Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

  The more I thought of it the more I fell into a kind of morbid fascination with the possibility. Why hadn’t I discovered it sooner? How different my life might have been! How terribly different! Why hadn’t I seen the possibilities? If a share-cropper could attend college by working during the summers as a waiter and factory hand or as a musician and then graduate to become a doctor, why couldn’t all those things be done at one and the same time? And wasn’t that old slave a scientist—or at least called one, recognized as one—even when he stood with hat in hand, bowing and scraping in senile and obscene servility? My God, what possibilities existed! And that spiral business, that progress goo! Who knew all the secrets; hadn’t I changed my name and never been challenged even once? And that lie that success was a rising upward. What a crummy lie they kept us dominated by. Not only could you travel upward toward success but you could travel downward as well; up and down, in retreat as well as in advance, crabways and crossways and around in a circle, meeting your old selves coming and going and perhaps all at the same time. How could I have missed it for so long? Hadn’t I grown up around gambler-politicians, bootlegger-judges and sheriffs who were burglars; yes, and Klansmen who were preachers and members of humanitarian societies? Hell, and hadn’t Bledsoe tried to tell me what it was all about? I felt more dead than alive. It had been quite a day; one that could not have been more shattering even if I had learned that the man whom I’d always called father was actually of no relation to me.

  I went to the apartment and fell across the bed in my clothes. It was hot and the fan did little more than stir the heat in heavy leaden waves, beneath which I lay twirling the dark glasses and watching the hypnotic flickering of the lenses as I tried to make plans. I would hide my anger and lull them to sleep; assure them that the community was in full agreement with their program. And as proof I would falsify the attendance records by filling out membership cards with fictitious names—all unemployed, of course, so as to avoid any question of dues. Yes, and I would move about the community by night and during times of danger by wearing the white hat and the dark glasses. It was a dreary prospect but a means of destroying them, at least in Harlem. I saw no possibility of organizing a splinter movement, for what would be the next step? Where would we go? There were no allies with whom we could join as equals; nor were there time or theorists available to work out an over-all program of our own—although I felt that somewhere between Rinehart and invisibility there were great potentialities. But we had no money, no intelligence apparatus, either in government, business or labor unions; and no communications with our own people except through unsympathetic newspapers, a few Pullman porters who brought provincial news from distant cities and a group of domestics who reported the fairly uninteresting private lives of their employers. If only we had some true friends, some who saw us as more than convenient tools for shaping their own desires! But to hell with that, I thought, I would remain and become a well-disciplined optimist, and help them to go merrily to hell. If I couldn’t help them to see the reality of our lives I would help them to ignore it until it exploded in their faces.

  Only one thing bothered me: Since I now knew that their real objectives were never revealed at committee meetings, I needed some channel of intelligence through which I could learn what actually guided their operations. But how? If only I had resisted being shifted downtown I would now have enough support in the community to insist that they reveal themselves. Yes, but if I hadn’t been shifted, I would still be living in a world of illusion. But now that I had found the thread of reality, how could I hold on? They seemed to have me blocked at every turn, forcing me to fight them in the dark. Finally I tossed the glasses across the bed and dropped into a fitful nap during which I relived the events of the last few days; except that instead of Clifton being lost it was myself, and I awoke stale, sweaty and aware of perfume.

  I lay on my stomach, my head resting upon the back of my hand thinking, where is it coming from? And just as I caught sight of the glasses I remembered grasping Rinehart’s girl’s hand. I lay there unmoving, and she seemed to perch on the bed, a bright-eyed bird with her glossy head and ripe breasts, and I was in a wood afraid to frighten the bird away. Then I was fully awake and the bird gone and the girl’s image in my mind. What would have happened if I had led her on, how far could I have gone? A desirable girl like that mixed up with Rinehart. And now I sat breathless, asking myself how Rinehart would have solved the problem of information and it came instantly clear: It called for a woman. A wife, a girl friend, or secretary of one of the leaders, who would be willing to talk freely to me. My mind swept back to early experiences in the movement. Little incidents sprang to memory, bringing images of the smiles and gestures of certain women met after rallies and at parties: Dancing with Emma at the Chthonian; she close, soft against me and the hot swift focusing of my desire and my embarrassment as I caught sight of Jack holding forth in a corner, and Emma holding me tight, her bound breasts pressing against me, looking with that teasing light in her eyes, saying, “Ah, temptation,” and my desperate grab for a sophisticated reply and managing only, “Oh, but there’s always temptation,” surprising myself nevertheless and hearing her laughing, “Touché! Touché! You should come up and fence with me some afternoon.” That had been during the early days when I had felt strong restrictions and resented Emma’s boldness and her opinion that I should have been blacker to play my role of Harlem leader. Well, there were no restrictions left, the committee had seen to that. She was fair game and perhaps she’d find me black enough, after all. A committee meeting was set for tomorrow, and since it was Jack’s birthday, a party at the Chthonian would follow. Thus I would launch my two-pronged attack under the most favorable circumstance. They were forcing me to Rinehart methods, so bring on the scientists!

  Chapter twenty-four

  I started yessing them

  the next day and it began beautifully. The community was still going apart at the seams. Crowds formed at the slightest incidents. Store windows were smashed and several clashes erupted during the morning between bus drivers and their passengers. The papers listed similar incidents that had exploded during the night. The mirrored facade of one store on 125th Street was smashed and I passed to see a group of boys watching their distorted images as they danced before the jagged glass. A group of adults looked on, refusing to move at the policemen’s command, and muttering about Clifton. I didn’t like the look of things, for all my wish to see the committee confounded.

  When I reached the office, members were there with reports of clashes in other parts of the district. I didn’t like it at all; the violence was pointless and, helped along by Ras, was actually being directed against the community itself. Yet in spite of my sense of violated responsibility I was pleased by the developments and went ahead with my plan. I sent out members to mingle with crowds and try to discourage any further violence and sent an open letter to all the press denouncing them for “distorting” and inflating minor incidents.

  Late that afternoon at headquarters I reported that things were quieting down and that we were getting a large part of the community interested in a clean-up campaign, which would clear all backyards, areaways, and vacant lots of garbage and trash and take Harlem’s mind off Clifton. It was such a bare-face maneuver that I almost lost the confidence of my invisibility even as I stood before them. But they loved it, and when I handed in my fake list of new members they responded with enthusiasm. They were vindicated; the program was correct, events were progressing in their predetermined direction, history was on their side, and Harlem loved them. I sat there smiling inwardly as I listened to the remarks that followed. I could see the role which I was to play as plainly as I saw Jack’s red hair. Incidents of my past, both recognized and ignored, sprang together in my mind in an ironic leap of consciousness that was like looking around a corner. I was to be a justifier, my task would be to deny the unpredictable human element of all Harlem so that they could ignore it when it in any way interfered with
their plans. I was to keep ever before them the picture of a bright, passive, good-humored, receptive mass ever willing to accept their every scheme. When situations arose in which others would respond with righteous anger I would say that we were calm and unruffled (if it suited them to have us angry, then it was simple enough to create anger for us by stating it in their propaganda; the facts were unimportant, unreal); and if other people were confused by their maneuvering I was to reassure them that we pierced to the truth with x-ray insight. If other groups were interested in becoming wealthy, I was to assure the Brothers and the doubting members of other districts, that we rejected wealth as corrupt and intrinsically degrading; if other minorities loved the country despite their grievances, I would assure the committee that we, immune to such absurdly human and mixed reactions, hated it absolutely; and, greatest contradiction of all, when they denounced the American scene as corrupt and degenerate, I was to say that we, though snarled inextricably within its veins and sinews, were miraculously healthy. Yessuh, yessuh! Though invisible I would be their assuring voice of denial; I’d out-Tobitt Tobitt, and as for that outhouse Wrestrum—well. As I sat there one of them was inflating my faked memberships into meanings of national significance. An illusion was creating a counter-illusion. Where would it end? Did they believe their own propaganda?

  Afterwards at the Chthonian it was like old times. Jack’s birthday was an occasion for champagne and the hot, dog-day evening was even more volatile than usual. I felt highly confident, but here my plan went slightly wrong. Emma was quite gay and responsive, but something about her hard, handsome face warned me to lay off. I sensed that while she might willingly surrender herself (in order to satisfy herself) she was far too sophisticated and skilled in intrigue to compromise her position as Jack’s mistress by revealing anything important to me. So as I danced and sparred with Emma I looked over the party for a second choice.

  We were thrown together at the bar. Her name was Sybil and she was one of those who assumed that my lectures on the woman question were based upon a more intimate knowledge than the merely political and had indicated several times a willingness to know me better. I had always pretended not to understand, for not only had my first such experience taught me to avoid such situations, but at the Chthonian she was usually slightly tipsy and wistful—just the type of misunderstood married woman whom, even if I had been interested, I would have avoided like the plague. But now her unhappiness and the fact that she was one of the big shots’ wives made her a perfect choice. She was very lonely and it went very smoothly. In the noisy birthday party—which was to be followed by a public celebration the next evening—we weren’t noticed, and when she left fairly early in the evening I saw her home. She felt neglected and he was always busy, and when I left her I had arranged a rendezvous at my apartment for the following evening. George, the husband, would be at the birthday celebration and she wouldn’t be missed.

  IT WAS a hot dry August night. Lightning flashed across the eastern sky and a breathless tension was in the humid air. I had spent the afternoon preparing, leaving the office on a pretense of illness to avoid having to attend the celebration. I had neither itch nor etchings, but there was a vase of Chinese lilies in the living room, and another of American Beauty roses on the table near the bed; and I had put in a supply of wine, whiskey and liqueur, extra ice cubes, and assortments of fruit, cheese, nuts, candy and other delicacies from the Vendome. In short, I tried to manage things as I imagined Rinehart would have done.

  But I bungled it from the beginning. I made the drinks too strong—which she liked too well; and I brought up politics—which she all but hated—too early in the evening. For all her exposure to ideology she had no interest in politics and no idea of the schemes that occupied her husband night and day. She was more interested in the drinks, in which I had to join her glass for glass, and in little dramas which she had dreamed up around the figures of Joe Louis and Paul Robeson. And, although I had neither the stature nor the temperament for either role, I was expected either to sing “Old Man River” and just keep rolling along, or to do fancy tricks with my muscles. I was confounded and amused and it became quite a contest, with me trying to keep the two of us in touch with reality and with her casting me in fantasies in which I was Brother Taboo-with-whom-all-things-are-possible.

  Now it was late and as I came into the room with another round of drinks she had let down her hair and was beckoning to me with a gold hairpin in her teeth, saying, “Come to mamma, beautiful,” from where she sat on the bed.

  “Your drink, madame,” I said handing her a glass and hoping the fresh drink would discourage any new ideas.

  “Come on, dear,” she said coyly. “I want to ask you something.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “I have to whisper it, beautiful.”

  I sat and her lips came close to my ear. And suddenly she had drained the starch out of me. I pulled away. There was something almost prim about the way she sat there, and yet she had just made a modest proposal that I join her in a very revolting ritual.

  “What was that!” I said, and she repeated it. Had life suddenly become a crazy Thurber cartoon?

  “Please, you’ll do that for me, won’t you, beautiful?”

  “You really mean it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “yes!”

  There was a pristine incorruptibility about her face now that upset me all the more, for she was neither kidding nor trying to insult me; and I could not tell if it were horror speaking to me out of innocence, or innocence emerging unscathed from the obscene scheme of the evening. I only knew that the whole affair was a mistake. She had no information and I decided to get her out of the apartment before I had to deal definitely with either the horror or the innocence, while I could still deal with it as a joke. What would Rinehart do about this, I thought, and knowing, determined not to let her provoke me to violence.

  “But, Sybil, you can see I’m not like that. You make me feel a tender, protective passion— Look, it’s like an oven in here, why don’t we get dressed and go for a walk in Central Park?”

  “But I need it,” she said, uncrossing her thighs and sitting up eagerly. “You can do it, it’ll be easy for you, beautiful. Threaten to kill me if I don’t give in. You know, talk rough to me, beautiful. A friend of mine said the fellow said, ‘Drop your drawers’ … and—”

  “He said what!” I said.

  “He really did,” she said.

  I looked at her. She was blushing, her cheeks, even her freckled bosom, were bright red.

  “Go on,” I said, as she lay back again. “Then what happened?”

  “Well … he called her a filthy name,” she said, hesitating coyly. She was a leathery old girl with chestnut hair of fine natural wave which was now fanned out over the pillow. She was blushing quite deeply. Was this meant to excite me, or was it an unconscious expression of revulsion?

  “A really filthy name,” she said. “Oh, he was a brute, huge, with white teeth, what they call a ‘buck.’ And he said, ‘Bitch, drop your drawers,’ and then he did it. She’s such a lovely girl, too, really delicate with a complexion like strawberries and cream. You can’t imagine anyone calling her a name like that.”

  She sat up now, her elbows denting the pillow as she looked into my face.

  “But what happened, did they catch him?” I said.

  “Oh, of course not, beautiful, she only told two of us girls. She couldn’t afford to let her husband hear of it. He … well, it’s too long a story.”

  “It’s terrible,” I said. “Don’t you think we should go … ?”

  “Isn’t it, though? She was in a state for months …” Her expression flickered, became indeterminate.

  “What is it?” I said, afraid she might cry.

  “Oh, I was just wondering how she really felt. I really do.” Suddenly she looked at me mysteriously. “Can I trust you with a deep secret?”

  I sat up. “Don’t tell me that it was you.”

&nbs
p; She smiled, “Oh, no, that was a dear friend of mine. But do you know what, beautiful,” she said leaning forward confidentially, “I think I’m a nymphomaniac.”

  “You? Noooo!”

  “Uh huh. Sometimes I have such thoughts and dreams. I never give into them though, but I really think I am. A woman like me has to develop an iron discipline.”

  I laughed inwardly. She would soon be a biddy, stout, with a little double chin and a three-ply girdle. A thin gold chain showed around a thickening ankle. And yet I was becoming aware of something warmly, infuriatingly feminine about her. I reached out, stroking her hand. “Why do you have such ideas about yourself?” I said, seeing her raise up and pluck at the corner of the pillow, drawing out a speckled feather and stripping the down from its shaft.

  “Repression,” she said with great sophistication. “Men have repressed us too much. We’re expected to pass up too many human things. But do you know another secret?”

  I bowed my head.

  “You don’t mind my going on, do you, beautiful?”

  “No, Sybil.”

  “Well, ever since I first heard about it, even when I was a very little girl, I’ve wanted it to happen to me.”

  “You mean what happened to your friend?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Good Lord, Sybil, did you ever tell that to anyone else?”

  “Of course not, I wouldn’t’ve dared. Are you shocked?”

  “Some. But Sybil, why do you tell me?”

  “Oh, I know that I can trust you. I just knew you’d understand; you’re not like other men. We’re kind of alike.”

  She was smiling now and reached out and pushed me gently, and I thought, here it goes again.

  “Lie back and let me look at you against that white sheet. You’re beautiful, I’ve always thought so. Like warm ebony against pure snow—see what you do, you make me talk poetry. ‘Warm ebony against pure snow,’ isn’t that poetic?”