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the young black narrator and his companions are due for a beating, jailing, or worse when they’re lined up in the Montgomery yards by two Alabama bulls snorting to avenge their dead fellow. The young hoboes are “happy as hell” riding on top of the freight car carrying them far away from the scene of the killing and the nearby Scottsboro frame-up of a couple of years before.
    “I Did Not Learn Their Names” begins as if the narrator of “Hymie’s Bull,” more experienced now, tells another story. Here,
we
refers to the narrator and his buddy, and soon becomes
I
as he tells of Morrie, a white guy with an artificial leg, saving him from falling between two cars. Like “Hymie’s Bull,” “I Did Not Learn Their Names” moves in the syncopated rhythm of the freights its narrator rides, sometimes smoothly and swiftly, sometimes with the herky-jerky motion of cars bumping along, coupling and uncoupling in sudden stops, then returning to crawl or race toward a destination somewhere that is also nowhere. Like his successor Invisible Man, the narrator is personal, even intimate. “I was having a hard time trying not to hate in those days,” he confesses, and follows with a well-honed response to racial prejudice. “I still fought the bums—with Morrie’s help. But I had learned not to attack those who were not personally aggressive and who only expressed passively what they had been taught.” The young man vividly evokes the countryside from Colorado back through Kansas to Oklahoma, perhaps as Ellison remembered it from a trip to Denver with his high school band. At any rate, the old married couple the narrator meets in a boxcar are touchingto each other and kind to him, almost to a fault. Keeping to the anonymity of “Hymie’s Bull,” the narrator does not identify himself. But he acknowledges the complexity of knowledge and language, revealing that he learned about Scottsboro while a prisoner in Decatur, Alabama, and that “I thought of the old couple often during those days I lay in jail, and I was sorry that I had not learned their names.” He had, of course, learned more than that. Once again there is Ellison’s (and his characters’) hunger for democratic equality; like Twain’s raft and Melville’s whaling ship, Ellison’s rails open up possibilities of fraternity even in the face of violence, danger, and racial hatred.
    “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” “The Black Ball,” and “King of the Bingo Game” are stories of young black men testing the ground under their feet in the larger world, adapting to life as a game of chance in which the odds are long, the outcome at best in doubt and at worst fixed, even when you’ve won the jackpot. Like the trolley rail covered by snow in “A Hard Time Keeping Up,” the color line is always there. Visible or invisible, it’s palpable to the two dining-car waiters laying over in an unidentified town not that far from the Mason-Dixon Line and to John, the caretaker and handyman for an apartment building in “The Black Ball.” Like other early unpublished stories, “A Hard Time Keeping Up” is told by a narrator unidentified except for a fleeting reference to “Al” by his friend Joe, who seethes at the Jim Crow scheme of things, often on the verge of rage. The story gives the feel of two guys tramping through the snow to the best rooming house on the Negro side of town. They don’t look for trouble, but they expect it. Yet when what appears to be an ugly, sexually charged racial incident turns out to be a friendlywager between the underworld character, Ike, and Charlie, his black acquaintance from the sporting world, Joe and Al have the resiliency to laugh. In a reverberation of Hemingway, Ellison turns the utterly flat danger and despair of “The Killers” inside out.
    Games and stacked decks are apt metaphors for Jim Crow rules in “The Black Ball,” perhaps the most subtly crafted and realized of the unpublished stories. John, the narrator, is