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taut with a father’s tenderness for his son. He is aware that no matter what he does, the boy will have—indeed, already has begun to have—his initiation into “the old ball game” of crooked ground rules. Set in the Southwest and, like other unpublished stories, typed on the back of the letterhead of the Montgomery County Republican Executive Committee, “The Black Ball” is nuanced by the narrator’s sensitivity to differences between the South and the Southwest. “Doesn’t he know we aren’t afraid to fight his kind out this way?” John wonders in a reflex response to the stereotype of the redneck before he learns that the man’s hands were fried with a gasoline torch because he stuck to his alibi for a black friend falsely accused of raping a white woman back in Alabama. Hearing the story and seeing the man’s hands, John feels his suspicion ebb. Here and elsewhere in the early stories, Ellison’s African-American characters show a persistent willingness to overcome their hostility to whites, suspend their disbelief, and perhaps join efforts toward brotherhood, in this case a union trying to organize black and white building-service workers. John’s memory of the white organizer’s burned hands, together with his boss’s threat to put him behind the black ball and his little boy’s wise-fool’s questions, nudges him toward thethought that “maybe there was a color other than white on the old ball.”
    “King of the Bingo Game” is a third-person story in which a greenhorn migrant from the South to Harlem draws bingo and the right to take a turn at the wheel of fortune and the jackpot. Despite his urgent need for money to secure medical help for his wife, the act of spinning the wheel becomes his energy, his life, his God. The King of Bingo experiences that demonic power that Leon Forrest, in his “Luminosity from the Lower Frequencies,” associates with Ellison’s defiant imagination. He feels so liberated by the act of pressing the button that he cannot let go until it is forcibly taken from him by security cops, one of whom blackjacks him at the same moment he sees the wheel stop at double zero and the jackpot. Double zero is his fate; it’s “winner take nothing” except a beating behind the curtain, and doubtless again in jail or in the gutter before he’s set free. “King of the Bingo Game” anticipates the tithe paid to fluidity, violence, chaos, and the surreal throughout
Invisible Man.
    In its concentration on the riddle of identity, “In a Strange Country” also anticipates
Invisible Man.
In this story, “the answer to the complicated question of identity is a musical one,” Robert G. O’Meally has observed in
The Craft of Ralph Ellison
, and “music, here, is Ellison’s metaphor for democracy and love.” In his aching self-consciousness, the protagonist Parker realizes that to the Welshmen who befriended him after his fellow Yank servicemen blackened his eye,
he
is the true American. They recognize, as Ellison wrote many years later, that there is “something indisputably American about Negroes.” Howpainful it is for Parker to recognize and act on this perception. While the Welsh chorus belts out “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “as though to betray him he heard his own voice singing out like a suddenly amplified radio.” In the subconscious, the “strange country” stands less for Wales than for America, and like many Americans, Parker discovers his Americanness overseas. Attacked without provocation by the first white fellow countrymen he sees in Wales, Parker feels ambivalence toward America as both “the horrible foreboding country of dreams” and the country whose ideals he experienced in mixed jam sessions back home. “When we jam, sir, we’re Jamocrats,” he thinks to himself. Asked “HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE FREE OF ILLUSION?” Invisible Man will reply: “Painful and empty.” And earlier, in “In a Strange Country,” Parker lays claims to an