Sanctuary: When in Rome, do as Ralph Ellison did

In April 1956, Ralph Ellison wrote to his friend and fellow writer, Albert Murray, from Rome where he was a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ellison recounts his visit to St. Peter’s where he listened to the Pope. Rather than reflect on the Pope’s blessings, Ellison transforms the Pope into a backdrop for exalting the African American worship experience. He exhorts Italian worshippers to “elevate them a Mose, preferably one converted from one of the storefront cults” so he could “get in there and bring back some of the old vitality to the Church” (Letters 422).

The “vitality” Ellison associates with Black religious tradition and recommends to European Catholics captures his response to Rome in a nutshell. In fact, his sojourns across Europe repeatedly led him back to a deeper appreciation of Black culture, and he hoped to use his knowledge of African American experience to educate others. When he prepared for his first trip abroad to Salzburg to teach European students, Ellison declared, “I am interested only in helping them discover the complex truth of American reality. To this end, I commit myself” (unpublished letter, January 1954). Ellison continued to adopt a pedagogical posture in Rome even as he worked hard on his second novel.

Ellison’s response is not unusual for African American writers and teachers. The first time I traveled to Rome with my mother in the late nineties, we found ourselves at St. Peters on Easter Sunday. As the Pope gave mass in Latin, my mother took advantage of our time together to describe my father’s participation in the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama during the early 1960s. Our time in Italy coincided with my father’s tenure as pastor of a large African Methodist Episcopal Church outside of Atlanta where the worship experience was markedly different from St. Peter’s. I had never heard the details of my father’s collegiate activism that linked him to Martin Luther King, Jr. It took being in Rome listening to the Pope for my mother to share this history. Many Black writers and educators have found such European inspiration, and like me, used it to teach others about African American culture.

Ellison’s two-year appointment as a fellow at the Academy in Rome from September 1955 to September 1957 sparked his writerly productivity as he also intensely followed the Civil Rights Movement at home. In another letter to Murray from Rome, he crowed “I feel a lot better about our struggle though. Mose is still boycotting the hell out of Montgomery and still knocking on the door of Alabama U” (Letters 417). Intriguingly, Ellison highlighted different aspects of his Roman experience to different friends and associates. When writing to white acquaintances, he often emphasizes the charming countryside, artistic treasures and beauty of the people. He recorded a great deal of Rome with his camera. Writing to Ida Guggenheimer, Ellison exclaims, “Ruins, architecture, art, palaces, churches, and graveyards, my head is whiling with it all. I was somewhat reluctant to come here, but had I failed to do so I would have missed one of the major human experiences. Perhaps it is impossible to have a real idea of what human culture can be unless one visits Italy” (Letters 385). But Ellison rarely made such proclamations to friends like Murray. He was most fascinated by the treasures not found in museums or galleries. One of his favorite Roman haunts was the flea market. Fanny reports in a February 1956 letter from Rome, “This morning (as usual) we went to the Flea Market… where one can buy anything from junks to antiques. …Ralph is enslaved.” His thralldom led to long hours of searching for treasures such as gold-gilded picture frames, a copper water bottle, and a crystal inkwell. Ellison wanted to discover his own Roman valuables.

The juxtaposition of these impressions of Rome illustrates the city’s impact on his creative work. Ellison’s time in Rome corresponds to the early work he completed on the posthumously published Three Days Before the Shooting…. His voluminous drafts overflow with traditional art pieces, spaces overflowing with junk and trinkets like Jessie Rockmore’s house, and a persistent investment in Black folk culture. He develops episodes like the eviction scene in Invisible Man in greater detail in his second novel. Although Ellison describes his time in Rome as “exile” and admits, “there is hardly a week that passes that I don’t dream of home” (Letters 434, 427), his experiences in Rome energized his literary depictions of African American culture. Like my Easter Sunday mass with my mother, Rome provided an inspiring canvas for Ellison’s celebration of Black cultural experience.

When in Rome, he commemorated Blackness.

Dr. Lena Hill serves as provost at Washington & Lee University. Hill’s scholarship on Ralph Ellison is internationally recognized.

This story was originally published July 13, 2022 at 10:00 AM.