Flying Home and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by Ralph Ellison which was published after his death. The selections were chosen and arranged by the executor of Ellison’s literary estate, John Callahan. Since not all of these selection were technically written as short stories intended for publication in the from in which they appear (a few are featured as self-contained excerpts extricated from the longer-form novels of which they are just a part) Callahan made the editorial decision to design the order in which they appear based on the ascending chronological ages of each story’s main characters or protagonist.
This decision seems to have produced an unintended effect but it is difficult to say for sure. It is quite possible that Callahan (or even possibly Ellison at some point before death) proposed the notion that the opening story of a collection such as this should be “A Party Down at the Square.” Like his groundbreaking novel and most of his non-fiction, the dominant theme of these stories is the nature of the African-American identity within a society dominated by whites. The bulk of this thematic pursuit is made through stories that center black characters as the protagonist and through whose point of view the events are filtered.
The most jarring exception to this rule happens to be the opening selection. “A Party Down at the Square” is specifically about the ever-present threat of lynching which black people faced throughout America, though most infamously in the south. By definition, lynching are a part of the construction of the African-American identity in which the narrative is exclusively told by the whites who commit the violence. Dead men (and woman and children) tell no tales, after all. Therefore, it is a bit surprising that Ellison also chooses to present the story of lynching filtered through the perspective of white society. Notably, however, that perspective if a young white boy in whom Ellison has invested hope for the future that some day this element of black life will eventually come to an end. The effect of placing a story in which it is the white character’s perspective that takes dominance over the story’s black victim is such that it seems almost impossible that the decision to make it the introduction to the volume was made solely on the basis of the age of the narrator. It is just too perfect as a metaphor for the entire black experience to believe that mere chance was responsible for the editorial decision.
From there, the stories proceeds much as one would expect by training the focus away from white perspective and into that of the black experience in all its various incarnations. Four of the stories feature the recurring characters of two kids, Buster and Riley, that present a portrait of what it means to grow up in black America. Two otherwise unconnected stories are presentations of the transitory nature of black men as each feature narratives about riding the rails. “King of the Bingo Game” remains as relevant as ever in the way it shows how those at the bottom of the economic ladder are exploited into gambling against ridiculous odds as a way of achieving what those on the rungs above them can get simply by taking advantage of greater opportunities for work and education.
The experience of alienation as a black man in a white society that isn’t America is presented in the World War II-era tale, “In a Strange Country” in which a black merchant used to dealing with racial discrimination among his white country gets his first glimpse as the possibility of alternatives existing elsewhere. The title story of this collection is not just the one which brings it to a close, but it also the longest and most intricate. It is a complex mingling of symbolism, fantasy, and the deeply ambiguous relationship between religion and racism. The final imagery of this story and the book as a whole brings it back around to where it began in a sense as the black protagonist is dependent upon two white men for assistance. The connection between the opening and closing stories is supposed to be based on age alone, remember, but the thematic unison is so perfectly aligned as to once again raise questions about the validity of that explanation for the story order.
