Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Don’t kid. What was that about our peaceful nature?

  I’m not—who could kid at a time like this? Perhaps we’re so peaceful because deep down we are bound by an agreement, by an unspoken but nevertheless sacred pact, based on an instinctive knowledge which the shooting and our reaction to it is already verifying.

  What kind of knowledge?

  Well, intuition. The intuition that we are held together by a delicate system of alliances and agreements as to the nature of reality, based on the recognition that whenever someone becomes rash enough or desperate enough to shoot one of these powerful figures, strange, furious forces will break free from behind their restraining walls and take us over.

  It’s quite possible….

  Possible? Isn’t that why you’re sitting here full of strange doubts, feeling that you’ve participated in the downfall of someone sacred—if not your father, then a rowdy, rascally, buffoon of an uncle?

  What? Sunraider? That’s outrageous! That … that …

  I looked up to see a tall physician moving swiftly up the corridor, bouncing along on white, ripple-soled shoes. He had just reached old Hickman when I heard the big voice again.

  “Doctor, how’s he doing?”

  The physician paused briefly, shaking his head.

  “Well, you tell him for me that I’m waiting,” Hickman said. “And, Doctor, tell him also that I’m praying and that I’ll keep on praying until he pulls through. And if he needs blood you can call on me. I’m strong and healthy, and I have never had the yellow jaundice or been sick a day in my life.”

  What on earth is this all about? I asked myself. And suddenly I began to shake again. My hands trembled, and I felt as though the floor had dropped away, leaving me suspended there in white space. And yet I could still see old Hickman hulking before me, and down the corridor the security man standing his post. I felt light-headed. I tried to shake it away by concentrating on old Hickman’s clothing: his soft pongee shirt with maroon bow tie, his straw-colored suit, his white suede shoes. He sat in tranquil stillness, like a huge stone, his legs crossed and his white socks revealing a clock of dark design. A white panama hat rested brim-down on the floor beside him, and it came to me that he was dressed as no minister that I’d ever seen. Yet, his clothing reminded me of the costume of someone I’d seen quite recently—but who? Actually, he looked like a wealthy man attired for a summer party at Newport which had taken place some thirty years ago. No, Hickman’s clothing didn’t tell me a thing; instead, it increased my sense of confusion.

  How long would the Senator be in surgery? I wondered. What was the state of his health? Then my mind leaped back to M. Vannec’s letter, but now, with the Senator shot and my nerves in an uproar, I wondered how I could have been flattered by its contents, its shower of questions. Yes, and with Hickman not only praying for Senator Sunraider’s life but offering to donate blood, it was as though M. Vannec had been playing a joke on me. I took out the letter and looked at it, and the longer I looked, the more the conviction grew that the letter was indeed linked to what had happened. It was part of a whole, tied not to the shooting itself—for that would have been either sheer insanity, or inescapable evidence of an international incident pregnant with war—but nevertheless connected to it in some way I couldn’t understand. This was wild, but who was to say that Vannec hadn’t plotted his moves so that I would be reading his letter during the very moment when the string was pulled or the button was pushed that released the towering monkey house of outrage which exploded with the shooting?

  No, I thought, it isn’t the shooting itself which has me shaking, but something far more insidious. Something which accounts for that old Negro sitting there beside the door. For after all, events may be shattering, shocking, violent, comic, tragic even, all in themselves. Or all of these at one and the same time, it depends mainly upon the observer’s point of view, his prior conditioning. I knew, because I had seen enough of violence and general human foolishness to be immune from simple shock. That’s what one gained from dealing with facts unemotionally, and I had learned as early as 1939 that human beings are capable of anything and everything—especially betrayal in the name of honor. I knew all this, but here Vannec’s letter got into it with its questions.

  The questions which arise immediately after a traumatic event—thesecause the maximum confusion. They envelop us like the smoke of a horrifying fire and remain active and torturous long after the event which gave them birth has become formalized history or been forgotten—which amounts, perhaps, to the same thing.

  Now, who knows this better than Monsieur Vannec? In his own country he is famous for raising those profound questions of a political-philosophical nature which upset wise men and ordinary citizens alike. He is forever explaining the meaning of everything—events, art, politics, stray blasts of torpid air. He informs the world with brain-rattling, spine-chilling eloquence just what is implied by historical developments, cultural fads, styles, costumes, slang, manners—all matters which usually leave me baffled. This is one reason I have admired him for so long. He gives me an assurance that logic is still a dominant force in human affairs, even though he frequently confuses me. As when he questions the existence of Europe and then expands the concept of Europe to include New York, Chicago, and Hollywood. As when he views the United States as European and then insists that the only really united states are those of Europe. As when he denies that Hitler left any effect on the political life of the postwar continent and yet wears a silver plate in his skull from a wound suffered fighting in the Resistance, and drives a Volkswagen.

  Yet the fault was mine. M. Vannec is possessed by a fury to have everyone live with that extreme consciousness and ultrasensitivity to events which marked his own sensibility. And for a time I had tried to follow him, but I simply wasn’t gifted enough. I had to settle for reading his articles now and then. Still, I had lost none of my admiration. But now the juxtaposition of the shooting, the Senator and Hickman, and Vannec’s letter, his ability to make meaningful patterns of apparently unrelated events suddenly seemed sinister. It threatened me from afar. Could it be that he had kept an eye on me during all the years since the war—when I had first laid eyes upon him—and had plotted and waited to post his letter at the precise moment when it would do me the greatest damage? Could it be that he waited until the shooting was set to occur before firing his questions?

  Oh, I knew that this was less than rational, but with the old Negro having called me “boy,” sitting there in his pongee shirt, questions of mere rationality were no longer binding…. I was swept along. In my mind I could see M. Vannec, impressive and grave (he was up to his neck in the Algerian trouble), turning from his affairs of State to divert himself with his plot against me. I tried to shake it, but a stream of images now pursued me like the scene from a movie which I had seen as a child, a scene of hell into which the lost souls, stripped to their loincloths, girdles, can-can panties, and brassieres, were made to enter by standing on their heads upon a large manhole cover which flipped over and plopped them screaming into a huge pit of fire, smoke, and sleek black pitchfork-wielding devils. I had dashed bawling from the theater then, but now there was no escape. I was struck by a fantasy in which I could see a great room cluttered with exquisite paintings and sculptures, objets d’art and fetishes, tapestries and leather-bound volumes—a virtual pirate’s treasure of the world’s art and literature—in which M. Vannec sat at his desk day after day, winter and summer, spring and fall, consulting his calendar from time to time and thinking of me. Finally, the fateful moment having arrived, he smiles knowingly and I could hear him say to himself, “Alors, McIntyre, you chose to forget me for all these years but I willed to remember you, and now, since you’ve devoted your best energies to reporting facts and describing appearances, let us have a little testing. Agreed, McIntyre? Yes? No? Very well, within a few hours I shall put to you a few questions—then let us see what you make of the facts!” He then calls a servant, a small evil-looking
man with thin hair and thick glasses, who whines and sniffles like Peter Lorre, a villain out of Dickens, and the Karamazovs’ bastard brother, all in one, and has him post the letter….

  Oh, it was wild, like the world of dreams; yet, there was a certain reality underneath, in that the circumstances which led to my initial encounter with M. Vannec were decidedly mysterious.

  It was during the Battle of the Bulge, when the ship on which I served as purser was anchored in the Seine below Rouen. I had gone ashore for a stroll in the town when, moving along the blacked-out quay, I had come upon three American infantrymen attacking one of my shipmates. It was a fierce, wordless struggle in which bottles flashed, glinted, and flew, and I had joined in. Then, when the fight broke up at the approach of a group of white-helmeted MPs, I had half-carried my shipmate as we escaped into the dark. A blow to the head had left him quite groggy, but when, standing close to a wrecked building in the dark, I had suggested that we stop at the military-base hospital to have a doctor look after his wound, he declined, explaining that he had to keep an urgent appointment up in the town.

  He was still quite rocky, but when I offered to go along until his head cleared, he insisted that he could make it alone. Then, moving away, he had gone a few yards when I saw him plunge to his knees, a dark shape in the dark, starting to crawl, and I had run up and helped him to his feet. Then, despite his protests, I had insisted on going along. He was angry, and as we started off he charged me with meddling—which wasn’t, I admit, entirely untrue.

  All during the journey across the Atlantic, I had sensed some mystery about the man, some undefined aura of wealth and comfortable living. Actually, he seemed more the type who’d have sought a commission as a cadet officer, as other wealthy young men had done. Instead, he’d signed on as an able-bodied seaman. On a small vessel a purser gets to know all of the crew, but before that night I had never gotten more than a few words out of him. There was something profoundly detached about him. Nothing on board seemed to interest him except books. He did his work and that was it. No argument among the crew seemed to arouse him, no union matter, no scuttlebutt. No talk of music or sports, no comparison of adventures with women in strange ports, nothing aroused his slightest participation.

  “Where are we headed?” I said.

  “To the cathedral,” he said. “And I can get there by myself.”

  “Not the way you’re stumbling,” I said. “You’re apt to get hit by a truck.”

  He still protested, but now my curiosity was aroused. Why the cathedral? Surely he didn’t plan to meet a girl there; the waterfront cafés were the place for that. Nor did he appear to be the type who dealt in the black market. Certainly he wasn’t bent upon a pilgrimage—unless for aesthetic motives, and even so the night was so dark that most of the time we couldn’t see our hands before us. But whatever his motive, I sensed that his need was urgent.

  We were going uphill now, and as his head cleared he pulled away from my assisting arm, and as we went staggering up the hill past the old Hall of Justice in the dark, I had to hurry to keep abreast. It was hot and the going was rough. Broken masonry and shattered glass lay over the road, and twice I had to help him to his feet. Then we were moving through the old marketplace and on beneath the great medieval clock (knocked awry by bombs and shell fire), and heading toward the square.

  Sometimes in the cold, breathless middle of the night I relive our approach to the cathedral, our emergence into the deserted square, where it looms like a mountain which was felt rather than seen in the predawn darkness, its roof smashed in, its stained glass removed, and its lower walls and buttresses protected by sandbags. I can still see my shipmate heading straight into the dark interior as though he had been there many times before. Perhaps he had during times of peace. I didn’t ask, I was too busy trying to keep up to speculate too much about it. But there we were, and I had no time even to try to penetrate the darkness about me, for now two maquis stepped out of the shadows with burp guns trained straight at us. This was a bad moment for me. The night before, the Germans had made a parachute drop of troops dressed in civilian clothing into the hills overlooking the town, and being sure that the maquis were searching for these, I thought us triply doomed: by our dress, by our semi-civilian status, and by the fortunes of war. I fully expected that we would be killed, swiftly and without interrogation.

  It was then I heard my companion’s excited whispering—he had the odd name of Severen—and we were being swiftly searched for weapons, then hurried along a path cleared through the broken masonry which cluttered the vast enclosure. As we moved along, I could feel the great walls of the edifice sweeping up, up, in great shattered curves to the dark dome of the sky, where the stars, there so far above us, showed like tiny lights stuck in the ceiling. I was awed by the sweep of it, and the very damage, the smashed incompleteness, made me realize as never before the grandeur of its inspiration. It was like watching two great arms reaching up to encompass all of heaven. And indeed, in that moment I could believe in heaven, no questions asked.

  Then came the sound of a voice which seemed, there in the shadows and vast space, utterly sourceless. It seemed, in my excited state, to rise from the walls or from beneath the broken masonry. And all the more because it was hardly more than a whisper. Afterwards, I learned that acoustical perfection was frequently a property of such buildings, but then I realized that my nerves had been rendered supersensitive by danger and by darkness, and I almost bolted. In that instant a scent of tobacco came to me, and I was aware that the voice had spoken in English. Then close by I saw the glow of a cigarette, and the sharply defined face of a man appeared, whom my shipmate recognized with a low greeting. And somehow the sharp, amused eyes which looked out of the fatigued face were as reassuring to me as to Severen. It was only for the briefest instant, then the two of them moved off into the shadows and I, still wondering what I had pushed myself into, found myself being marched by the two maquis through a labyrinthine darkness, and suddenly I was standing outside the towering walls.

  They showed me the path down to the dock area below and left me there, and I made my way, puzzling over the true identity of my shipmate, down to a Red Cross club near the Seine. There I found a gear-laden group of soldiers just back from the front lines standing in quiet, worshipful repose before an oil portrait of the singer Lena Horne. They uttered no word; they simply stood there gazing upward as at a brown goddess in an apple-green dress. It was, to say the least, quite odd. Leaving them at their communion, I started back to the ship. It was necessary to avoid two groups of brawling soldiers along the way, and to avoid a third up ahead, I stopped in a café for a drink. There were a few Frenchmen at the tables, and three GIs who stood at the bar looked up when I came in, studied me briefly, then resumed their conversation.

  “No, that’s not him,” one of them said as I waited for the bartender. He sported a moused eye.

  I ordered a calvados and as I drank I listened, hoping to learn if these were the men who had attacked Severen.

  “So how’d it happen, Cyril?” one of them said.

  “Oh, hell,” the one with the moused eye said, “Rooster and Ringo and me were up the street drinking in a bar when this seaman came in looking all nice and clean and one of the fellows called him Joady.”

  “Who did? You?”

  “Hell, no, one of the other guys. It was Rooster Mills. I don’t have a girl to worry about.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Oh, hell, we were just kidding, but the mother got mad. He said something about, ‘Soldier, did you call me Joady? If so, you must have received some pretty jazzy letters from home.’ Then he turned back and took a drink.”

  “Yes? So?”

  “Then Rooster said, ‘Aw, listen, Joady, don’t try to kid us, we know your type.’ So then the fellow looks at Rooster and says, ‘Fellow, you really must be cockeyed.’ And Rooster says, ‘Who’s cockeyed?’

  “‘You,’ the fellow says. ‘You’re cockeyed; coming ove
r, we lost five ships to the subs, and they’ll probably sink others before we get back. So if you can stand here in Rouen and call me ‘Joady,’ then, hell yes, you must be cockeyed.’ ”

  “So then what did Rooster do?”

  “Rooster told him, ‘Aw, you’re still a Joady, Joady.’ And the guy pushes his drink back on the bar and stands up. He says, ‘Yeah, and I’m sitting in a fine hotel room wearing silk pajamas and waiting with a bottle of cold champagne for your best girl to arrive.’ ”

  They laughed and slapped the bar.

  “Old Joady had him a pretty sharp tongue, didn’t he?” one of them said.

  “All of these Joadies have a sharp tongue,” Cyril said. “Too sharp.”

  “Was that when he hit you, Cyril?”

  “Naw, it was later.”

  “I bet he went on to tell you about the great contribution the merchant marine is making to the war effort and all that bull,” one of the others said.

  “No,” Cyril said. “But then Rooster turned to us and said, ‘What do you think, man, is he or ain’t he a Joady?’ and Tom said, ‘Well, he looks like a Joady,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, and he sure talks like a Joady,’ and then Rooster said, ‘Then, hell, I was right, so he must be a Joady.’”

  “Was that when he hit you, Cyril?”

  “Not yet! That’s when he picked up his bottle and started out. He said, ‘Man, I be damn if I’ll ever understand the military mind, if it’s got a mind. But since you all think everybody who rides ships is a Joady, I hope somebody back stateside is performing a few Joady-grinding favors for all three of you.’ ”

  They laughed.

  “What happened then, Cyril?”

  “The mother left then, and we took a drink and laughed about it. But then old Rooster got to thinking about his broad back stateside, and in two minutes flat he’s all red in the face and says, ‘Come on, I’m going to get that Joady sonofabitch,’ and we went out and saw the mother going up the road and caught up with him and the mother struck at Rooster and missed—and that’s when he knocked the living hell out of me! Man, that Joady sonofabitch could rumble like gangbusters! But if you think my eye is bad, you wait ‘til you see Rooster’s!”