The Invisible Manuscript

But Ellison just smiled and thanked his friend and quietly deemed that no, it wasn't, that those 200 pages needed more work, more revision and maybe even more work after that.

Perhaps in his lifetime Ellison had few friends as close to him as the critic and author Albert Murray. They overlapped as students at Tuskegee Institute, though Murray didn't meet Ellison until 1942 in Manhattan. Over the years, they dined together, exchanged letters, discussed family matters -- and, of course, that polar bear on Ellison's back, the second novel. Murray is 91. He has long lived in Harlem. He says Ellison had somehow persuaded his closest friends not to be concerned about the pace of his writing, that worrying about a deadline was pedestrian, given that he was trying to create something large and enduring: art.

"Friends of Ralph's -- and the critics -- were talking about publication and money in commercial terms," Murray says. "But Ralph was thinking about understanding human beings, the human condition. Ralph was like a painter. He'd need to go back and look at his work over and over. Of course, doing that, it becomes hard to satisfy yourself." He goes on: "The critics have one perception of literary things, a literary life. Writers have different perceptions. Who am I to have said how many times he should or shouldn't have rewritten certain chapters? It was a matter of him having a lot to say. He was dealing with a lot of heavyweight stuff with a certain level of sophistication and profundity. Well, you have to do it the way you do it. Creativity is not manufacturing."

In the Ellison mirror, too, says Murray, was the cascading reception heaped upon Invisible Man. "He was challenged by what he had done."

In 1994, shortly before he died, Ellison was still talking optimistically about finishing the novel. He told the New Yorker, "There will be something very soon." But he also revealed his inner struggle. "Letting go of the book is difficult, because I'm so uncertain," he was quoted as saying. "I want it to be of quality . . . When you are younger, you are so eager to be published. I am eager to publish this book." Now that Callahan was responsible for all those pages, he, too, was eager. But, like his mentor, he wanted it to be of quality. The three years that Callahan imagined it would take to produce the most complete version of the novel that he would title, Three Days Before the Shooting, came and went. Then another three years, and another three years.

To help him move the project along, Callahan had drawn in one of his students, a young scholar-in-training on the Lewis & Clark campus named Adam Bradley. There were not many black students at Lewis & Clark; Callahan seemed to know all by name.

He had no idea how much Bradley's background echoed the major themes of Ellison's work, all those questions of uncertain paternity and racial knotting up that has so haunted and identified America.

JANE LOUISE BRADLEY MET JIMMY LEE TERRY IN LOS ANGELES IN THE MID-1970s. She was white, he was black. Falling in love is falling in love. He didn't want children, though. When she became pregnant, the waters roiled. Long silences ensued. The single mother returned to Salt Lake City, her home town, for the child's birth. It was a boy, Adam, and Bradley moved back to Los Angeles with him. Being a painter, she liked L.A., liked being near the Pacific Ocean.

In first grade, a teacher told Bradley that Adam was nice, a child with a sweet disposition -- but that he couldn't read. Bradley was shocked. And she didn't like the tone in the teacher's voice: It had that edge of defeatism in it, as if the child were doomed. So she scooped up Adam and returned to Salt Lake City.

Jane Louise Bradley's mother, Jane Frances Bradley, had begun her own life on the mean side of the racial divide while growing up in Washington. "She came from a narrow-minded family," says the daughter, Jane Louise. But Jane Frances married Iver Bradley, a semiprofessional basketball player who had befriended black ballplayers and who would teach his wife about tolerance. Iver would not allow epithets to fly from the mouth of anyone in a home where he put food on the table.

Jane Frances became a teacher. "She was educated enough to get away from racism," says Jane Louise. Then Jane Frances became an American Civil Liberties Union official in Utah.

When Jane Louise told her mother that her child had been declared nearly illiterate, her mother told her it was nonsense. Jane Frances took the boy into her own arms. And over the next nine years, she home-schooled him.