Essay Questions

What is the point of adding a near-plane crash to a story about a lynching?

A lot is going on in “A Party Down at the Square.” A black man is being lynched. White people from town are attending it in the town square as if it were a celebration of the first shots fired at Fort Sumter. Literarily speaking, there is the additional component of the story being told by not just a white narrator, but a child narrator and not just a white child narrator, but a white child narrator from the north. Then suddenly the plane almost crashes and a white female spectator is instantly electrocuted and burned to a crisp. It does seem to veer close to overkill. There does seem to be a point, however. Much of white society labored under the delusion that the lynching of blacks was a relic from the past, attributing it as a consequence of racial intolerance toward the idea of freed slaves that had, in the generations since, faded away. The addition of the plane accident implicates the setting of the story as being in the here now in spectacularly dramatic fashion uneasily overlooked.

If the point of introducing the plane is to persuade white readers that lynching is still going strong around them in their 20th century world, why make it a near-crash instead of a much more dramatic actual crash?

Two aspects of the introduction of the plane are really at play here: why introduced a plane accident at all and if it’s worth introducing, why make it only a near-accident? The first has been answered above, but in that answer can be explained why the plane doesn’t actually crash but instead merely creates a chain reaction ending in the electrocution of a white woman. The key lies in why the plane nearly goes down. This is no mere lynching by hanging; the white townspeople are intent on setting the black man on fire. Those flames are then seen by the pilot who confuses the light the scene with a nearby landing field. Preparing for landing, the pilot prematurely cuts his engines and begins to descend which causes the landing gear to make contact with the power lines which causes the lines to make contact with the puddles of rainwater in which the woman is standing which causes her to be electrocuted and charred almost as black as the man being lynched. Meanwhile, the sounds of the plane’s engines restarting can be heard, but the plane itself is lost in the clouds by now.

Word comes, however, that the airline will be conducting an investigation into who was responsible for setting the fire. Thus, the lynching of a black man has resulted in the grotesque death of a white woman as a result of a plane accident which, thanks to the plane not crashing and the pilot being alive to provide an eyewitness account, has led to an investigation. The result being the lynching has directly harmed more than just the one intended victim; the collateral damage could potentially extend to those who perpetrated the violence in the first place.

What does “A Party in the Square” have to say about religion in the South?

A drive down just about any street in any town in any state which belonged to the Confederacy will eventually wind up passing a church. The longer the street, the more churches the car will drive past. Religion and the south are inextricably combined to the point that on any given day spent in any town’s oldest and most successful restaurant one is sure to hear the phrase “god-fearing Christian” spoken out loud at least once and probably multiple times. The hypocrisy of religion allegedly holding such a place of prominence in a region defined by the willingness to die for the cause of maintaining slavery has always been a subject stridently avoided as topics for sermons on Sunday in churches where the congregation is not predominantly black. Ellison confronts this hypocrisy directly when Jed taunts the lynching victim: “Sorry, but ain’t no Christians around tonight. Ain’t no Jew-boys neither. We’re just one hundred percent Americans.” Jed’s expression suggests that religion among white southerners is not mere hypocrisy but something much darker: a total fraud.