One of the writers who contributed to the Folklore Project was Ralph Ellison, who collected oral histories and folklore from black Americans to create stories about life in Harlem. Here, I discovered a connection to telling stories that was similar to mine-one that presented different perspectives on the “black experience.” While researching ideas for this project, I learned about the Works Progress Administration’s Folklore Project, which hired out-of-work writers to collect narratives about the American experience. “They couldn’t do a thing with that Sweet-the-Monkey,” Gurley said. He had used this power to rob banks, houses, and stores, and to elude white police officers. The story Gurley told Ellison was about a man in South Carolina called Sweet-the-Monkey who had achieved the ability to become invisible by cutting out the heart of a black cat, climbing a tree backward, and cursing God. Sometimes you would find people sitting around on Eighth Avenue just dying to talk.” I would tell some stories to get people going, and then I’d sit back and try to get it down as accurately as I could. “I went into hundreds of apartment buildings and just knocked on doors. “I hung around playgrounds I hung around the street, the bars,” Ellison recalled to an interviewer in 1977. Ellison, then a 25-year-old writer, was in a unique position to solicit stories from strangers: he’d been working for the Folklore Project, part of the government-funded Federal Writers’ Project, since the year before, collecting folklore from black New Yorkers. On a summer day in Harlem in 1939, on the corner of New York City’s West 125th Street and Lenox Avenue, Ralph Ellison met a man named Leo Gurley, and Gurley told him a story.

Ralph ellison