And before Rushing died, Ellison-who lives in Washington Heights-made a habit of calling him up on the phone to talk about the blues and their common background as Oklahomans. In his later years, Rushing lived in Queens. One of Ellison’s boyhood idols was the late Jimmy Rushing, the jazz singer, who was also an Oklahoman. “I keep it,” Ellison said to me, “partly out of my sense of ceremony, and partly to remind myself from whence I came.” So it’s a continuing relationship.” Ellison treasures a small medal stamped with the seal of Oklahoma which was given to him in 1966, when the governor of the state invited him back-along with Maria Tallchief, the ballerina, and Roy Harris, the composer-for a ceremony in honor of well-known Oklahomans in the arts. Then, at least once a month, I get on the phone and call up people in Oklahoma City, people I’ve known since I was a child. Old faces and old things are always turning up. And, as you know, you tend to dream, can’t help dreaming, of your early experiences and of the people you first knew. “Well, for one thing,” he said, “I dream constantly of Oklahoma City. “The act of writing,” he has said, “requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.” In a talk I had with him not long ago, I asked him what some of the ways were in which, while living in New York, he remained in touch with his background. His writings have drawn deeply upon the materials of his early experience. Yet he still sees and describes-sometimes even introduces-himself as an Oklahoman and a Southwesterner. Hardly anyone who has listened to him speaking about the Oklahoma of his boyhood can have failed to come away with the impression that it retains an exceptional influence upon his outlook, and that he continues to harbor an affection for the region which far exceeds what people ordinarily feel for distant places in which they were raised.īy now, after forty years of living in the city, Ellison has every right to consider himself a New Yorker. But since he dislikes calling attention to his achievement, he is more than likely to point to his background as an Oklahoman-to the “sense of possibility” he developed while growing up in one of the younger states of the Union. As one quickly gathers from his conversations and occasional writings, Ralph Ellison is much preoccupied-as an individual, as a Negro American (an expression he persists in using), and as a writer-with the not so fashionable conviction that, when met with courage and determination, there is almost no predicament that cannot be converted into “benefits and victories.” If Ellison, who is now sixty-two, is asked to explain the source of this optimism, he might point to what he has been able to make of his own life.

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