A Party Down the Square (1996). Summary and Description

Not published until after Ellison’s death but probably written in the late 1930s or early 1940s, “A Party Down the Square” is narrated by a young white man, who tells of being invited one night to a “party” in the town square of a small southern community—a “party” that turns out to be the impromptu public burning of a black man. As a storm blows up, an airplane flies low over the town; when it loses power, it clips the tops off trees and sends power lines falling to the ground, electrocuting a female bystander. After the plane regains its power, the distracted crowd returns its focus to executing the hapless black man, who is incinerated until nothing is left but a few bones and ashes.

In this superb story, Ellison takes the unusual step of writing from the first-person perspective of a bigoted white character. The effect is powerful, for Ellison takes us inside the mind of a young man who simply takes his racism for granted, never bothering to question whether the brutality he describes might be wrong or immoral. Those questions are raised, however, in the mind of the reader: Ellison produces a stunning indictment of racism that is all the more effective because it is so indirect and implicit; the story never sounds preachy, propagandistic, or sentimental, because Ellison manages to stay so convincingly inside the head and voice of his white narrator.

The style of the work is lean, crisp, clear, and colloquial; the influence of Hemingway is visible, for instance, in the brevity of the opening sentence and in the lengthy second sentence, with its repeated and’s and its matter-of-fact, reportorial tone (Flying Home 3). The sudden shift in the third sentence to unexpected paradox (“everybody was mad and quiet”) is made all the more wrenching by the abrupt introduction, at the very end of the sentence, of the word nigger. The real focus of the story becomes instantly if unexpectedly clear, and the care with which these opening sentences are crafted is typical of the skill and artistry exhibited by the entire work.

Many factors combine to make the story both highly memorable and extremely effective. The setting, characters, and actions are all vividly described; the imagery is precise and haunting; dialect and dialogue are both credible and artfully employed; sentences alternate tellingly in length and rhythm; symbolism is subtly but expertly introduced; and narrative suspense never flags. As in much of Ellison’s fiction, sometimes the phrasing seems realistic, even mundane; at other times, surreal and grotesque.

The sudden appearance of the plane, for instance, seems like an element of a nightmare. Despite seeming almost too convenient and implausible, Ellison manages to keep it believable, exploiting it to powerfully ironic effect. Thus the plane knocks down power lines that incinerate a white woman even before the black man is burned alive, and the passage in which Ellison describes her body is typical of the vividness of the story as a whole:

I could smell the flesh burning. The first time I’d ever smelled it. I got up close and it was a woman. It must have killed her right off. . . . Her white dress was torn, and I saw one of her tits hanging out in the water and her thighs. . . . The shock had turned the woman almost as black as the nigger. (Flying Home 7)

The brevity of the opening sentence, the use of a fragment in the second, the shock of discovering that the victim is one of the women who had gone see the black man burned, the use of white and black imagery, the crude reference to the woman’s “tits,” the mention of her thighs almost as an afterthought, and, especially, the ironic observation that she had been burned as black as the black man she had arrived to see burned alive—all these factors contribute to the effectiveness of this very brief passage, and this effectiveness is typical of the impact of the story as a whole. When it comes time for Ellison to describe the burning of the black man, he does so in ways that are literally sickening: Even the narrator vomits in the aftermath of the execution, and few readers are likely to be able to erase from their minds his description of the “nigger’s” burning body:

He kicked so hard that the platform, which was burning too, fell in, and he rolled out of the fire at my feet. I jumped back so he wouldn’t get on me. I’ll never forget it. Every time I eat barbeque I’ll remember that nigger. His back was just like a barbecued hog. I could see the prints of his ribs where they start around from his backbone and curve down and around. It was a sight to see, that nigger’s back. (Flying Home 9)

This passage typifies, once more, the brilliance with which the entire story is composed. The narrator does not want to be touched physically by the burning corpse, but obviously he has been touched in a deeper sense: The body is “at [his] feet” both literally and symbolically; the dead man is “on” him in ways he does not quite comprehend. He compares the black man to a barbequed hog in a way that is both believable and shocking, and when he describes the burning corpse, he slips unconsciously into the present tense (“the prints of his ribs where they start”).

He is simultaneously fascinated, disgusted, fearful, and indifferent: He is repelled by the incinerated body but never stops to question the morality of the deed. By putting the words of this story in the mouth of such a character, Ellison made a stunningly effective narrative decision, and the result is one of the most powerful short stories ever crafted by Ellison or any other modern American writer.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Compare and contrast this tale with Richard Wright’s story titled “Big Boy Leaves Home.” How are the two works comparable in plot and theme but distinctive in their resolutions and points of view? Discuss the structures of the two works; how and why is Wright’s story lyrical and then intense, and how and why is Ellison’s story intense almost immediately?

2. Read this story in conjunction with Claude McKay’s sonnet “The Lynching,” and then discuss the forms of the two works (story v. sonnet), the different kinds of diction (or phrasing) they use, the distinct perspective each adopts, and the particular kind of imagery each employs. Do you find one work more effective than the other? If so, explain why; if not, explain how each is effective in its own way.