s occupied for months now!), but he’s clearly familiar with the genre. He casually identifies it, with a trace of bitter irony, as a “piece of early Americana” and implores his reader, too, to recognize this “kind of bank.” It’s a type, and he assumes his reader has seen them before.

The narrator is shocked and confused that Mary Rambo would keep such a “self-mocking image” (319) in her home (even if it’s somehow been invisible to him up to now), but such items were a fairly commonplace category of bric-a-brac decorating respectable, middle-class (white) homes throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To our eyes, they are a jarring reminder of how commonplace and generally unquestioned such poisonous racial stereotypes used to be (although we can see a direct descendant in the grinning caricature of a Native American, “Chief Wahoo,” seen until very recently on the [former] Cleveland Indians’ hats and uniforms). It’s a powerful symbol for Ellison to deploy at this point in the novel, where the narrator feels like he’s about to become visible as a spokesman for Brother Jack’s organization. The bank doesn’t represent who or what the narrator is—it’s a stark, visible embodiment of a racist caricature being imposed on him and anyone who looks like him. Can we doubt that having such items on mantles and shelves in white homes contributed in no small way to the perpetuation of racism?

There’s still a market for these things, apparently—a subcategory of the antique market. Until recently, eBay abounded with "black Americana" items, with various euphemisms for the bank Ellison is citing in the novel. I found the following image among a dozen or so “Jolly N****r Banks” (yes, this was their common commercial name, although euphemisms and abbreviation abound online, to get around policies about racist language) recently available for auction on eBay, before they apparently removed this stuff from the site:

While eBay is no longer in the business of auctioning racist antiques, the interested consumer can still find such items through multiple online auctions and sellers: just Google "black Americana coin bank" and see what comes up. According to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University, the more extremely racist the caricature, the higher price such “Americana” will fetch. I’ll point you to the Jim Crow Museum’s website as a valuable resource on this shameful corner of early American popular culture—see especially the section on “Caricatures and Stereotypes,” for a detailed taxonomy of the range of recurring images and stock characters. The museum’s motto is “Using Objects of Intolerance to Teach Tolerance and Promote Social Justice,” and while the images contained on the site inspire unease (as does the casual preponderance of the N-word as part of daily commercial discourse), this is a crucial part of American cultural history that must be preserved in order to understand why racism has endured so strongly in this country. The dehumanization, infantilization, demonization, and marginalization of black people was taking place in the realm of everyday objects—children’s toys, games, piggy banks, and food products. When the narrator of Invisible Man talks about how people never actually see him because of the accumulation of crap in their own minds, these sorts of things, by virtue of their commonplace everydayness, have played a big role in distorting their vision.

Group Discussion Prompt (September 9 and 10)

 In chapter 9, the narrator is feeling optimistic and confident as he goes to his meeting with Mr. Emerson, one of the "important people" to whom Dr. Bledsoe has written a letter on his behalf. He meets with the younger Mr. Emerson, the "important" guy's son, and the meeting does not go as the narrator had hoped. By the end of the chapter, the narrator is vowing to kill Bledsoe as an act of revenge.

Discuss your impressions of the younger Mr. Emerson in your group: What do you make of this guy? What does the narrator make of him? In the end, do you see him as an ally of the narrator, or an antagonist/obstacle to his development? Does Emerson's intervention advance the narrator's development of critical consciousness at all?

“A Revelation or a More Efficient Blinding?”

The anonymous narrator of Invisible Man never specifies the state he grows up in—all we know is that it’s deep in the Jim Crow South—and he never names “the state college for Negroes” to which he wins a scholarship. Ellison himself grew up in racially segregated Oklahoma City and attended Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama, a historically black college that was founded by the famous educator and former slave Booker T. Washington. As I mentioned in class, the young narrator models his graduation speech closely on Washington’s ideas of pragmatism and accommodationism. The narrator tells us that he “visualized [himself] as a potential Booker T. Washington” in those “pre-invisible days” (18), and he quotes “the great leader and educator” at the start of his speech: “‘To those of my race who depend upon bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the southern white man, who is his next-door neighbor, I would say: “Cast down your bucket where you are”—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded’” (30).

Ellison undermines Washington’s message of “humility as the essence of progress” considerably, by having the narrator endure humilation and degradation in the battle royal leading up to his speech, and even during the speech itself. His “fervor” as he quotes Washington prevents him from noticing “that the men were still talking and laughing until my dry mouth, filling up with blood from the cut, almost strangled me” (30). Washington’s faith in the essential goodness and generosity of southern whites is treated with irony throughout this chapter, as the narrator’s humility spills over into humiliation.

The “progress” with which his humility is rewarded, at the conclusion of this harrowing, nightmarish episode, takes the form of a scholarship to a school that resembles Washington’s Tuskegee in a number of general—and specific—respects. The most specific, perhaps, comes in the form of a statue the narrator describes near the start of chapter 2: "[I]n my mind’s eye I see the bronze statue of the college Founder, the cold Father symbol, his hands outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave” (36). Readers may note a conspicuous resemblance to a famous statue of Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee:

The sculptor’s intent is easy to read, and indeed the gesture is “breathtaking”: education is freedom, knowledge is power. The promise of Emancipation depends on the education and literacy of the newly freed population of the South. Washington is justly revered to this day as an eloquent spokesman for the liberational potential of education, and his own life story is a powerful testament to his ideas. The sculpture’s inscription captures these ideals beautifully (although what the narrator means by the “cold Father symbol” is evident, too):

But just as the narrator’s laughing grandfather undermines his pride in his “triumph” at the battle royal in his unnerving dream (thereby undermining the narrator’s naïve faith in the Washingtonian principles he so earnestly espouses before an audience that seems anything but “friendly”), here again Ellison’s underground narrator throws a wrench of irony into this apparently straightforwardly allegorical statue: “I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly into place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk” (36). I love how this simple insight complicates the straightforward interpretation of the statue’s meaning: indeed, we can see it either as a veil being raised or lowered. And look again: the eyes do appear empty, dead, smeared with weathering and (it’s easy to imagine) birdcrap. (Bronze is not the ideal medium for capturing the spark of life in a human eyeball.) 

And it’s not as if the narrator’s education will simply either enlighten him or leave him as he was (we can agree that he sure needs some veils raised at this point in his life). Ellison suggests, provocatively, that education can have a blinding effect. What do you see, in chapter 2, as the narrator-as-collegian serves as a chauffeur (just like Bigger Thomas!), driving a rich white philanthropist around and trying to show him only the face of the college and the “community” that the higher-ups have approved for public consumption? Does he seem enlightened, or blinded? Is the veil being lifted, or lowered into place?