Ellison Family Home (1929) -- 710 East Second

When Ralph Ellison's mother Ida married a third time, the family moved to a home on this site in the early 1930s, Ralph was a high school upper classman at Douglass during his residency in this house, but was frequently absent because of his active social life. This was Ralph Ellison's last home in Oklahoma City.

Ida Ellison married her third husband, John Bell, in 1929, and the widowed [or divorced] Bell moved in with Ida and her two high school-aged sons at 710 East Second Street, not far from the Rock Island Round House. “...In those days I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the tracks, switch engines made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late spring night I could hear Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, caring to me as clear as a full-bored riff on ‘Hot Lips’ Page’s horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar chords simmering up from a shack in the alley, it was easy to imagine the voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were some ideal native to the time and to the land.” The house at 710 East Second would be Ralph's last residence in Oklahoma City. Although Elllison's love affair with jazz kept distracted him from thoughts of yet another man in his mother's life, John Bell, seems to have been a courteous stepfather, though Ralph’s brother Herbert claimed that they were not on good terms. While a student at Tuskegee, Ralph corresponded with Bell, who at one point sent a small token to the struggling undergraduate, a one-dollar bill, adding that he wished it had been a hundred.

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

Ellison, Ralph. Living with Music. New York City, New York. The Modern Library, 2001.

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