Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  We had begun to sweat now, both from the press of bodies and the frenzy of gossip. It had become a lying contest. When, I wondered, would the security people be done and allow us to go and seek out the facts behind the shooting? I wanted to consult a policeman, but there was no space in which to move, and I wanted especially to move now that a rumor was being repeated which I consider of such unique nastiness that I was distressed to hear it again. It has to do with an incident in which the Senator is said to have gone to an ultra-extreme of unconventional conduct, and although it distressed me and I deliberately refused to listen, the details came alive in my mind with the vividness of a disturbing dream.

  Besides the Senator, two other people were involved, a highly respected Justice of the Supreme Court (now deceased) and a young man of twenty or so, all of whom moved like phantoms through my mind.

  The scene was an elevator in a government building, and I could see it all with startling clarity: the small automatic metal cage, garlanded with abstract laurel wreaths of antiqued bronze, with the Senator the first to enter, wearing a superbly tailored suit and broad-brimmed planter’s panama. He presses the button for the lobby. It moves, drops a floor, stops. The distinguished old Justice steps slowly in, lost in some profound judicial abstraction, his eyes looking straight through the Senator. The car falls, stops again. The young man enters with noncommittal countenance; then, looking up, he recognizes—doubtlessly with delight—the two important figures of Congress and Court. He moves uneasily aside, his eyes alight; it’s as though he has encountered two kings at a crossroad. The car moves again, seeming now to glide on frictionless air.

  The young man steals a glance at his fellow-passengers. There’s a clean smell of oil, metal, topped by a whiff of wintergreen. The Justice stands stiffly, he’s lost in thought, his eyes pale behind his glasses.

  The Senator smiles.

  The young man looks swiftly from face to face, and then away. The great men stand remote. He feels an obvious glow—perhaps like that which a toddler who has just reached the delightful, goose-stepping stage of walking displays when he struts about swinging his little arms in the familiar manner which a highly emphatic friend of mine calls “feeling good in his growing shoes”—he’s delighted heel and toe, head and sole. Great vistas of possibility spring wide before him. Bodiless voices whisper down encouragement from the clouds, the laurel leaves. He stands in a deep, dark gorge, looking up at two distant mountain peaks, one shining white in the sun, the other brooding blue in the icy shadow. Strands of patriotic music murmur in his ears. And before his inner eyes a marvelous eagle plummets screaming into the gorge to brush his face with the tips of wide, majestic wings; then up and away it swiftly climbs to cleave the high rare air. His heart pounds, he trembles, for he has been caressed by history and mystery. And then the elevator seems to do a barrel roll!

  He sees the Senator, still smiling, leaning forward as though to greet the Justice—then zzzzzzspat! and his heart and mind would deny the evidence of his own dear eyes. But there it is, the lenses of the old jurist’s pince-nez are flooded blind, the eyes obscured! And now the boy’s ears ache of anguished decibels unboomed, of shrieks unshrieked. His shoes inflate, his trousers sag, he’s in a spin, and a stench of doom has shrunk the intimate air. And through it all not a word is spoken. Floors flash past, flickering breathlessly as in a dream. His mind reels backwards in desperate reversal of the scene, but he can’t cast out his ravaged eye. The Senator looms, still smiling in calm unrufflement. And yet there, too, the startled Justice, the man of lofty vision also stands, dripping as with two suddenly acquired cataracts!

  The car revolves, the air expires, the young man’s mind is now a snarl of strings, a ruptured kite in turbulent air, a rampaging stagecoach with the driver shot dead from the seat and there the random-flying, slapping of the reins in nerveless hands and the shotgun rider dead drunk back in Dead-wood; a stampede of walleyed stallions; a panicked regiment in headlong flight dragging its tattered flag, stone-deaf to the rallying cry of shrilling bugles. His brain pops, swirls, becomes a pot of boiling spaghettini!

  Now the elevator seems itself disinclined to plunge to its Chthonian Nadir in such outrage. The boy’s mind boils, but still the pause, the smile, the blotted eyes, both burning like a branding iron. He looks from giant to giant but still the frozen silence. He waits for the action to complete itself, for his head to clear, but only the dropping of the car.

  It’s awful. I ache even to think of it, and how they survived I’ll never know. Doubtless the old jurist was saved from a stroke or heart attack only by his intense dedicated concentration on the law. As for the Senator, I would have imagined that the mere impulse toward such an act would have brought on general paralysis. Even now the very idea leaves my mouth a desert. In other words, I’m left quite spitless. So that here, let’s face it, I’m one with the young man. For both the Senator and the Justice were men of enormous capacity. They lived with fire and with ice, with sun and with lightning, with huge worlds of power, guilt, and aspiration. No wonder that the terrible impact of the gratuitous insult was sustained not by them, but by the young man, that eager innocent caught unaware between titans.

  The rumor holds that the boy was simply unhinged. He was running even before the elevator reached the lobby, running frenziedly in that tight place, and hammering the unyielding doors with his fists. And when the doors slid open upon the stately, high gold-leafed and becolumned lobby, he plunged through the crowd assembled there to ascend, knocking them about like ninepins, as he dashed for the street, jabbering like a madman.

  One man, annoyed by being so rudely pushed about, rushed out after the boy and saw him start into the stream of passing cars, screaming now, then whirling suddenly as though aware of the danger and running back onto the sidewalk, where he bumped into a blind man who happened, as fate would have it, to be tapping his way along. This seemed to enrage, to further unhinge the boy—those sightless eyes, that halting, three-legged locomotion—because, seizing the blind man’s lapels, he pushed him away at arm’s length, staring for a moment into that bewildered face, the two leaning there, poised in silent interrogation, the blind man with one foot upraised. And it was as though something in the man’s unseeing eyes threw the boy into a higher pitch of madness.

  Suddenly he screamed, “No, No, NO!” in a rising pitch of despair and cryptic denial. Whereupon he released the man, turned, and started off—only to whirl back and, running forward, seize the man’s white cane and struck him repeatedly, beating him to the walk, and when the blind man tried to escape on all fours, he was knocked flat and stomped upon. It was a swift, outrageous, savagely unrestrained assault, which ended only when three men leaped from a passing car, tackled the youth, and held him until the police arrived.

  It was just too shocking, and all the more so because this boy was no hoodlum. He was from a good family and far above the average in intellect and ambition. He is said to have won several highly coveted scholarships and prizes and, when only ten, was the undefeated winner of a nationwide contest in which a series of especially difficult puzzles designed by a group of metaphysicists were presented for solution. And yet, these accomplishments notwithstanding, he would have killed a blind man, no doubt about it. Now the youth is vegetating in an institution and of no aid whatsoever in reconstructing exactly what happened in the elevator. His hair fell out long ago, and now he sits for hours staring blankly at the ceiling, where he managed somehow to draw one blankly staring eye.

  Compounding the mystery, the police were said to have located Senator Sunraider at his office shortly after the disturbance, but he was cold sober and denied any knowledge of the incident. As for the Justice, clothed in the austere dignity of his high office and regarding any direct linkage between the Court and politicians distasteful as a matter of principle, he refused to discuss the matter. So the incident, which haunts my mind with threatening significance, has retained its dream-like mystery. What awful terrors rage in the young man�
�s shattered mind? What chaos actually erupted there? What deep depths of forbearance lie within the Justice’s dark ceremonial robes? What secret tensions boil beneath that crusty dignity? And who, as I say, knows the Senator? One thing only is certain: Truth is extremely difficult to come by, here in the Capitol.

  When I allowed myself to listen again, Morris Moskowitz, a book reviewer, was explaining that it was later determined that, while unquestionably brilliant, the young man had had a long history of personality instability, and that a week before the incident, on a night of the full moon, his mother had been startled into wakefulness by a presence in her bedroom and, springing up in terror, had found him standing beside her bed, weeping, in a state of stark nakedness.

  “Gentlemen,” Moskowitz said, “I don’t know what happened on that elevator, but if I know my Freud at all, this indicates beyond question that there was a screw loose there somewhere!”

  “Maybe the young fellow simply couldn’t stand being in a tight place with such powerful men,” Sweeney said. “Maybe he was suffering from claustrophobia.”

  “It’s possible,” Moskowitz said. “But we don’t want to overlook the powerful side effects which such accidental encounters can have. They can be pretty mysterious, pretty fateful. For instance, I recall hearing that years ago the late J. P. Morgan saw a woman bearing a babe in arms during the opening of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum and was moved to present her, right there on the spot, with a life membership for the child. But what happens? Before the child was old enough to make use of the membership he went stone-blind! I tell you, these things are mysterious! Fate gets into the act, various obscure lines of causation come together. Private destinies brew public awe!”

  “Yes,” the fat man said. “But now since you’ve mentioned accidents and mysteries, how about those other crazy things that the Senator has done? Like the thing at the National Gallery?”

  And this led to one of the wildest rumors of all.

  The occasion was all white tie and evening gown, all high style in a setting of great, transcendent art. With the ladies beautiful in their silks and satins, their diamonds and pearls, their mink and sable, with countless tiaras sparkling away like the stars. A scene of culture and power, an elegant scene of elegance; with the gentlemen handsome in their tails, their sashes, their beribboned medals, their diverse emblems of rank and status. It was, in a sense, a gathering of eagles and cooing doves. The rumor goes that, in such an august setting, mind you, the Senator noticed the courtly and quite prickly chairman of an important senatorial committee (a tiny old man and a Southerner, by the way), doddering past, his shirtfront gleaming. His wife, a famous Charleston belle still quite beautiful despite the frost of age, leaned gracefully on his arm, while in his free left hand he held a glass of bourbon. It was then, it was said, that the Senator broke off a conversation with the curator of a famous Boston museum and a certain political commentator and, moving abruptly forward as in a trance, seized this very severe, irascible old man—this living symbol of a gracious and formal way of life—and spilled his bourbon as he pinned his arms to his sides in a kind of genial bear hug, then, raising him up like some outraged puppet, some demented Punch, clear off the floor, began whirling him so swiftly that their coattails were set flying, creating a whirling totem pole.

  Talk of consternation—but wait! While this was going on, the Senator is said to have shouted, with that marvelous vocal projection for which he’s famous, these outrageously provocative words:

  “Now that he’s communed with great art, it’s time to swing my little nigger!”

  One can imagine the effect of this in the mere telling. The gathering gasped, the old man went apoplectic, his wife turns deathly pale. A waiter drops a tray of champagne glasses; the protocol officer of a foreign embassy, entering the room just as the whirling stops, stands with his eyes popped and his mouth agape, pointing frantically to the scene—as though everyone else in the room has had his head stuck in the pages of the Philadelphia Bulletin!

  Finally, the wife broke the spell by stammering, “Unhand my husband, you beast! Unhand him now, I say! Put him down this very instant!”

  To which the Senator answers quite gaily, “Of course, ma’am, yo’ah lawd and mahster and mah little jigaboo!”

  Then, as the gathering watches, he slowly lowers the old man to the floor, saying, “Come on down now, J.P. Come on down off your cross,” laughing in the friendliest manner. Then, taking the hand of the outraged wife, he kisses it three times quite gravely, and turning swiftly on his heel moves away and out. All of this very quickly, and his face was described as “suddenly masklike and grave, his eyes bright with a quick welling of tears.”

  “Now what the hell did he mean?” a reporter said. “What kind of a connection was he making between art and communication?”

  And now, shifting about and sweating, they discussed the Senator’s manhandling of the old gentleman and his use of the naughty, naughty epithet, and how our attitude toward personal insult and matters of honor had changed. Years ago, it was said, the old man would have sought out the Senator with a set of dueling pistols, a bowie knife, a Colt Navy Special, a commemorative shillelagh—and have done with him. He would have caned the Senator, “thrashed” him. But then they went into the fact that the great repercussion that had been expected to take place in the Senate the following day failed to come off. For this some blamed the telephone, others the District’s gossips and servants, through whose eager, swift, and countless retellings the cruelty of the act became quickly submerged and the malicious comedy implicit in the scene accentuated.

  It had soon become obvious that although the Senator refused to explain his action there was no real danger of retaliation against him in the situation. Because for all the high respect in which he was held, there was something quite pompous about the older man. His flinty and most bigoted principles, sharpened by his wit, had over the years drawn too much blood and had too long defied change and historical and political realities. During his endless tenure he made countless enemies by frustrating the ambitions of many of his colleagues, businessmen, minority groups, and labor leaders indiscriminately. So that far from being censured for his cruel act, the Senator emerged as something of an underground hero, a dragon slayer, a holy fool manqué.

  But as always, there was a sinister undertone throbbing beneath the Senator’s maneuver. Far from giving way to impulse, one of the men insisted, the Senator had acted with careful calculation; he’d stacked the deck. A few years ago, it was said, he had provided, quietly and without publicity and from his own pocket, a dozen generous scholarships for graduate students in American history. They were required to do nothing in return, simply to follow their own researches. However, it was gotten across to them that the Senator would be most pleased that if in the course of their work they would look into the court records of several cities of the old South and jot down any information concerning the blood relationship between the old families and their slaves and between contemporary members of these families and the descendants of the slaves who share their esteemed names.

  Our informant went on to say that the result of these researches was quite startling, even though he could not name anyone who had seen the actual documents. Nor is there knowledge that the Senator has ever discussed the material. Indeed, the scholars themselves have denied that it exists. Nevertheless, all who were said to have received the Senator’s assistance are now tenured members of the faculties of important Southern universities. Perhaps the information doesn’t exist. Perhaps they became innocently involved in a situation which many people find threatening, but there is no question but that the very rumor that such information exists, carefully arranged and codified by certified scholars, and in the hands of the Senator, makes some bloodstreams approach the freezing point. Nor is it unthinkable, as the gossip insists, that upon hearing of its existence, a number of people left for parts unknown. And whatever the truth of the rumor, there has been, without doubt, an
aura of impending revelation emanating from the Senator. It was as though he walked over in a suit of blackmail which not only rendered him invulnerable to would-be attackers, but intimidated their ability to act by threatening to turn some secret but forgotten weakness against them. Very few have been willing to take such chances.

  CHAPTER 4

  AROUND ME NOW a thousand questions were echoing through the hall, each concerning some contradiction of character, some trope, some scandal, some audacious Sunraider caper.

  “Did you know? Did you see? Did you hear?”

  They swirled about my head like a swarm of flies.

  Why? Why? But why?

  And it came to me that only yesterday I had overheard a most innocuous question which, although addressed to another, resulted in my witnessing not only one of the oddest incidents involving the Senator, but one of the few from which he could be said to have emerged less than triumphant.

  It had been a fine spring day made even pleasanter by the lingering of the cherry blossoms, and I had gone out before dawn with some married friends and their children on a bird-watching expedition. Afterwards we had sharpened our appetites for brunch with rounds of Bloody Marys and bullshots. And after the beef boullion ran out our host, an ingenious man, had improvised a drink from chicken broth and vodka which he proclaimed the “chicken-shot.” This was all very pleasant, and after a few drinks my spirits were soaring. I was pleased with my friends, the brunch was excellent and varied—chili, cornbread, and oysters Rockefeller, etc.—and I was pleased with my tally of birds. I had seen a bluebird, five rose-breasted grosbeaks, three painted buntings, seven goldfinches, and a rousing consort of mockingbirds. In fact, I had hated to leave.

  Thus, it was well into the afternoon when I found myself walking past the Senator’s estate. I still had my binoculars around my neck, and my tape recorder—which I had along to record birdsongs—was slung over my shoulder. As I approached, the boulevard below the Senator’s estate was heavy with cars, with promenading lovers, dogs on leash, old men on canes, and laughing children, all enjoying the fine weather. I had paused to notice how the Senator’s lawn rises from the street level with a gradual and imperceptible elevation that makes the mansion, set far at the top, seem to float like a dream castle; an illusion intensified by the chicken-shots, but which the art editor of my paper informs me is the result of a trick copied from the landscape architects who designed the gardens of the Belvedere Palace in Vienna. I was about to pass on when a young couple blocked my path, and when I saw the young fellow point up the hill and say to his young blonde of a girl, “I bet you don’t know who that is up there,” I brought my binoculars into play, and there, on the right-hand terrace of the mansion, I saw the Senator.