Trueblood and Mr. Norton: Critical Perspectives

 Laura Nogrady

“Whatever you become, and even if you fail, you are my fate”

-Mr. Norton, Invisible Man (43)

            Acclaim for Ralph Ellison’s first (and only) novel Invisible Man was present from the commencement of publication in 1952, but the rich text has left scholars debating about key issues to the present day.  The nearly six-hundred page book has many a morsel to offer hungry critics, each chapter opening a new dream-like state as the reader feels and sympathizes with the confusion, the heartache, and eventually the fury of the invisible protagonist. As an analysis of the entire text would be too complex to condense for this study, the main focus will rest on the second chapter in which the story of a sharecropper named Trueblood is related. Several scholarly publications use this section of the novel to establish larger theories of the text as a whole, mainly relating to power, sexual relations, and the blues.

            Before relating the scholarship, it is important to look at Ellison’s life as much of the invisible protagonist’s experiences are tied to the author’s. Ralph Waldo Ellison was born in 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, the son of a former soldier and restaurant operator. When Ellison’s father died, his mother became a domestic worker, cooking and cleaning to raise her sons. In 1933, Ellison left for Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an all-black school founded by Booker T. Washington, similar to the descriptions of the invisible man’s “state college for Negroes” (Ellison 32) created by the illusive “college Founder” (35). Ellison left in his third year and headed to New York, intending to someday return to college, just like his invisible protagonist. The jobs he held in New York included the server behind the food bar “at the Harlem YMCA, substitute receptionist and file clerk for psychoanalyst Henry Stack Sullivan, and factory worker” (McSweeney xii). The job in the factory is also similar to the invisible man’s work experience, proving to be perhaps another in the long line of parallel links to Ellison’s character. After the successes of this first novel, several years in the making, Ellison published twelve stories and dozens of essays and interviews, some collected in Shadow and Act in 1964. An attempted second novel was never completed, and Invisible Man stands as a tribute, not to the African American experience alone, but rather to the experiences of all people in the search for identity.

            The person searching for identity within the text is mainly the invisible man himself. He is completely perplexed by an episode in his later college experience in which a rich white man, Mr. Norton, needs a ride and ends up meeting with an interesting character named Trueblood. In driving philanthropist Mr. Norton, a self-proclaimed devotee to the cause of African Americans, the invisible man notes the double pregnancies in Trueblood’s house and explains that Trueblood is the cause of both the wife and daughter’s pregnancies. Mr. Norton, who is, perhaps not coincidently, infatuated with his beautiful dead daughter, insists that they pull over and hear Trueblood’s story, and thus begins the tale, as recorded by the invisibleman/narrator.

Trueblood claims he was in bed with his wife and daughter because of the cold, and that he found himself mid-coitus with his daughter upon awakening from an odd dream. Instead of stopping on his own, Trueblood is interrupted by the slice of an ax on his face from his enraged wife. After fleeing, Trueblood returns home to take care of his family and all of his children. The narrator notes that Trueblood tells the story like a professional, as he has repeated it numerous times to the surrounding community. After listening intently, Mr. Norton looks sickly, and opens up his leather wallet to hand Trueblood a hundred dollar bill with which to buy toys for the children. The invisible protagonist is angered by this tribute, given to a brute instead of to the driver of the vehicle, a motivated and eloquent college student (Ellison 34-69).

In Mark Busby’s Ralph Ellison, the author declares that the reason Trueblood is so important is because he represents a way for the invisible narrator to gain visibility and to become noticed. Busby relates the way in which Trueblood tells his tale, as an “accomplished storyteller” (Busby 47), “taking on a deep, incantatory quality, as though he had told the story many, many times” (Ellison 42). The author also displays the folkloric qualities to Trueblood’s narrative, with a night as black “as the middle of a bucket of tar” (Ellison 42). All of this pageantry in the story leads Busby to view Trueblood as “a trickster who realizes that by becoming the white community’s stereotypical black, he fulfills their expectations and becomes a ‘true blood’ or pure stereotype” (Busby 48). Trueblood, knowingly and purposefully using his story to trick the surrounding white community, is essentially “yessin’. . .‘em to death by giving whites the story they want” (Busby 48) and is receiving in return for the story an ever-increasing value exchange of money, food, and attention.

Thus, Busby sees Trueblood as a man, once invisible, who is able to use the story of his life to trick whites into viewing him stereotypically and giving him “barter for the commodity he delivers – his story” (Busby 48). If the narrator were to use this idea, and follow the advice of his grandfather, a man who instructed his family to agree with whites all the way to “death and destruction” (Ellison 16), he could live like Trueblood, getting handouts from people like Mr. Norton. However, the invisible man continues on his contrary path, trying to lift up the uneducated blacks like Trueblood while they “did everything it seemed to pull” the race down (47).

In another critical book, Invisible Man: Race and Identity, written by Kerry McSweeney, Trueblood is not seen as a trickster, but rather as an unfortunate character, living out the desires of upper-class whites like Mr. Norton. McSweeney begins his examination of the passage by noting Mr. Norton’s feelings toward his daughter. He recalls her as “a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet” and “a delicate flower that bloomed in the liquid light of the moon” with “a nature not of this world . . . too pure and too good and too beautiful” for life (Ellison 42- 43). Mr. Norton also restates his difficulty in believing that she is his “own flesh and blood,” as he hands the narrator a “tinted miniature framed in engraved platinum” (42) to prove his point.

When Mr. Norton sees the two pregnant women and discovers that Trueblood is the father of both babies, he “sounded as though he were in great pain” (Ellison 49) and insists that he speak with the father of the infants. McSweeney notes that the dream in which Trueblood is engaged while he is involved with his daughter is extremely sexual, as he runs from a white woman’s bedroom into a clock with “some kinda crinkly stuff like steel wool on the facing” and a hot dark tunnel in which a light “burst like a great big electric light in my eyes and scalded me all over” (Ellison 58-59). The sexual imagery captures Mr. Norton’s interest, and he cannot break free from the story until the very end, where he gives Trueblood a hundred dollars. This time, the miniature of Mr. Norton’s daughter is removed with the money, but is not looked at, suggesting that “Norton’s bsessive interest in Trueblood’s story is rooted in his own forbidden sexual feelings for his daughter which have been vicariously satisfied through his intense participation in Trueblood’s incestuous coupling” (McSweeney 53). As Trueblood has received repeated compensation for his experience from whites in the community, McSweeney argues that it is “the illiterate and uncivilized black having acted out the white man’s repressed sexual desires” (53) that frames the importance of this section of the text to the whole. Instead of Trueblood as trickster, as Busby would argue, McSweeney sees the Trueblood story as imperative to understanding the black-white relationship and how the upper-class whites were more similar than different from even the most uneducated blacks.

Rather than analyzing for sexual or power issues within the Trueblood incident, Robert O’Meally discusses the importance of blues in his book The Craft of Ralph Ellison. O’Meally begins his study by evaluating the language used by Trueblood in his tale. Because Trueblood was occasionally invited into the chapel to sing for white guests, and seems to have a “kind of blues cadence” (O’Meally 86), the author expects the blues to play a role in the tale. After fleeing from his family, Trueblood sings on his own until his songs dissolve into blues and “somehow the blues provide just the vehicle for coming to terms with the twisted and painful details of Trueblood’s situation; by expressing himself in this ‘near tragic, near lyric’ form, he conquers his fearful guilt” (87). Thus, because Trueblood uses the blues to determine how to make amends in his life, O’Meally uses the blues elements in the Trueblood section of the book to make claims about the overall influence of blues on the text as a whole.

These key issues of power, sexual relations, and the blues can be traced throughout Ellison’s Invisible Man, but Mark Busby’s Ralph Ellison, Kerry McSweeney’s Invisible Man: Race and Identity, and Robert O’Meally’s The Craft of Ralph Ellison all outline the importance of these themes within the second chapter and the Trueblood incident, showing the importance of the tale in light of each critical approach.

Works Cited

Busby, Mark. Ralph Ellison. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991.

Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. New York: The Modern Library, 1994.

McSweeney, Kerry. Invisible Man: Race and Identity. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988.

O’Meally, Robert. The Craft of Ralph Ellison. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980.

Works Consulted

Nadel, Alan. Invisible Criticism. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988.

New Essays on Invisible Man. Ed. Robert O’Meally. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Ralph Ellison: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. John Hersey. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall Inc., 1974

Schor, Edith. Visible Ellison: A Study of Ralph Ellison’s Fiction. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993.

Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison. Ed. Kimberly W. Benston. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987.