What Happens to a Dream Deferred?

Ella: A Novel

In her debut novel, Ella, Diane Richards, Executive Editor of the Harlem Writers Guild and writer, playwright, and music producer, reimagines the origin story of Ella Fitzgerald, American singer, songwriter, and composer. Ella has been called the “Queen of Jazz,” “The First Lady of Jazz,” and “Lady Ella.” She won 13 Grammys in total, sold more than forty million albums, and is well-known for her first No. 1 hit in 1938, “A Tisket, A-Tasket” which she co-wrote and “I Found My Yellow Basket” her second hit which she later recorded the same year. Ella died in June, 1996.

Richards’ riveting portrait and reimagination of Ella’s childhood, adolescence, and teenage years reveals a young woman who would not allow her dreams to be deferred. Her story is a call to hold onto one’s dreams, no matter the obstacles.

She overcomes homelessness and emotional, sexual, and physical abuse to pursue her dream to dance and sing. Like the jazz musicians, artists, singers, and performers on whose shoulders she stands and who persevere despite racism, sexism, and poverty, the young passionate Ella persists and focuses on the light emanating from her dreams. She does not allow her dreams to dry up like “a raisin in the sun.”

Hughes’ poem Harlem, written in 1952, is an exploration of America’s treatment of Blacks in the years spanning the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights Movement. The speaker in “Harlem” asks:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
The poignant images in the poem epitomize the challenges and burdens confronting many Blacks during depression-era Harlem, obstacles which face Ella, her family, and the Harlem community from the 1930s through the 1950s. Richards illustrates how Ella’s response to barriers is to resist “festering like a sore.” She provides a message of hope by defying the odds and attaining her dreams.

The depiction of Ella’s youth in the novel is heartrending. Readers traverse Ella’s journey and witness her grief upon losing her mother, the traumas she encounters at her home in the Bronx as a result of a drunken and abusive stepfather, her move to Harlem where she comes face to face with Numbers Runners, drugs, and continuing poverty, and her placement in reform school.

Richards is a playwright and the chapters in her novel, like scenes from a play, provide vivid details of Ella’s interior and physical worlds. One can feel the emotional turmoil of Ella as she reflects on the death of her mother, hides in a closet to escape abuse, survives being buried alive while at reform school, and auditions to perform at the Savoy and Apollo. Her description of Ella’s view of depression-era Harlem captures the essence of the community.

Oh she loved this place, where colored folks’ industry and talent were welcome and celebrated. . . Businesses owners with no storefronts sold ice, shined shoes, peddled their own food – southern, Caribbean, or Harlem homestyle – right on the street. . . Black people had found a place to breathe and simply be. Harlem was home.

Harlem is also a paradox for Ella. Although it is viewed as home, she is confronted with a “reality which kept looming in front of her, undeniable. The gloss of Harlem was like some of the clothes that Tempie (her mother) used to take in for laundering: seemingly at first tightly woven and strong, but when submerged in soapy water, revealing worn patches, darned, threadbare, torn.”

Those who have read Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys will observe similarities between the cruel and derogatory treatment received by Ella in the New York Training School for Girls, the reform school in upstate New York where she is sent and the similar treatment that Elwood Curtis, the protagonist of Whitehead’s novel receives at the Nickel Academy, the reform school which is located in Jim-Crow Florida.

Writers of historical fiction have the challenge of using their imagination and creativity to tell a unique story based on facts related to the subject and on extensive research and analysis of the sociological and historical events of an era. Richards succeeds in this genre and provides readers with a deeper understanding of the origin story of Ella Fitzgerald, “The Queen of Jazz.”

Dr. Brenda M. Greene is Professor of English, Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Black Literature, and Senior Assistant to the Provost at Medgar Evers College, CUNY.