“Eve’body knows ’bout Dabney Graves, especially the colored. He done killed enough of us.”
Todd had the sensation of being caught in a white neighborhood after dark.
“What did they do?” he asked.
“Thought they was men,” Jefferson said. “An’ some he owed money, like he do me …”
“But why do you stay here?”
“You black, son.”
“I know, but …”
“You have to come by the white folks, too.”
He turned away from Jefferson’s eyes, at once consoled and accused. And I’ll have to come by them soon, he thought with despair. Closing his eyes, he heard Jefferson’s voice as the sun burned blood-red upon his lids.
“I got nowhere to go,” Jefferson said, “an’ they’d come after me if I did. But Dabney Graves is a funny fellow. He’s all the time making jokes. He can be mean as hell, then he’s liable to turn right around and back the colored against the white folks. I seen him do it. But me, I hates him for that more’n anything else. ’Cause just as soon as he gits tired helping a man he don’t care what happens to him. He just leaves him stone-cold. And then the other white folks is double hard on anybody he done helped. For him it’s just a joke. He don’t give a hilla beans for nobody—but his-self …”
Todd listened to the thread of detachment in the old man’s voice. It was as though he held his words at arm’s length before him to avoid their destructive meaning.
“He’d just as soon do you a favor and then turn right around and have you strung up. Me, I stays outa his way ’cause down here that’s what you gotta do.”
If my ankle would only ease for a while, he thought. The closer I spin toward the earth the blacker I become, flashed through his mind. Sweat ran into his eyes and he was sure that he would never see the plane if his head continued whirling. He tried to see Jefferson, what it was that Jefferson held in his hand. It was a little black man, another Jefferson! A little black Jefferson that shook with fits of belly laughter while the other Jefferson looked on with detachment. Then Jefferson looked up from the thing in his hand and turned to speak but Todd was far away, searching the sky for a plane in a hot dry land on a day and age he had long forgotten. He was going mysteriously with his mother through empty streets where black faces peered from behind drawn shades and someone was rapping at a window and he was looking back to see a hand and a frightened face frantically beckoning from a cracked door and his mother was looking down the empty perspective of the street and shaking her head and hurrying him along and at first it was only a flash he saw and a motor was droning as through the sun’s glare he saw it gleaming silver as it circled and he was seeing a burst like a puff of white smoke and hearing his mother yell, “Come along, boy, I got no time for them fool airplanes, I got no time,” and he saw it a second time, the plane flying high, and the burst appeared suddenly and fell slowly, billowing out and sparkling like fireworks and he was watching and being hurried along as the air filled with a flurry of white pinwheeling cards that caught in the wind and scattered over the rooftops and into the gutters and a woman was running and snatching a card and reading it and screaming and he darted into the shower, grabbing as in winter he grabbed for snowflakes and bounding away at his mother’s, “Come on here, boy! Come on, I say!” And he was watching as she took the card away seeing her face grow puzzled and turning taut as her voice quavered, “Niggers Stay from the Polls,” and died to a moan of terror as he saw the eyeless sockets of a white hood staring at him from the card and above he saw the plane spiraling gracefully, agleam in the sun like a fiery sword. And seeing it soar he was caught, transfixed between a terrible horror and a horrible fascination.
The sun was not so high now, and Jefferson was calling, and gradually he saw three figures moving across the curving roll of the field.
“Look like some doctors, all dressed in white,” said Jefferson.
They’re coming at last, Todd thought. And he felt such a release of tension within him that he thought he would faint. But no sooner did he close his eyes than he was seized and he was struggling with three white men who were forcing his arms into some kind of coat. It was too much for him, his arms were pinned to his sides and as the pain blazed in his eyes, he realized that it was a straitjacket. What filthy joke was this?
“That oughta hold him, Mister Graves,” he heard.
His total energies seemed focused in his eyes as he searched for their faces. That was Graves, the other two wore hospital uniforms. He was poised between two poles of fear and hate as he heard the one called Graves saying,
“He looks kinda purty in that there suit, boys. I’m glad you dropped by.”
“This boy ain’t crazy, Mister Graves,” one of the others said. “He needs a doctor, not us. Don’t see how you led us way out here anyway. It might be a joke to you, but your cousin Rudolph liable to kill somebody. White folks or niggers don’t make no difference …”
Todd saw the man turn red with anger. Graves looked down upon him, chuckling.
“This nigguh belongs in a straitjacket, too, boys. I knowed that the minnit Jeff’s kid said something ’bout a nigguh flyer. You all know you caint let the nigguh git up that high without his going crazy. The nigguh brain ain’t built right for high altitudes …”
Todd watched the drawling red face, feeling that all the unnamed horror and obscenities that he had ever imagined stood materialized before him.
“Let’s git outa here,” one of the attendants said.
Todd saw the other reach toward him, realizing for the first time that he lay upon a stretcher as he yelled:
“Don’t put your hands on me!”
They drew back, surprised.
“What’s that you say, nigguh?” asked Graves.
He did not answer and thought that Graves’ foot was aimed at his head. It landed in his chest and he could hardly breathe. He coughed helplessly, seeing Graves’ lips stretch taut over his yellow teeth, and tried to shift his head. It was as though a half-dead fly was dragging slowly across his face, and a bomb seemed to burst within him. Blasts of hot, hysterical laughter tore from his chest, causing his eyes to pop, and he felt that the veins in his neck would surely burst. And then a part of him stood behind it all, watching the surprise in Graves’ red face and his own hysteria. He thought he would never stop, he would laugh himself to death. It rang in his ears like Jefferson’s laughter and he looked for him, centering his eye desperately upon his face, as though somehow he had become his sole salvation in an insane world of outrage and humiliation. It brought a certain relief. He was suddenly aware that although his body was still contorted, it was an echo that no longer rang in his ears. He heard Jefferson’s voice with gratitude.
“Mister Graves, the army done tole him not to leave his airplane.”
“Nigguh, army or no, you gittin’ off my land! That airplane can stay ’cause it was paid for by taxpayers’ money. But you gittin’ off. An’ dead or alive, it don’t make no difference to me.”
Todd was beyond it now, lost in a world of anguish.
“Jeff,” Graves said. “You and Teddy come and grab holt. I want you to take this here black eagle over to that nigguh airfield and leave him.”
Jefferson and the boy approached him silently. He looked away, realizing and doubting at once that only they could release him from his overpowering sense of isolation.
They bent for the stretcher. One of the attendants moved toward Teddy.
“Think you can manage it, boy?”
“I think I can, suh,” Teddy said.
“Well, you better go behind then, and let yo pa go ahead so’s to keep that leg elevated.”
He saw the white men walking ahead as Jefferson and the boy carried him along in silence. Then they were pausing, and he felt a hand wiping his face, then he was moving again. And it was as though he had been lifted out of his isolation, back into the world of men. A new current of communication flowed between the man and boy and himself. They m
oved him gently. Far away he heard a mocking-bird liquidly calling. He raised his eyes, seeing a buzzard poised unmoving in space. For a moment the whole afternoon seemed suspended, and he waited for the horror to seize him again. Then like a song within his head he heard the boy’s soft humming and saw the dark bird glide into the sun and glow like a bird of flaming gold.
ALSO BY RALPH ELLISON
“[One] of the most formidable figures in American intellectual life.”
—Washington Post Book World
GOING TO THE TERRITORY
The seventeen essays collected in this volume prove that Ralph Ellison was not only one of America’s most dazzlingly innovative novelists but perhaps also our most perceptive and iconoclastic commentator on matters of literature, culture, and race. In Going to the Territory, Ellison provides us with dramatically fresh readings of William Faulkner and Richard Wright, along with new perspectives on the music of Duke Ellington and the art of Romare Bearden. Erudite, humane, and resounding with humor and common sense, the result is essential Ellison.
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-76001-6
INVISIBLE MAN
First published in 1952 and immediately hailed as a masterpiece, Invisible Man is one of those rare novels that have changed the shape of American literature. For not only does Ralph Ellison’s nightmare journey across the racial divide tell unparalleled truths about the nature of bigotry and its effects on the minds of both victims and perpetrators, it gives us an entirely new model of what a novel can be.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73276-4
SHADOW AND ACT
With intellectual incisiveness and stylish, supple prose, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque landscape of Harlem. Throughout, he gives us what amounts to an episodic autobiography that traces his formation as a writer as well as the genesis of Invisible Man.
Nonfiction/Literature/0-679-76000-8
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Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
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Flying Home and Other Stories Page 17
