Episode 4: Unheard

In 1945, Ralph Ellison went to a barn in Vermont and began to write Invisible Man. He wrote it in the voice of a black man from the south, a voice that changed American literature. Invisible Man is a novel made up of black voices that had been excluded from the historical record until, decades earlier, he’d helped record them with the WPA’s Federal Writers Project. What is the evidence of a voice? How can we truly know history without everyone’s voices? This episode traces those questions — from the quest to record oral histories of formerly enslaved people, to Black Lives Matter and the effort to record the evidence of police brutality.

Image: Ralph Ellison outside with his typewriter. Credit: Library of Congress.

KEY SOURCES

The novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, published in 1952. 

An oral history of Ralph Ellison collected by his friend Robert Penn Warren.

An oral history of Ralph Ellison collected by Studs Terkel. 

John Henry Faulk’s interview with Harriet Smith, a formerly enslaved woman. The transcript of those recordings can be read in full here, you can listen to the interview at the Library of Congress, and you can read Debbie Nathan’s story, “Hearing Harriet Smith,” here. 

Frederick Douglass’s encounter with ‘negro evidence,’ recorded in his 1845 autobiography,  Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass.

Much of this episode deals with the Federal Writers’ Project — a project conducted by the Works’ Progress Administration from 1935 to 1939. Part of the Project’s work is archived in the Library of Congress’s Slave Narratives Collection. Ellison was one of many Black authors who interviewed on behalf of the FWP.

You can read the story of Sweet The Monkey, read by one of our actors in this episode. Ralph Ellison collected the story from a man named Leo Gurley on June 14, 1938. The Library of Congress has also published an essay about Ralph Ellison and the folklore he collected, which you can read here.

A reflection on the folklore recording project in Florida. Kennedy, Stetson, et al. Opinion of recording program of folksongs in Florida. Jacksonville, Florida, 1939. Audio. Retrieved from the Library of Congress.