Americans First
The “party” in the story “A Party Down at the Square” is the lynching of a black man. It brings out all the white community in a perversely celebratory mood. The story is thick with imagery that describes the details of the many melodramatic events in the story which include not just a lynching but a plane nearly crashing and causing a fire and the immolation of white woman who had come to enjoy the spectacle. However, the most resonant imagery may be that provided by the only character who actually gets a first and last name, the leader of the pack and instant front-runner in the next vote for sheriff:
“And Jed hollered back, `Sorry, but ain’t no Christians around tonight. Ain’t not Jew-boys neither. We’re just one-hundred percent Americans.”
Hope Flies Eternal
The title story of the collection is the final story and this is probably not by accident. Of all the endings, “Flying Home” is the most optimistic, but it is an optimism distanced somewhat through its presentation as imagery. Nothing is definitive, but the allusion to the mythological resurrection of the phoenix—the ultimate symbol of hope—helps bring the many darkly pessimistic tales which precede it to an conclusion on a note of optimism:
“Far away he heard a mocking- bird liquidly calling. He raised his eyes, seeing a buzzard poised unmoving in space. For a moment the whole afternoon seemed suspended, and he waited for the horror to seize him again. Then like a song within his head he heard the boy's soft humming and saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold.”
Outsiders
A more pervasive form of imagery not limited to just one story, but connecting many of them together is the use of outside perspective. A great many of the narrators, storytellers or protagonists are specifically implicated as visitors to the setting of the events rather than natives. The young white boy telling the story of a lynching down south earn the derisive nicknamed “the gutless wonder from Cincinnati.” The title character in “King of the Bingo Game” is actually ridiculed before a crowd by the bingo master who responds to the man’s coming up north from Rocky Mont, North Carolina by quipping that he “decided to come down off that mountain to the U.S.”
Even the secondary characters like the union organizer in “the Black Ball” become part of the pattern of this imagery. The point of the outsider imagery is most likely that they describe Ellison himself as a well-traveled writer who puts his perspective on the subject into the mouth of the union guy: “And the more I move around, the more I see, and the more I see, the more I work.”
Double Zero
The most resonant imagery in entire book is probably the double zero on the bingo wheel. Pressing a button which stops the wheel can bring a jackpot to anyone who manages to possess the unlikely good luck of pressing the button at just the right millisecond. The idea that decks are stacked and games are rigged against blacks in America reaches its zenith in the imagery of the poor protagonist of this story whose circumstances lead him against all odds to pressing the button at that exact miraculous millisecond thereby proving that the system is so rigged that even those who win wind up losing.
