Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

  “Here some flashlights over here,” someone called.

  “How many?” Dupre said.

  “Plenty, man.”

  “Okay, pass out one to everybody. They got batteries?”

  “Naw, but there’s plenty them too, ’bout a dozen boxes.”

  “Okay, give me one with batteries so I can find the buckets. Then every man get him a light.”

  “Here some buckets over here,” Scofield said.

  “Then all we got to find is where he keeps the oil.”

  “Oil?” I said.

  “Coal oil, man. And hey, y’all,” he called, “don’t nobody be smoking in here.”

  I stood beside Scofield listening to the noise as he took a stack of zinc buckets and passed them out. Now the store leaped alive with flashing lights and flickering shadows.

  “Keep them lights down on the floor,” Dupre called. “No use letting folks see who we are. Now when you get your buckets line up and let me fill ’em.”

  “Listen to ole Du lay it down—he’s a bitch, ain’t he, buddy? He always liked to lead things. And always leading me into trouble.”

  “What are we getting ready to do?” I said.

  “You’ll see,” Dupre said. “Hey, you over there. Come on from behind that counter and take this bucket. Don’t you see ain’t nothing in that cash register, that if it was I’d have it myself?”

  Suddenly the banging of buckets ceased. We moved into the back room. By the light of a flash I could see a row of fuel drums mounted on racks. Dupre stood before them in his new hip boots and filled each bucket with oil. We moved in slow order. Our buckets filled, we filed out into the street. I stood there in the dark feeling a rising excitement as their voices played around me. What was the meaning of it all? What should I think of it, do about it?

  “With this stuff,” Dupre said, “we better walk in the middle of the street. It’s just down around the corner.”

  Then as we moved off a group of boys ran among us and the men started using their lights, revealing darting figures in blonde wigs, the tails of their stolen dress coats flying. Behind them in hot pursuit came a gang armed with dummy rifles taken from an Army & Navy Store. I laughed with the others, thinking: A holy holiday for Clifton.

  “Put out them lights!” Dupre commanded.

  Behind us came the sound of screams, laughter; ahead the footfalls of the running boys, distant fire trucks, shooting, and in the quiet intervals, the steady filtering of shattered glass. I could smell the kerosene as it sloshed from the buckets and slapped against the street.

  Suddenly Scofield grabbed my arm. “Good God, look-a-yonder!”

  And I saw a crowd of men running up pulling a Borden’s milk wagon, on top of which, surrounded by a row of railroad flares, a huge woman in a gingham pinafore sat drinking beer from a barrel which sat before her. The men would run furiously a few paces and stop, resting between the shafts, run a few paces and rest, shouting and laughing and drinking from a jug, as she on top threw back her head and shouted passionately in a full-throated voice of blues singer’s timbre:

  If it hadn’t been for the referee,

  Joe Louis woulda killed

  Jim Jefferie

  Free beer!!

  —sloshing the dipper of beer around.

  We stepped aside, amazed, as she bowed graciously from side to side like a tipsy fat lady in a circus parade, the dipper like a gravy spoon in her enormous hand. Then she laughed and drank deeply while reaching over nonchalantly with her free hand to send quart after quart of milk crashing into the street. And all the time the men running with the wagon over the debris. Around me there were shouts of laughter and disapproval.

  “Somebody better stop them fools,” Scofield said in outrage. “That’s what I call taking things too far. Goddam, how the hell they going to get her down from there after she gits fulla beer? Somebody answer me that. How they going to get her down? ’Round here throwing away all that good milk!”

  The big woman left me unnerved. Milk and beer—I felt sad, watching the wagon careen dangerously as they went around a corner. We went on, avoiding the broken bottles as now the spilling kerosene splashed into the pale spilt milk. How much has happened? Why was I torn? We moved around a corner. My head still ached.

  Scofield touched my arm. “Here we is,” he said.

  We had come to a huge tenement building.

  “Where are we?” I said.

  “This the place where most of us live,” he said. “Come on.”

  So that was it, the meaning of the kerosene. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe they had the nerve. All the windows seemed empty. They’d blacked it out themselves. I saw now only by flash or flame.

  “Where will you live?” I said, looking up, up.

  “You call this living?” Scofield said. “It’s the only way to git rid of it, man …”

  I looked for hesitation in their vague forms. They stood looking at the building rising above us, the liquid dark of the oil simmering dully in the stray flecks of light that struck their pails, bent forward, their shoulders bowed. None said “no,” by word or stance. And in the dark windows and on the roofs above I could now discern the forms of women and children.

  Dupre moved toward the building.

  “Now look ahere, y’all,” he said, his triple-hatted head showing grotesquely atop the stoop. “I wants all the women and chillun and the old and the sick folks brought out. And when you takes your buckets up the stairs I wants you to go clean to the top. I mean the top! And when you git there I want you to start using your flashlights in every room to make sure nobody gits left behind, then when you git ’em out start splashing coal oil. Then when you git it splashed I’m going to holler, and when I holler three times I want you to light them matches and git. After that it’s every tub on its own black bottom!”

  It didn’t occur to me to interfere, or to question … They had a plan. Already I could see the women and children coming down the steps. A child was crying. And suddenly everyone paused, turning, looking off into the dark. Somewhere nearby an incongruous sound shook the dark, an air hammer pounding like a machine gun. They paused with the sensitivity of grazing deer, then returned to their work, the women and children once more moving.

  “That’s right, y’all. You ladies move on up the street to the folks you going to stay with,” Dupre said. “And keep holt them kids!”

  Someone pounded my back and I swung around, seeing a woman push past me and climb up to catch Dupre’s arm, their two figures seeming to blend as her voice arose, thin, vibrant and desperate.

  “Please, Dupre,” she said, “please. You know my time’s almost here … you know it is. If you do it now, where am I going to go?”

  Dupre pulled away and rose to a higher step. He looked down at her, shaking his thrice-hatted head. “Now git on out the way, Lottie,” he said patiently. “Why you have to start this now? We done been all over it and you know I ain’t go’n change. And lissen here, the resta y’all,” he said, reaching into the top of his hip boot and producing a nickel-plated revolver and waving it around, “don’t think they’s going to be any mind-changing either. And I don’t aim for no arguments neither.”

  “You goddam right, Dupre. We wid you!”

  “My kid died from the t-bees in that deathtrap, but I bet a man ain’t no more go’n be born in there,” he said. “So now, Lottie, you go on up the street and let us mens git going.”

  She stood back, crying. I looked at her, in house shoes, her breasts turgid, her belly heavy and high. In the crowd, women’s hands took her away, her large liquid eyes turned for a second toward the man in the rubber boots.

  What type of man is he, what would Jack say of him? Jack, Jack! And where was he in this?

  “Let’s go, buddy,” Scofield said, nudging me. I followed him, filled with a sense of Jack’s outrageous unreality. We went in, up the stairs, flashing our lights. Ahead I saw Dupre moving. He was a type of man nothing in my life had taught me to see,
to understand, or respect, a man outside the scheme till now. We entered rooms littered with the signs of swift emptying. It was hot, close.

  “This here’s my own apartment,” Scofield said. “And ain’t the bedbugs going to get a surprise!”

  We slopped the kerosene about, upon an old mattress, along the floor; then moved into the hall, using the flashlights. From all through the building came the sounds of footsteps, of splashing oil, the occasional prayerful protest of some old one being forced to leave. The men worked in silence now, like moles deep in the earth. Time seemed to hold. No one laughed. Then from below came Dupre’s voice.

  “Okay, mens. We got everybody out. Now starting with the top floor I want you to start striking matches. Be careful and don’t set yourself on fire …”

  There was still some kerosene left in Scofield’s bucket and I saw him pick up a rag and drop it in; then came the sputtering of a match and I saw the room leap to flame. The heat flared up and I backed away. He stood there silhouetted against the red flare, looking into the flames, shouting.

  “Goddam you rotten sonsabitches. You didn’t think I’d do it but there it is. You wouldn’t fix it up. Now see how you like it.”

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  Below us, men shot downstairs five and six steps at a time, moving in the weird light of flash and flame in long, dream-bounds. On each floor as I passed, smoke and flame arose. And now I was seized with a fierce sense of exaltation. They’ve done it, I thought. They organized it and carried it through alone; the decision their own and their own action. Capable of their own action …

  There came a thunder of footfalls above me, someone calling, “Keep going man, it’s hell upstairs. Somebody done opened the door to the roof and them flames is leaping.”

  “Come on,” Scofield said.

  I moved, feeling something slip and was halfway down the next flight before realizing that my brief case was gone. For a second I hesitated, but I’d had it too long to leave it now.

  “Come on, buddy,” Scofield called, “we caint be fooling around.”

  “In a second,” I said.

  Men were shooting past. I bent over, holding on to the handrail, and shouldered my way back up the stairs, using my flash along each step, back slowly, finding it, an oily footstep embedded with crushed pieces of plaster showing upon its leather side; getting it now and turning to bound down again. The oil won’t come off easily, I thought with a pang. But this was it, what I had known was coming around the dark corner of my mind, had known and tried to tell the committee and which they had ignored. I plunged down, shaking with fierce excitement.

  At the landing I saw a bucket full of kerosene and seized it, flinging it impulsively into a burning room. A huge puff of smoke-fringed flame filled the doorway, licking outward toward me. I ran, choking and coughing as I plunged. They did it themselves, I thought, holding my breath—planned it, organized it, applied the flame.

  I burst into the air and the exploding sounds of the night, and I did not know if the voice was that of a man, woman or child, but for a moment I stood on the stoop with the red doorway behind me and heard the voice call me by my Brotherhood name.

  It was as though I had been aroused from sleep and for an instant I stood there looking, listening to the voice almost lost in the clamour of shouts, screams, burglar alarms and sirens.

  “Brother, ain’t it wonderful,” it called. “You said you would lead us, you really said it …”

  I went down into the street, going slowly but filled with a feverish inner need to be away from that voice. Where had Scofield gone?

  Most of their eyes, white in the flame-flushed dark, looked toward the building.

  But now I heard someone say, “Woman, who you say that is?” And she proudly repeated my name.

  “Where he go? Get him, mahn, Ras wahnt him!”

  I went into the crowd, walking slowly, smoothly into the dark crowd, the whole surface of my skin alert, my back chilled, looking, listening to those moving with a heaving and sweating and a burr of talk around me and aware that now that I wanted to see them, needed to see them, I could not; feeling them, a dark mass in motion on a dark night, a black river ripping through a black land; and Ras or Tarp could move beside me and I wouldn’t know. I was one with the mass, moving down the littered street over the puddles of oil and milk, my personality blasted. Then I was in the next block, dodging in and out, hearing them somewhere in the crowd behind me; moving on through the sound of sirens and burglar alarms to be swept into a swifter crowd and pushed along, half-running, half-walking, trying to see behind me and wondering where the others had gone. There was shooting back there now, and on either side of me they were throwing garbage cans, bricks and pieces of metal into plate-glass windows. I moved, feeling as though a huge force was on the point of bursting. Shouldering my way to the side I stood in a doorway and watched them move, feeling a certain vindication as now I thought of the message that had brought me here. Who had called, one of the district members or someone from Jack’s birthday celebration? Who wanted me at the district after it was too late? Very well, I’d go there now. I’d see what the master minds thought now. Where were they anyway, and what profound conclusions were they drawing? What ex post facto lessons of history? And that crash over the telephone, had that been the beginning, or had Jack simply dropped his eye? I laughed drunkenly, the eruption paining my head.

  Suddenly the shooting ceased and in the silence there was the sound of voices, footfalls, labor.

  “Hey, buddy,” somebody said beside me, “where you going?” It was Scofield.

  “It’s either run or get knocked down,” I said. “I thought you were still back there.”

  “I cut out, man. A building two doors away started to burn and they had to git the fire department … Damn! wasn’t for this noise I’d swear those bullets was mosquitoes.”

  “Watch out!” I warned, pulling him away from where a man lay propped against a post, tightening a tourniquet around his gashed arm.

  Scofield flashed his light and for a second I saw the black man, his face gray with shock, watching the jetting pulsing of his blood spurting into the street. Then, compelled, I reached down and twisted the tourniquet, feeling the blood warm upon my hand, seeing the pulsing cease.

  “You done stopped it,” a young man said, looking down.

  “Here,” I said, “you take it, hold it tight. Get him to a doctor.”

  “Ain’t you a doctor?”

  “Me?” I said. “Me? Are you crazy? If you want him to live, get him away from here.”

  “Albert done gone for one,” the boy said. “But I thought you was one. You—”

  “No,” I said, looking at my bloody hands, “no, not me. You hold it tight until the doctor comes. I couldn’t cure a headache.”

  I stood wiping my hands against the brief case, looking down at the big man, his back resting against the post with his eyes closed, the boy holding desperately to the tourniquet made of what had been a bright new tie.

  “Come on,” I said.

  “Say,” Scofield said when we were past, “wasn’t that you that woman was calling brother back yonder?”

  “Brother? No, it must have been some other guy.”

  “You know, man, I think I seen you before somewhere.

  You ever was in Memphis … ? Say, look what’s coming,” he said, pointing, and I looked through the dark to see a squad of white-helmeted policemen charge forward and break for shelter as a rain of bricks showered down from the building tops. Some of the white helmets, racing for the doorways, turned to fire, and I heard Scofield grunt and go down and I dropped beside him, seeing the red burst of fire and hearing the shrill scream, like an arching dive, curving from above to end in a crunching thud in the street. It was as though it landed in my stomach, sickening me, and I crouched, looking down past Scofield, who lay just ahead of me, to see the dark crushed form from the roof; and farther away, the body of a cop, his helmet making a small white luminous
mound in the dark.

  I moved now to see whether Scofield was hit, just as he squirmed around and cursed at the cops who were trying to rescue the one who was down, his voice furious, as he stretched full length firing away with a nickel-plated pistol like that Dupre had waved.

  “Git the hell down, man,” he yelled over his shoulder. “I been wanting to blast ’em a long time.”

  “No, not with that thing,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Hell, man, I can shoot this thing,” he said.

  I rolled behind a pile of baskets filled with rotting chickens now, and to my left, upon the littered curb, a woman and man crouched behind an upturned delivery cart.

  “Dehart,” she said, “let’s get up on the hill, Dehart. Up with the respectable people!”

  “Hill, hell! We stay right here,” the man said. “This thing’s just starting. If it become a sho ’nough race riot I want to be here where there’ll be some fighting back.”

  The words struck like bullets fired close range, blasting my satisfaction to earth. It was as though the uttered word had given meaning to the night, almost as though it had created it, brought it into being in the instant his breath vibrated small against the loud, riotous air. And in defining, in giving organization to the fury, it seemed to spin me around, and in my mind I was looking backward over the days since Clifton’s death … Could this be the answer, could this be what the committee had planned, the answer to why they’d surrendered our influence to Ras? Suddenly I heard the hoarse explosion of a shotgun, and looked past Scofield’s glinting pistol to the huddled form from the roof. It was suicide, without guns it was suicide, and not even the pawnshops here had guns for sale; and yet I knew with a shattering dread that the uproar which for the moment marked primarily the crash of men against things—against stores, markets—could swiftly become the crash of men against men and with most of the guns and numbers on the other side. I could see it now, see it clearly and in growing magnitude. It was not suicide, but murder. The committee had planned it. And I had helped, had been a tool. A tool just at the very moment I had thought myself free. By pretending to agree I had indeed agreed, had made myself responsible for that huddled form lighted by flame and gunfire in the street, and all the others whom now the night was making ripe for death.