Xavier Nicholas, Professor of English at Tuskegee University, interviews Albert Murray." Callaloo 34, no. 1 (2011): 31-40.

1. Ralph Ellison Remembered: An Interview with Albert Murray
Xavier Nicholas
Callaloo, Volume 34, Number 1, Winter 2011, pp. 31-40 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Tuskegee University (26 Oct 2017 17:37 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2011.0022
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/418407

2. 31Callaloo 34.1 (2011) 31–40
RALPH ELLISON REMEMBERED
An Interview with Albert Murray*
by Xavier Nicholas
NICHOLAS: I would like to begin with you talking about your student days at Tuskegee
in the 1930s and how you first became acquainted with Ralph Ellison.
MURRAY: When I came to Tuskegee Institute as a freshman in September of 1935, Ralph
Ellison was a junior. I noticed that he had a prominent position in the school’s march-
ing band. Since everybody was a cadet in those days, we all had to wear the blue cadet
uniforms to drill three days a week, and when we had parade practices, you would see
him. When the band was playing in the Alumni Bowl during football games and Captain
Drye, who was the bandmaster at that time, would be sitting on the other side of the Bowl
with the faculty, Ralph would be the one who would direct the band. He was sort of the
concertmaster for the band. Then, when it was time to play “The Tuskegee Song,” Captain
Drye would come back and direct the band. At that time, Tuskegee had a School of Music,
which was directed by William L. Dawson, the conductor of the renowned Tuskegee In-
stitute Choir. Ralph was a music major, and I was in the School of Education majoring in
English. I had a very good English teacher in Morteza Drexel Sprague, who was head of
the English department, and he had a list of books that a well-rounded intellectual should
read. So I was a regular user of the Hollis Burke Frissell Library, and I would see Ralph
in the library where he worked at the main circulation desk. Because I scored high on
the entrance exam, I qualified for a special section of freshman English that Mr. Sprague
taught, and I was aware that Ralph was in Mr. Sprague’s special advanced course in the
English novel. Although he was majoring in music, he seemed to be very much interested
inliterature.Ihadbecomeverymuchinterestedincontemporaryliterature—novelistslike
Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner and poets like T. S. Eliot and Robinson Jeffers.
Well, I found out that he was very much interested in these contemporary writers, too.
NICHOLAS: What about Ezra Pound? Did you and Ralph Ellison read him, since he had
such a great influence on T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land?
MURRAY: We knew Ezra Pound because Mr. Sprague attended Hamilton College, a small
elite liberal arts college in upstate New York, and Pound attended Hamilton, too. Another
personwewerereadingwhowasverypopularinliterarycircleswasAlexanderWoollcott.He
* This interview was conducted by telephone between Montgomery, Alabama, and New York, New York,
on October 10, 2002.

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was a part of theAlgonquin Round Table, a group of NewYork writers who met regularly at
theAlgonquin Hotel. He had also gone to Hamilton College. Ralph and I were reading stuff
that none of the teachers was reading. When I would check out books at the library, I would
see Ralph’s name on the checkout slips because, during those days, you had to sign your
name on the slip in the back of the book that had the date you took it out and the date you
returned it. From the checkout slips, I knew what he had read and when he had read it.
NICHOLAS: I remember those checkout slips when I was a student at Tuskegee in the
1960s. Recently, I searched through the literature section of Tuskegee’s library to see if I
could find a book with Ralph Ellison’s name on the checkout slip, and I found a copy of
T. S. Eliot’s Poems: 1909 – 1925, which was published in 1932. On the checkout slip was
Ralph Ellison’s name in his own hand and the date June 26, 1936.
MURRAY: One time, I checked out Robinson Jeffers’s book of poems Roan Stallion that
Ralph had already checked out, and he had written a little poem in the margin of the book
about life and death being two beautiful nothings: “Death is nothing,/ Life is nothing,/
How beautiful these two nothings!” The Hollis Burke Frissell Library, which was headed
by Walter Williams, was an up-to-date library for that time.
NICHOLAS: I remember Ralph Ellison saying in an interview with the writer John Hersey
thathewasabletofindalloftheobscurereferencesinT.S.Eliot’sfootnotestoTheWasteLand
in Tuskegee’s library, although he went on to say that the library was not used enough.
MURRAY: That’s right. Sometimes, I would check out a book, and it would turn out that
Ralph was the only other person who had read the book unless it was Mr. Sprague. In
the fall semester of 1936, I no longer saw Ralph in the library; he had left Tuskegee for
New York at the end of his junior year, but as an upperclassman, he had left a lasting
impression on me.
NICHOLAS: I must admit that I was always under the impression that you and Ralph
Ellison became close friends at Tuskegee.
MURRAY: That didn’t come about until years later. There were some routine exchanges
that may have taken place from time to time when I was checking a book out or checking
a book in at the library. But I didn’t know him then. I had a friend named John Gerald
Hamilton, who was from Detroit. We called him Gerald Hamilton. He was the biggest
influence on me at Tuskegee other than Mr. Sprague.
NICHOLAS: I know that name because you wrote about him in your travelogue-memoir,
South to a Very Old Place. Whatever happened to John Gerald Hamilton?
MURRAY: The last time I saw him was during the war. He went in the Air Force as a
master sergeant cadet, but he didn’t finish; he washed out. I haven’t heard from him since.
He was my all-time favorite classmate; he could do all kinds of things.

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NICHOLAS: He sounds like Geronimo in your novel The Spyglass Tree. Geronimo is
Scooter’s roommate at a college modeled on Tuskegee. He is described as a polymath.
MURRAY: Well, Gerald was a polymath, too. As I said, he could do all kinds of things.
The band used to go to Chicago every year for the football game between Tuskegee and
Wilberforce, which was played at Soldier Field. They would augment the band for this
game. So Gerald decided to pick up a French horn, and he qualified for the augmented
band and made the trip to Chicago. As a result of being in the band, he got to know Ralph
better than I did because I didn’t know him at all. Gerald had a few exchanges with him,
and Ralph was aware of Gerald as I found out years later when Ralph and I became very
close friends.
NICHOLAS: So when did you and Ralph Ellison become very close friends?
MURRAY: First of all, I graduated from Tuskegee in 1939, and I spent about a year taking
some graduate courses in education at the University of Michigan. I worked for a term as
principal of a junior high school in Georgia. Then I returned to Tuskegee as an instructor
of English. In reading various literary magazines, I found out that Ralph had been doing
a few book reviews; in fact, I remember the first time I read his book review of the novel
These Low Grounds by the Negro author Waters Edward Turpin. It appeared in the fall 1937
issue of the literary journal New Challenge, and Richard Wright was one of the editors. I
realized that he was following through on his literary interests. At the time, I didn’t know
that he had given up on music and was thinking of himself as a writer. Then, in 1942, I went
to New York with my wife of one year. She was a junior at Tuskegee majoring in home
economics, and she was going up to the Berkshires for a summer internship. It was like a
delayed honeymoon for us. I stayed in New York and she went on up to the Berkshires.
Then I moved to the YMCA in Harlem, and I went to see Mike Rabb, who used to be an
administratoratTuskegee’sJohnAndrewsHospital.MikeRabbfinishedTuskegeetheyear
I arrived as a freshman. At that time, he was working in the student employment office
as a recent graduate, so he knew Ralph as a fellow student. His nickname for Ralph was
Sousa after the famous bandleader John Philip Sousa . . .
NICHOLAS:ItalkedtoMr.Rabb,who,asyouknow,liveshereinTuskegee,andheshowed
me a first edition copy of Invisible Man that Ralph Ellison sent him with the following
inscription: “For Mike Rabb—in memory of those pleasant, sunfilled days when we were
‘working our way through college’; and when, for him, my name was ‘Sousa.’”
MURRAY: Well, when I saw Mike at the Harlem Y, he asked me if I wanted to go and see
Ralph, since he knew I thought a lot of him. So we went over to visit Ralph, who was then
living in an apartment on Hamilton Terrace, which is in the City College of New York
area. When we walked in, one of the first things I noticed was his bookcase on the wall
that contained books I had read, such as Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, and
books that I had not seen before, such as Malraux’s The Conquerors and The Royal Way. This
meeting with Ralph that Mike Rabb set up was actually the beginning of our personal

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friendship. This was during the war, and he was a mess man in the US Merchant Marine
and writing full-time. I was a second lieutenant in the Air Force, which was called the US
Army Air Corps at that time, and I was stationed at the Tuskegee Army Air Field where
the “Tuskegee Airmen” were being trained. I would occasionally bump into him when I
visited New York, and he was always interested in people from Tuskegee. By this time,
I would come across his name in a lot of books and magazines, so I knew much more
about him than he knew about me. After the war, in 1946, I was released from active duty
in the Air Force and placed on reserve status, at which point I returned to my position as
an instructor of English at Tuskegee. But, in 1947, I went to New York to attend graduate
school at New York University. I spent a year earning my master’s degree in English. At
that time, Ralph was already working on Invisible Man. He would read passages of it to
me. I was the guy he could talk to about the most abstract and abstruse literary questions
as well as about the South and, specifically, about Tuskegee. He was not really a deep
Southerner; he was from Oklahoma, which is not the Deep South.
NICHOLAS: As Ralph Ellison himself pointed out in his essay “Going to the Territory,”
Oklahoma was initially called the Indian Territory and later the Oklahoma Territory. It
didn’t become a state until 1907.
MURRAY: That’s right. Now during the year I was in New York, I spent most of my days
doing my research for graduate school at the New York Public Library because classes at
NYU were at night. From time to time, Ralph and I would get together on weekends. He
was working on Invisible Man in a friend’s writing studio in the back of a jewelry store on
the eighth floor of a building on 608 Fifth Avenue, which is right across from Saks Fifth
Avenue and Rockefeller Center. This friend was a specialist in French literature and wrote
outstanding books on Gustave Flaubert, Guy Maupassant, and Jean Couteau . . .
NICHOLAS: I came across this friend’s name in my research and talked to his widow, the
writer Shirley Hazzard. You’re referring to Francis Steegmuller, right?
MURRAY: Right. He became a very good friend of mine, too. Ralph was living at 749 St.
NicholasAvenue,whichwasaone-roombasementapartmentaboutthreestepsdownfrom
thesidewalk.Heturnedthatlittlebasementapartmentintoanundergroundfictionalplace.
But he was writing his novel in a swanky jewelry store. He would get up in the morning,
dress up like a Madison Avenue guy, take his attaché case with his manuscript in it, and
then walk down the street to work. That was the kind of discipline he had.
NICHOLAS: Was he married to his first wife, Rose Poindexter, at this time?
MURRAY: Yes. I met her briefly when Mike Rabb and I went to see him. She was a night-
club entertainer, a singer-dancer.
NICHOLAS:Withthehelpofmystudent,MichaelEllison-Lewis,whoisthegreat-nephew
of Ralph Ellison, I was able to locate her second husband, whose name is Charles Higgs.

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To my surprise, I found out that Charles Higgs and Rose Poindexter lived for twenty-five
years in the same apartment building on Riverside Drive as Ralph and Fanny Ellison. In
my conversations with Mr. Higgs, who still lives at the Beaumont, he said that they had
friendly relations with the Ellisons throughout this time. He told me that Rose Poindex-
ter performed on Broadway in the Blackbirds revue of 1928 and traveled with the cast of
Blackbirds to Europe. He also told me that she was a very close friend of Josephine Baker.
He said she died of esophagus cancer in 1990 at the age of seventy-nine. In your later visits
to New York, did you get to know Rose Poindexter at all?
MURRAY: No. Ralph and I never talked about her. When I would see him on later visits,
he was married to Fanny McConnell. I knew Fanny. She had gone to Fisk University and
had been at one time a student-secretary for James Weldon Johnson before he died in that
automobile accident in 1938.
NICHOLAS: Wasn’t his car hit by a train at a railroad crossing somewhere up in Maine?
MURRAY: Yes. It was a tragic accident.
NICHOLAS: When you and Ralph Ellison would reminisce about your student days at
Tuskegee, is there any particular story he told you that stands out?
MURRAY: One story he told me was that he had won a scholarship from the state of
Oklahoma, but he couldn’t go to the University of Oklahoma during those days of seg-
regation. So the state of Oklahoma made some type of arrangement to give him a special
scholarshiptogosomeplacewherehecouldstudymusic.RalphdecidedtoattendTuskegee
because its School of Music, as I mentioned earlier, was directed by William L. Dawson,
who received national recognition for his Negro Folk Symphony when it was premiered
in 1934 by Leopold Stokowski conducting the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. Ralph,
you know, wanted to become a composer of concert hall music . . .
NICHOLAS: I remember him saying in an interview with the writer James Alan McPher-
son that his “dream” was to compose a symphony by the age of twenty-six that would be
equal to anything the German composer Richard Wagner had composed at that age.
MURRAY: That’s right. But he didn’t go to college directly from high school; he worked
for a year at a haberdashery in Oklahoma City, and I’m sure he got great discounts on his
clothes. That’s why he had that perfect Joe College wardrobe that impressed me when
we were students at Tuskegee.
NICHOLAS: I’ve heard that he was a natty dresser.
MURRAY:Nattydresser?Man,hewasrightoutofEsquiremagazine:button-downOxford
shirt, expertly tied bow tie, first-quality sports jacket, welt-seamed contrasting slacks, and
two-toned shoes. I remember the first issue of Esquire, which came out in September of

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1933 and was the number-one men’s fashion magazine of that time. All these guys got
on that kick. Joe College was right out of Esquire magazine. There were guys at Tuskegee
who had a lot more money than Ralph, but they weren’t any sharper. Years later, he told
me that when he was a trustee of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,
he got to know Abe Ribicoff, who was a member of Kennedy’s Cabinet. I forget what his
position was in the Cabinet . . .
NICHOLAS: I think he was the Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and
Welfare.
MURRAY: That’s it. Well, at a party, Ralph said he met one of the descendants of the people
who owned that haberdashery in Oklahoma City, and it turned out that they were rela-
tives of the Ribicoffs. So after he had worked for a year at that haberdashery, he hoboed
to Tuskegee to save money.
NICHOLAS: That would’ve been right during the time when nine black youth were ar-
rested while hoboing on a freight train near Scottsboro, Alabama, and falsely accused of
raping two white women, resulting in the infamous Scottsboro Case.
MURRAY: Yes. The first trial of the Scottsboro Boys was in 1931, and Ralph hoboed to
Tuskegee in the summer of 1933. He got there early before school opened because he
wanted to see if he could get a job. At one time, he worked in the dining hall; he was a
cook. The dormitories at that time had what we called house mothers . . .
NICHOLAS: They’re called dorm mothers now.
MURRAY: Well, one of the house mothers in Sage Hall was named Mrs. Addie Long.
When Ralph arrived at Tuskegee in his hobo outfit, Mrs. Long took him under her wing.
She thought that he was another Booker T. Washington, that he was going to come, you
know, and clean up the room and win a scholarship. Mrs. Long recognized that Ralph
was a serious young man, and he was a serious guy. There was nothing frivolous about
him at all. His father had passed when he was just three years old. His mother was taking
care of him and his younger brother. He was very much on his own. Mrs. Long wanted
to baby him and pet him, but Ralph was the type of guy who didn’t even want anyone
to touch him. You know how guys come up and hug each other? Well, Ralph didn’t even
want anyone to shake his hand. I became one of the few guys who could shake his hand.
He had a certain level of reserve, but I’ve always thought that his reserved demeanor had
to do with the fact that he stammered.
NICHOLAS: I heard him give a talk once when I was a college student back in the 1960s,
but I didn’t notice that he stammered.
MURRAY: If he got excited, he would stammer, so he kept himself under control. I’ve
always thought his reserved demeanor had something to do with that. But when he would

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talk to me and get caught up in my stuff—and you can tell by the way I talk—your reserve
is going. But, to get back to Mrs. Addie Long, when school opened, Ralph’s trunk came
with that Esquire wardrobe in it . . .
NICHOLAS: He had a trumpet in that trunk, too. In Jervis Anderson’s article in The New
Yorker entitled “Profiles: Going to the Territory,” he quotes Ralph Ellison as saying that
after graduating from Douglass High School, he had to buy a trumpet because the one he
had been using as a member of the marching band belonged to the school.
MURRAY: Now you know Ralph was going to have a first-rate trumpet. So with that
Esquire wardrobe and that first-rate trumpet, Mrs. Long thought he had pulled a flimflam
on her. “That Ellison boy,” she said, “why he’s a jellybean!” I used this story he told me in
an episode in my novel The Magic Keys. The character is obviously based on Ralph.
NICHOLAS: That has to be Taft Woodrow Edison. You describe him as arriving on a col-
lege campus his freshman year carrying his meager belongings in a topcoat tied up with
a belt and thrown over his shoulder like a knapsack.
MURRAY: Yes, that’s the character based on Ralph.
NICHOLAS: I can think of other characters that resemble persons at Tuskegee you have
talked about so far, which, if this is the case, would make The Magic Keys a roman à clef. For
example, Mrs. Abbie Langford seems to be based on Mrs. Addie Long, Professor Carlton
Poindexter on Professor Morteza Drexel Sprague, and T. (for Thomas) Jerome Jefferson
on John Gerald Hamilton. Is that correct?
MURRAY: Yes, all of those characters are based on people I knew at Tuskegee.
NICHOLAS: Since we’re on the subject of Tuskegee, I want to ask you about a photograph
of you and Ralph Ellison standing in front of a car on Tuskegee’s campus that I saw in
the journal American Heritage, which published an interview with you. What’s the story
behind that photograph?
MURRAY: I was called back into the service because of the Korean War. Since I was a
college teacher, I was assigned to Air Force ROTC duty at Tuskegee in 1951, and Ralph
visited me in 1954. In the photograph, we’re standing right on Campus Avenue next to
Huntington Hall before it burned down. I’m in my Air Force uniform and Ralph has on
a tweed jacket and a snap-brim hat. We’re standing in front of my car, which was a 1954
Ford Victoria. Shortly after Ralph’s visit to Tuskegee, I was given an overseas assignment
in Casablanca in what at that time was known as French Morocco. That was 1955, and that
same year the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Ralph the Prix de Rome,
which was a yearly fellowship for residency at the American Academy in Rome. I arrived
in Casablanca on August 20 with my wife and daughter and Ralph and Fanny arrived
in Rome about the end of September or early October. Since I had my automobile, which

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was shipped over along with my household furniture, we drove up to Rome and picked
up Ralph and Fanny. That was the summer of 1956. We traveled to Venice, Spain, and up
through France to Paris. Ralph was able to renew his residency for another year, and he
and Fanny came back to the States in the fall of 1957. When my family and I came back to
the States inApril of 1958, Ralph met us at the port of the Brooklyn Naval Yard and took us
to a hotel. From there, we went down to Tuskegee, and then we drove to my next tour of
duty at the Air Reserve Flying Center in California by way of Memphis and Route 66.
NICHOLAS: That’s the same Route 66 that the Joad family took on their journey during
the Depression from Oklahoma to California in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
MURRAY: Yes. Steinbeck called it the “mother road.”
NICHOLAS:InTradingTwelves:TheSelectedLettersofRalphEllisonandAlbertMurrayedited
by you and John Callahan, there’s a letter that Ralph Ellison wrote to you in California
asking you to look up his brother, Herbert, who was living in Los Angeles. Was that the
first time you met his brother?
MURRAY: Yes. In his letters, Ralph would mention from time to time that he had a brother
who lived in California, but he told me he hadn’t seen him in years. I was basically his
functional brother. So when I went to California for my tour of duty, he told me to look
him up. The Air Reserve Flying Center was located at the Long Beach Municipal Airport
in Long Beach, California. He gave me Herbert’s address and phone number in Los Ange-
les, and I drove over to see him. Ralph was an altogether different guy than Herbert, but
you could see the strong resemblance. I took a couple of pictures and sent them to Ralph
because he didn’t know what Herbert looked like after all those years. They definitely
looked like brothers, and Herbert even stammered like Ralph.
NICHOLAS: When he wrote that letter to you in California, Ralph Ellison was teaching
at Bard College and living with Saul Bellow in an old “Hudson River mansion,” as Bellow
called it, in Tivoli, New York. I understand that you visited him while he was at Bard.
MURRAY: Yes. I would come back to New York from time to time on Air Force flights.
One of those times, I took the bus up to Bard, which is about two hours from New York,
and he met me at the bus stop. I spent the night at that old house that Saul Bellow owned,
but Bellow was in Chicago at the time. The next day, I rode back with Ralph in his car to
New York.
NICHOLAS: I want to go back to the time when Ralph Ellison was at the American Acad-
emy in Rome. You have written that it was during those two years in Rome, from 1955 to
1957, that he created “the crucial episode of the assassination in the Senate Chamber for
the novel that he hoped would follow Invisible Man within the next year or so.” Why do
you think he never finished his second novel?

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MURRAY: The one thing you can quote me on is this: it certainly wasn’t a case of writer’s
block. If anything, it would be different from writer’s block; it would be the opposite. He
had a lot of material. My impression is that he had difficulty in sequencing the material.
In other words, he would be at a certain point in a narrative sequence, and he would want
to combine two scenes. Well, you can cut just like they do in a movie when the director
shouts “Cut, two!” He would be in a “Cut, two!” transition, and he would get interested
in some character that he had created for the transition. The character is a light-skinned,
freckle-faced guy who collects records and does this and does that. So the transition could
be a little sketch or a short story, but, for Ralph, it might end up being a novella. You see
what I mean?
NICHOLAS: Yes. I remember Ralph Ellison himself saying in that 1955 Paris Review inter-
view that his difficulty with transitions, with getting, as he put it, “from A to B to C,” was
the reason why it took him seven years to finish Invisible Man. So your impression is that
his difficulty with transitions was the reason why he never finished his second novel.
MURRAY: Yes. He would get caught up in his characters doing this and doing that, so
then he would have to go back and foreshadow them some other place. It ended up being
a big manuscript. He’s got to have about two thousand pages.
NICHOLAS: So how do you see Juneteenth, which is only 348 pages, in relation to the
overall scope of his book?
MURRAY: When John Callahan, the editor, brings out the rest of the material, it will be like
some of the last works of William Faulkner—The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion . . .
NICHOLAS: These are Faulkner’s later novels that make up what is called the Snopes
trilogy.
MURRAY: Yes. The three novels are not really tightly woven, but they all come together
because they all are set in Yoknapatawpha County. So Ralph’s book might work on that
level.
NICHOLAS: The reviews of Juneteenth focus primarily on the relationship between Bliss
and Hickman, but I’ve heard you say that Juneteenth is about much more than their rela-
tionship.
MURRAY: That’s the narrative. For me, the most fascinating character in the novel is that
white newspaper guy . . .
NICHOLAS: You’re talking about McIntyre?
MURRAY: Yes. He’s somebody like James Reston or Walter Cronkite, and he’s in the
Senate when this damn thing happens. He starts going out to Oklahoma and looking all

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around and trying to put everything together, because we don’t know why Bliss got shot.
There’s nothing in Juneteenth that tells you why he got shot or who shot him, right? It’s
a full narrative, but it has gaps in it. We don’t even know how this guy got to be a sena-
tor. If you look at some of the excerpts published before Juneteenth, you’ll find this same
senator in a story like “Cadillac Flambé.” Remember when this senator is having a party
on the lawn of his mansion and some Negro in a white suit drives up in a white Cadillac
convertible and immolates it on the lawn and then gives a big speech?
NICHOLAS: Yes. That’s LeeWillie Minifees, who is a jazz musician. As you know, the
authorities arrest Minifees and put him in a straitjacket. The story ends with McIntyre
saying that he wants to question him to find out why he set his Cadillac on fire. In the
interview with John Hersey that I mentioned earlier, Ralph Ellison talks about what hap-
pens after Minifees is arrested. He says the authorities think Minifees is crazy and are
holding him in the observation cell of a hospital. It’s at that point that he says he had to
create a new character for the “Cut, two!” transition, to use your term. He describes the
new character as a Negro who works at the hospital and acts as an intermediary between
McIntyre and Minifees.
MURRAY: Now the questioning of Minifees to find out why he immolated his Cadillac
is McIntyre’s story, and he has a lot more stories to tell. This white journalist got to figure
out all this stuff; he’s got to dig it out. That makes a heck of a book. The problem with
Juneteenth is that it does not show the scope or the ambition of what Ralph was doing.
The man was trying to write something as big as Moby-Dick!