Ellison Family Home (1923) -- 822 East Fourth Street

Ralph Ellison's family continued to move households frequently in the early 1920s as the widowed Ida Ellison try to make ends meet for her young family. In 1923, Ida and brothers Ralph and Herbert moved to this home on East Fourth which was developing into a busy thoroughfare that would eventually become the heart of the northeast side.

Earning on average six dollars a week and often facing rent of ten, Ida Ellison found a job cleaning test tubes at University Hospital in 1923, and this, possibly combined with continued work cleaning hotels, provided her the luxury of moving up the social ladder to the house at 822 East Fourth Street. Fourth Street signified success to Black Oklahoma City. The Ellison family seemed to have lived uninterruptedly for a year at this location. The house on Fourth would become a home in Ellison's memory. “[T]here is hardly a week that passes that I don’t dream of home. Sometimes it’s the little house in the Eight Hundred block on east Second, one of [Edna Slaughter’s]; or again it’s 409 East Third, or most frequently, the little house at 822 East Fourth Street.” Later he not only appreciated the influential friendship he made with the artistic boy next door, Frank Mead, but the ready access he gained to the streetcar line as well as home-grown vegetables from his mother's garden: "[M]y mother was a former Georgia farm girl who kept a kitchen garden back when we lived next door to Frank Mead on East Fourth Street. She also raised chickens, sweet peas, and guinea fowl.” Though in 1924, Ida Ellison took her boys to live with her sister-in-law Lucretia Brown and later to McAlester, Oklahoma, 125 miles east, she moved them back to 822 East Fourth Street, a return likely to help seal its status as home in Ellison’s imagination. “...How memory fades! There was a time when I could remember every family on that block but now the best I can come up with are Randolphs, Bowens, Baileys, Haywoods, Bethels, Hyatts, Youngs (I.W.), Sanders (Lizzie), Williams, Crawfords, Price and McCleary.”

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.