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America “free of illusion.” His struggle for self-definition foreshadows Ellison’s desire, expressed in his 1981 Introduction to the thirtieth-anniversary edition of
Invisible Man
, “to create a narrator who could think as well as act” and whose “capacity for conscious self-assertion” was “basic to his blundering quest for freedom.” Like other narrators and characters in these stories, Parker anticipates Ellison’s creation, in
Invisible Man
, of “a blues-toned laugher at wounds who included himself in his indictment of the human condition,” and was therefore better able to see and embrace the world in its diversity.
    Along with “A Party Down at the Square,” “Flying Home” frames the collection. The tale anticipates invisibility, the grandfather’s riddle, and the technique of solos and breaks with which Ellison took such flight in
Invisible Man.
In“Flying Home,” just when Ellison’s northern protagonist believes, with a nod to Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, that he has learned to use his wiles to escape the limitations of race, language, and geography, circumstances force him to confront the strange “old country” of the South. A literary descendant of Icarus, Todd, one of the black eagles from the Negro air school at Tuskegee, flies too close to the sun and falls to earth in rural Alabama. There, unlike his mythological forebear, he is saved by Jefferson, whose folktales and actions enable Todd to recognize where he is and who he is, and to come back to life by following the old black peasant and his son out of a labyrinthine Alabama valley. Laughter, which Todd earlier associates with humiliation, erupts from deep inside him at the story’s climax, and taking advantage of the chaos, old Jefferson comes to the rescue and bears him away from danger.
    In the 1981 Introduction to
Invisible Man
, Ellison recalls his pilot as a “man of two worlds,” who “felt himself to be misperceived in both, and thus was at ease in neither.” Looking ahead, he concludes that “I by no means was aware of his relationship to the invisible man, but clearly he possessed some of the symptoms.” And, Ellison might have added, he possessed a share of Invisible Man’s eventual, qualified, fraternal, democratic optimism. “A new current of communication [that] flowed between the man and boy and himself” enables Todd to transfigure a buzzard—one of the “jimcrows” he’d feared, identified with, and flown into on a training flight—into an emblem of flight and freedom. In the story’s last words he “saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold,” perhaps a prophetic image, inspired by Lionel Hampton’s high-velocitysignature jazz tune, “Flying Home,” of Ellison’s triumphant soaring in
Invisible Man.
    5.
Taken together, the short stories point to Ellison’s remarkably consistent vision of American identity over the fifty-five years of his writing life. In “The Black Ball” the little boy asks his father a question others before him have asked and those who have come after still ask from different sides of the color line. “Brown’s much nicer than white, isn’t it, Daddy?” “Some people think so,” his father concedes. “But American is better than both, son.” His response asserts Ellison’s belief in a common—
not identical, but common
—democratic identity. Simply put, this sentiment is Ellison’s creed. Like the narrator of this long-ago story, he pledges allegiance to America and the ideal for which it stands, aware of the distance that persists between the country’s reality and its principle. For Ellison, the idea of America is first cousin to the possibilities of fiction. He considered each a territory, as he inscribed in a friend’s book, “ever to be sought, ever to be missed, but always there.” Of his short stories this much we can say: They led Ralph Ellison into the territory of the novel—toward
Invisible Man
, with its