Library, an intellectual and creative hub of the
Harlem Renaissance community.
Ellison’s writing career began just as the
Harlem Renaissance began to wane. This novelist,
essayist, journalist, and magazine editor published
in a number of established journals of the era, in-
cluding NEWMASSES, Negro Quarterly,and NEW
CHALLENGE. By the end of the Harlem Renais-
sance, he was experiencing a newfound literary and
critical autonomy. No longer reliant on Wright, El-
lison began to develop his own literary voice. In
1944 he won a JULIUSROSENWALDFELLOWSHIP
and began work on Invisible Man,the work that
would win the 1953 National Book Award and that
prompted the CHICAGODEFENDERto recognize El-
lison as the writer “symbolizing the best in Ameri-
can Democracy.” Ellison’s life was marked by
outstanding honors that included membership in
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in
1953 the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest civil-
ian honor. He was a recognized professor and en-
joyed appointments at Bard College, Rutgers
University, and NEWYORKUNIVERSITYbefore he
passed away in Harlem at 80 years of age.
Ellison’s major works include his first novel,
Invisible Man(1953), the essay collections entitled
Shadow and Act(1964) and Going to the Territory
(1986), and two posthumously published works,
Flying Home and Other Stories(1996) and June-
teenth(1996).
Bibliography
Benston, Kimberly W., ed. Speaking for You: The Vision of
Ralph Ellison.Washington, D.C.: Howard Univer-
sity Press, 1987.
Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002.
Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism: Ralph Ellison and the
American Canon.Iowa City: University of Iowa
Press, 1988.
Sundquist, Eric, ed. Cultural Contexts for Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man.Boston: Bedford Books of St. Martin’s
Press, 1995.
“El Tisico”Anita Scott Coleman(1920)
A short story by ANITA SCOTTCOLEMANpub-
lished in the March 1920 issue of The CRISIS,one
of three short stories that Coleman published in
the NAACP journal edited by W. E. B. DUBOIS.
The poem “Attar” by poet GEORGIA DOUGLAS
JOHNSONappeared immediately after Coleman’s
tale. “El Tisico’s ” account of the railroad and the
treatment that an African-American family experi-
enced was in sharp contrast to “Hymie’s Bull,”
RALPHELLISON’s first published short story and
harrowing tale of the violence that African-
American boys endured at the hands of aggressive
white riders and railroad workers.
Coleman’s story is told in the first person by
an observant railroad man whose colleagues are
debating the definitions of patriotism. While an
Irish engineer named O’Brady insists that patrio-
tism is “a thing men put before their wives,” an-
other man declares that it pales in comparison to
“love-making and women.” Eventually, Sam Dicks,
a “grizzled old trainman, who had more yarns in his
cranium, than a yellow cur has fleas on a zig-zag
trail between his left ear and his hind right leg,”
speaks up. He relates a compelling story about an
African-American family with a sick infant who
boarded a train in Mexico. The mother, sure that
her child was dying, was desperate that he last
until the train crossed the border. Once word
spread to the engineer, “the greatest dare devil and
the squarest that ever guided a throttle,” the train
raced through the Mexican countryside “faster
than a whirligig in a Texas cyclone.” The train
pulled into Nogales, but the coach with the wor-
ried family “landed fair and square upon American
soil.” Sam Dicks’s attentive audience is struck by
the heroics of one of their own and the mother’s
steadfast wish that her son die at home. They pep-
per him with questions about the outcome. He is
only to pleased to tell them that the youngest mu-
sician in the talented trio that they have been lis-
tening to is the child in question. It appears that
the young man has never fully recovered and, ac-
cording to Dicks, is “what the Mexicans call, ‘el
Tisico.’” The word, which means “tubercular,” sig-
nals the perennial vulnerability of the young man.
Coleman, who was herself born in Mexico to
Cuban and African-American parents, delivers
several messages with this economical and evoca-
tive story. First, she underscores the ways in which
African Americans are central to debates about
patriotism. White immigrants and white men, un-
able to agree about the concept, finally concur“El Tisico” 139