University Hospital

Ralph Ellison's father, Lewis was injured during an ice delivery when a block of ice shattered and a shard pierced his abdomen. Ralph was in the delivery wagon parked nearby. Lewis was rushed to this training hospital for the OU School of Medicine and died three days later on 19 July 1916.

On the northeast corner of Second Street and Stiles, stood University Hospital, the hospital to which Ralph Ellison’s father, Lewis, was taken after being injured by a large block of ice while making a delivery to Salter’s grocery store in the steamy month of June 1916. The block of ice had perforated Lewis’s already ulcerated stomach, and the doctors there were unable to shore up the wound due to the existing inflammation and infection. While his infection spread, hospital surgeons debated what kind of surgery to perform. After almost one month, Dr. L. E. Sauerport took a gamble on an experimental surgery, which failed. Lewis Ellison died the day after on July 19, 1916, leaving his wife Ida, son Ralph, aged three, and newborn son, Herbert, emotionally and financially devastated. Years later, Ellison recreated the scene with the visual tenderness of a screenplay writer: “We had said good-bye and he had made me a present of the tiny pink and yellow wild flowers that had stood in the vase on the window sill, had put a blue cornflower in my lapel. Then a nurse and two attendants had wheeled in a table and put him on it. He was quite tall and I could see the pain in his face as they moved him. But when they got him covered his feet made little tents of the sheets and he made me a joke about it, just as he had many times before. He smiled then and said good-bye once more, and I had watched, holding on to the cold white metal of the hospital bed as they wheeled him away. The white door closed quietly and I just stood there, looking at nothing at all. Nearby I could hear my mother talking quietly with the physician. He was explaining and she was asking questions. They didn’t talk long, and when they finished we went out of the room for the last time. Holding on to my fist, my mother led me down the silent corridor heavy with the fumes of chloroform. She hurried me along. Ahead of us I saw a door swing ajar and watched it, but no one came out, then as we passed I looked inside to see him, lying in a great tub-like basin, waiting to be prepared for his last surgery. I could see his long legs, his knees propped up and his toes flexing as he rested there with his arms folded over his chest, looking at me quite calmly, like a kindly king in his bath. I had only a glimpse, then we were past. We had taken the elevator then and the nurse had allowed me to hold the control and she laughed and talked with me as we went down to the street. Outside, as we moved along the winding drive into the blazing sun, I had told my mother but she wouldn’t believe me that I had seen him. I had though, and he had looked at me and smiled. It was the last time I saw my father alive.”

Callahan, John F.. Conner, Marc C.. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York City, New York. Random House, 2019.

Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: The Emergence of Genius. New York City, New York. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002.