Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

  “Don’t thank me, son,” he said from the door. “He belongs to all of us.”

  I sat now facing the portrait of Frederick Douglass, feeling a sudden piety, remembering and refusing to hear the echoes of my grandfather’s voice. Then I picked up the telephone and began calling the community leaders.

  They fell in line like prisoners: preachers, politicians, various professionals, proving Clifton correct. The eviction fight was such a dramatic issue that most of the leaders feared that their followers would have rallied to us without them. I slighted no one, no matter how unimportant; big shots, doctors, real-estate men and store-front preachers. And it went so fast and smoothly that it seemed not to happen to me but to someone who actually bore my new name. I almost laughed into the phone when I heard the director of Men’s House address me with profound respect. My new name was getting around. It’s very strange, I thought, but things are so unreal for them normally that they believe that to call a thing by name is to make it so. And yet I am what they think I am …

  OUR work went so well that a few Sundays later we threw a parade that clinched our hold on the community. We worked feverishly. And now the clashing and conflict of my last days at Mary’s seemed to have moved out into the struggles of the community, leaving me inwardly calm and controlled. Even the hustle and bustle of picketing and speechmaking seemed to stimulate me for the better; my wildest ideas paid off.

  Upon hearing that one of the unemployed brothers was an ex-drill master from Wichita, Kansas, I organized a drill team of six-footers whose duty it was to march through the streets striking up sparks with their hob-nailed shoes. On the day of the parade they drew crowds faster than a dogfight on a country road. The People’s Hot Foot Squad, we called them, and when they drilled fancy formations down Seventh Avenue in the springtime dusk they set the streets ablaze. The community laughed and cheered and the police were dumbfounded. But the sheer corn of it got them and the Hot Foot Squad went shuffling along. Then came the flags and banners and the cards bearing slogans; and the squad of drum majorettes, the best-looking girls we could find, who pranced and twirled and just plain girled in the enthusiastic interest of Brotherhood. We pulled fifteen thousand Harlemites into the street behind our slogans and marched down Broadway to City Hall. Indeed, we were the talk of the town.

  With the success I was pushed forward at a dizzy pace. My name spread like smoke in an airless room. I was kept moving all over the place. Speeches here, there, everywhere, uptown and down. I wrote newspaper articles, led parades and relief delegations, and so on. And the Brotherhood was going out of its way to make my name prominent. Articles, telegrams and many mailings went out over my signature—some of which I’d written, but most not. I was publicized, identified with the organization both by word and image in the press. On the way to work one late spring morning I counted fifty greetings from people I didn’t know, becoming aware that there were two of me: the old self that slept a few hours a night and dreamed sometimes of my grandfather and Bledsoe and Brockway and Mary, the self that flew without wings and plunged from great heights; and the new public self that spoke for the Brotherhood and was becoming so much more important than the other that I seemed to run a foot race against myself.

  Still, I liked my work during those days of certainty. I kept my eyes wide and ears alert. The Brotherhood was a world within a world and I was determined to discover all its secrets and to advance as far as I could. I saw no limits, it was the one organization in the whole country in which I could reach the very top and I meant to get there. Even if it meant climbing a mountain of words. For now I had begun to believe, despite all the talk of science around me, that there was a magic in spoken words. Sometimes I sat watching the watery play of light upon Douglass’ portrait, thinking how magical it was that he had talked his way from slavery to a government ministry, and so swiftly. Perhaps, I thought, something of the kind is happening to me. Douglass came north to escape and find work in the shipyards; a big fellow in a sailor’s suit who, like me, had taken another name. What had his true name been? Whatever it was, it was as Douglass that he became himself, defined himself. And not as a boatwright as he’d expected, but as an orator. Perhaps the sense of magic lay in the unexpected transformations. “You start Saul, and end up Paul,” my grandfather had often said. “When you’re a youngun, you Saul, but let life whup your head a bit and you starts to trying to be Paul—though you still Sauls around on the side.”

  No, you could never tell where you were going, that was a sure thing. The only sure thing. Nor could you tell how you’d get there—though when you arrived it was somehow right. For hadn’t I started out with a speech, and hadn’t it been a speech that won my scholarship to college, where I had expected speechmaking to win me a place with Bledsoe and launch me finally as national leader? Well, I had made a speech, and it had made me a leader, only not the kind I had expected. So that was the way it was. And no complaints, I thought, looking at the map; you started looking for red men and you found them—even though of a different tribe and in a bright new world. The world was strange if you stopped to think about it; still it was a world that could be controlled by science, and the Brotherhood had both science and history under control.

  Thus for one lone stretch of time I lived with the intensity displayed by those chronic numbers players who see clues to their fortune in the most minute and insignificant phenomena: in clouds, on passing trucks and subway cars, in dreams, comic strips, the shape of dog-luck fouled on the pavements. I was dominated by the all-embracing idea of Brotherhood. The organization had given the world a new shape, and me a vital role. We recognized no loose ends, everything could be controlled by our science. Life was all pattern and discipline; and the beauty of discipline is when it works. And it was working very well.

  Chapter eighteen

  Only my Bledsoe-

  trustee inspired compulsion to read all papers that touched my hands prevented me from throwing the envelope aside. It was unstamped and appeared to be the least important item in the mornings mail:

  Brother,

  This is advice from a friend who has been watching you closely. Do not go too fast. Keep working for the people but remember that you are one of us and do not forget if you get too big they will cut you down. You are from the South and you know that this is a white man’s world. So take a friendly advice and go easy so that you can keep on helping the colored people. They do not want you to go too fast and will cut you down if you do. Be smart …

  I shot to my feet, the paper rattling poisonously in my hands. What did it mean? Who’d send such a thing?

  “Brother Tarp!” I called, reading again the wavery lines of a handwriting that was somehow familiar. “Brother Tarp!”

  “What is it, son?”

  And looking up, I received another shock. Framed there in the gray, early morning light of the door, my grandfather seemed to look from his eyes. I gave a quick gasp, then there was a silence in which I could hear his wheezing breath as he eyed me unperturbed.

  “What’s wrong?” he said, limping into the room.

  I reached for the envelope. “Where did this come from?” I said.

  “What is it?” he said, taking it calmly from my hands.

  “It’s unstamped.”

  “Oh, yes—I saw it myself,” he said. “I reckon somebody put it in the box late last night. I took it out with the regular mail. Is it something that wasn’t for you?”

  “No,” I said, avoiding his eyes. “But—it isn’t dated. I was wondering when it arrived— Why are you staring at me?”

  “Because looks to me like you seen a ghost. You feel sick?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a slight upset.”

  There was an awkward silence. He stood there and I forced myself to look at his eyes again, finding my grandfather gone, leaving only the searching calm. I said, “Sit down a second, Brother Tarp. Since you’re here I’d like to ask you a question.”

  “Sure,” he said, dropp
ing into a chair. “Go ’head.”

  “Brother Tarp, you get around and know the members—how do they really feel about me?”

  He cocked his head. “Why, sure—they think you’re going to make a real leader—”

  “But?”

  “Ain’t no buts, that’s what they think and I don’t mind telling you.”

  “But what about the others?”

  “What others?”

  “The ones who don’t think so much of me?”

  “Them’s the ones I haven’t heard about, son.”

  “But I must have some enemies,” I said.

  “Sure, I guess everybody has ’em, but I never heard of anybody here in the Brotherhood not liking you. As far as folks up here is concerned they think you’re it. You heard any different?”

  “No, but I was wondering. I’ve been going along taking them so much for granted that I thought I’d better check so that I can keep their support.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry. So far, nearly everything you had, anything to do with has turned out to be what the folks like, even things some of ’em resisted. Take that there,” he said, pointing to the wall near my desk.

  It was a symbolic poster of a group of heroic figures: An American Indian couple, representing the dispossessed past; a blond brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister, representing the dispossessed present; and Brother Tod Clifton and a young white couple (it had been felt unwise simply to show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a group of children of mixed races, representing the future, a color photograph of bright skin texture and smooth contrast.

  “So?” I said, staring at the legend:

  “After the Struggle: The Rainbow of America’s Future”

  “Well, when you first suggested it, some of the members was against you.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  “Sho, and they raised the devil about the youth members going into the subways and sticking ’em up in place of them constipation ads and things—but do you know what they doing now?”

  “I guess they’re holding it against me because some of the kids were arrested,” I said.

  “Holding it against you? Hell, they going around bragging about it. But what I was about to say is they taking them rainbow pictures and tacking ’em to their walls ’long with ‘God Bless Our Home’ and the Lord’s Prayer. They’re crazy about it. And same way with the Hot-Footers and all that. You don’t have to worry, son. They might resist some of your ideas, but when the deal goes down, they with you right on down to the ground. The only enemies you likely to have is somebody on the outside who’s jealous to see you spring up all of a sudden and start to doing some of the things what should of been done years ago. And what do you care when some folks start knocking you? It’s a sign you getting some place.”

  “I’d like to believe so, Brother Tarp,” I said. “As long as I have the people with me I’ll believe in what I’m doing.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “When things get rough it kind of helps to know you got support—” His voice broke off and he seemed to stare down at me, although he faced me at eye level across the desk.

  “What is it, Brother Tarp?”

  “You from down South, ain’t you, son?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He turned in his chair, sliding one hand into his pocket as he rested his chin upon the other. “I don’t really have the words to say what just come into my head, son. You see, I was down there for a long time before I come up here, and when I did come up they was after me. What I mean is, I had to escape, I had to come a-running.”

  “I guess I did too, in a way,” I said.

  “You mean they were after you too?”

  “Not really, Brother Tarp, I just feel that way.”

  “Well this ain’t exactly the same thing,” he said. “You notice this limp I got?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I wasn’t always lame, and I’m not really now ‘cause the doctors can’t find anything wrong with that leg. They say it’s sound as a piece of steel. What I mean is I got this limp from dragging a chain.”

  I couldn’t see it in his face or hear it in his speech, yet I knew he was neither lying nor trying to shock me. I shook my head.

  “Sure,” he said. “Nobody knows that about me, they just think I got rheumatism. But it was the chain, and after nineteen years I haven’t been able to stop dragging my leg.”

  “Nineteen years!”

  “Nineteen years, six months and two days. And what I did wasn’t much; that is, it wasn’t much when I did it. But after all that time it changed into something else and it seemed to be as bad as they said it was. All that time made it bad. I paid for it with everything I had but my life. I lost my wife and my boys and my piece of land. So what started out as an argument between a couple of men turned out to be a crime worth nineteen years of my life.”

  “What on earth did you do, Brother Tarp?”

  “I said no to a man who wanted to take something from me; that’s what it cost me for saying no, and even now the debt ain’t fully paid and will never be paid in their terms.”

  A pain throbbed in my throat and I felt a kind of numb despair. Nineteen years! And here he was talking quietly to me and this no doubt the first time he’d tried to tell anyone about it. But why me, I thought, why pick me?

  “I said no,” he said. “I said hell, no! And I kept saying no until I broke the chain and left.”

  “But how?”

  “They let me get close to the dogs once in a while, that’s how. I made friends with them dogs and I waited. Down there you really learn how to wait. I waited nineteen years and then one morning when the river was flooding I left. They thought I was one of them who got drowned when the levee broke, but I done broke the chain and gone. I was standing in the mud holding a long-handled shovel and I asked myself, Tarp, can you make it? And inside me I said yes; all that water and mud and rain said yes, and I took off.”

  Suddenly he gave a laugh so gay it startled me.

  “I’m tellin’ it better’n I ever thought I could,” he said, fishing in his pocket and removing something that looked like an oilskin tobacco pouch, from which he removed an object wrapped in a handkerchief.

  “I’ve been looking for freedom ever since, son. And sometimes I’ve done all right. Up to these here hard times I did very well, considering that I’m a man whose health is not too good. But even when times were best for me I remembered. Because I didn’t want to forget those nineteen years I just kind of held on to this as a keepsake and a reminder.”

  He was unwrapping the object now and I watched his old man’s hands.

  “I’d like to pass it on to you, son. There,” he said, handing it to me. “Funny thing to give somebody, but I think it’s got a heap of signifying wrapped up in it and it might help you remember what we’re really fighting against. I don’t think of it in terms of but two words, yes and no; but it signifies a heap more …”

  I saw him place his hand on the desk. “Brother,” he said, calling me “Brother” for the first time, “I want you to take it. I guess it’s a kind of luck piece. Anyway, it’s the one I filed to get away.”

  I took it in my hand, a thick dark, oily piece of filed steel that had been twisted open and forced partly back into place, on which I saw marks that might have been made by the blade of a hatchet. It was such a link as I had seen on Bledsoe’s desk, only while that one had been smooth, Tarp’s bore the marks of haste and violence, looking as though it had been attacked and conquered before it stubbornly yielded.

  I looked at him and shook my head as he watched me inscrutably. Finding no words to ask him more about it, I slipped the link over my knuckles and struck it sharply against the desk.

  Brother Tarp chuckled. “Now there’s a way I never thought of using it,” he said. “It’s pretty good. It’s pretty good.”

  “But why do you give it to me, Brother Tarp?”

  “Because I have to, I guess. Now do
n’t go trying to get me to say what I can’t. You’re the talker, not me,” he said, getting up and limping toward the door. “It was, lucky to me and I think it might be lucky to you. You just keep it with you and look at it once in a while. Course, if you get tired of it, why, give it back.”

  “Oh, no,” I called after him, “I want it and I think I understand. Thanks for giving it to me.”

  I looked at the dark band of metal against my fist and dropped it upon the anonymous letter. I neither wanted it nor knew what to do with it; although there was no question of keeping it if for no other reason than that I felt that Brother Tarp’s gesture in offering it was of some deeply felt significance which I was compelled to respect. Something, perhaps, like a man passing on to his son his own father’s watch, which the son accepted not because he wanted the old-fashioned timepiece for itself, but because of the overtones of unstated seriousness and solemnity of the paternal gesture which at once joined him with his ancestors, marked a high point of his present, and promised a concreteness to his nebulous and chaotic future. And now I remembered that if I had returned home instead of coming north my father would have given me my grandfather’s old-fashioned Hamilton, with its long, burr-headed winding stem. Well, so my brother would get it and I’d never wanted it anyway. What were they doing now, I brooded, suddenly sick for home.

  I could feel the air from the window hot against my neck now as through the smell of morning coffee I heard a throaty voice singing with a mixture of laughter and solemnity:

  Don’t come early in the morning

  Neither in the heat of the day

  But come in the sweet cool of the

  Evening and wash my sins away …

  A whole series of memories started to well up, but I threw them off. There was no time for memory, for all its images were of times passed.

  There had been only a few minutes from the time that I’d called in Brother Tarp about the letter and his leaving, but it seemed as though I’d plunged down a well of years. I looked calmly now at the writing which, for a moment, had shaken my total structure of certainty, and was glad that Brother Tarp had been there to be called rather than Clifton or some of the others before whom I would have been ashamed of my panic. Instead he’d left me soberly confident. Perhaps from the shock of seeming to see my grandfather looking through Tarp’s eyes, perhaps through the calmness of his voice alone, or perhaps through his story and his link of chain, he had restored my perspective.