Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “Oh, burning,” he said, clearing his throat. “Well, you’ll get over it, son. Saint Paul’s got something to say about that. But you take old Jack Johnson’s advice and take cold showers, eat pickled walnuts, and think distant thoughts. Besides, son, nurses are dedicated to the Lord—at least when they’re on duty.”

  And before I could reply or explain, he was snoring again. I shook my head and went back and sat down. He appeared in calm sleep now, his chin against his chest, but he’d succeeded in making my thoughts even more turbulent.

  And now, for all my desire to deny it, I sensed a plot, scaled to huge democratic proportions, having as its driving and malicious essence the feat of selecting for its victim, not some American dignitary or captain of industry or hero of the intellect—i.e., someone of Vannec’s own stature—but some unimportant, near-anonymous common man such as I. I realized that this resounded with delusions of grandeur; indeed, it was as though a squadron of bombers were dispatched to pinpoint Joe Doe with the latest in bomb-sights for the express purpose of blasting him with ten megatons of Silly Putty, that defining substance of our own stoned age and of which it is both product and symbol. But the feeling not only persisted, it grew.

  And why aim at Joe Doe? I asked myself. Ah, but here, I thought, is where Vannec is most clever. It is because Joe Doe is the nut who holds the entire complex of highly unstable political machinery together. Hit him hard enough, give him a sudden left-handed wrenching, and the whole business gets the jitters, falls apart! He shakes, the next man shakes, you and I shake, those around us do a shake-shake, and the tremors move swiftly out across the countryside. Joe Doe shakes and yells, and the next thing you know everyone is shaking and yelling. Soon it becomes a contest with everyone trying to outdo the other. Then the politicians get into the act and promote the shaking. Then the magazine writers move in along with the village intellectuals, the provincials, exradicals, pseudo-avant-gardists, the parochial savants, and the radical hipsters, and hysteria itself becomes ashamed before all of the extremes committed.

  For instance, in Salzburg once, while on my first trip to peacetime Europe, I was dining at a restaurant near the Festung where it was the custom for the host to place upon the tables miniature versions of the guests’ national flags. It was a pleasant custom, usually evocative of national pride and quite productive of friendly inter-table conversation—truly a civilizing custom. Now this evening, since there were French, English, Australian, Belgian, Swiss, Italian, and American nationals present, their flags shone brightly throughout the room, and while the four-piece orchestra played waltzes by the elder Strauss, the guests smiled and bowed to one another in an atmosphere of gustatory goodwill, national affirmation, and international good fellowship. I had been enjoying myself with a meal of wild pig, stuffed with wild rice and wild mushrooms, when I looked up to see a large group of Americans entering with their European friends. They were seated at a nearby table and were laughing and talking pleasantly when a miniature version of Old Glory was placed on their table. Then one of them, a poet of some reputation—which accounts, perhaps, for his charismatic effect upon his fellow countrymen—this gifted and highly volatile man suddenly grabbed the flag and—with a grand gesture—threw it beneath the table! I dropped my forkful of pork, the others fell back in slack-jawed shock, and I looked on with frozen disbelief as the poet leaped to his feet, yelling:

  “Chau—

  vin—

  ism!

  Con—

  form—

  ity!

  Self—

  de—

  termi—

  nation!

  Freeeeeeeeee—dom!”

  He then threw himself into so impassioned a speech that the waiters were brought skidding to a tray-banging, dish-crashing halt, the guests shot to their feet in neck-stretching confusion, and a table of hot-eyed Frenchmen leaped up yelling, “Down with the Plan Marshall!”

  Four little words, and all hell broke loose! And with the Mozart Festival in progress, there were many Americans present (including a knock-kneed American Negro wearing lederhosen, a Tyrolean hat, and smoking a meerschaum pipe), and I watched the hysteria hit them en masse. Some, following the poet’s lead, cast their flags under the table, while others—whether in agreement or simply out of embarrassment is a question—hastily thrust Old Glory under their coats or into their pockets, and still others ran from the premises. It was disgraceful. Even some of the Europeans were outraged and utterly bewildered. But others, sensing a show, cheered and waved their countries’ flags as the poet’s wild speech sputtered and raged with references to his highly distinguished forefathers, the Battle of Bunker Hill, the War of 1812, the feats and characteristics respectively of the Maccabees and the Radical Abolitionists, the tail fins of the Cadillac Coupe deVille, Søren Kierkegaard and Saint John of the Cross. And while the orchestra struck up a desperate version of “The Ride of the Valkyries,” the poet called for a march on the nearby American Consulate.

  The place was going like a teeter-totter, a roller-coaster gone berserk, when from out of nowhere there appeared a little black bowlegged GI whose nickname escapes me—Poppa Stoppah or Fathah Stophidt—down from Darmstadt in his immaculately polished jump boots, who pushed his way to the poet, trembling with emotion, and yelled:

  “Listen, you wild-eyed, Joady-looking sonofabitch, put that pappy-grabbing flag back on that table, or I’mah kick your butt ‘til your nose bleeds.”

  Oh, but his language was most foul—and sobering. At this, the poet fell back into his chair as though someone had struck him from behind with a club, his mouth agape and his eyes wildly rolling. But instead of waiting for him to comply, the little soldier snatched up the flag and, ducking down again, dumped the table, water glasses, silver, beer, and all, upon him. And then, waving the dishonored pennant aloft, he roundly denounced the dripping poet and all Americans present—including yours truly.

  Nor could I reply when he turned, looking straight at me, and asked, “Goddamit, what’s wrong with y’all? How come you’re looking at me? Even I never did anything like that, so what makes y’all think I’mah stand by and let a nowhere sonofabitch like him get away with it?”—a most perplexing question indeed, which, fortunately, no one tried to answer. I stood there trying to guess how much damage had been done to our national image, and I’m sure that the incident escaped a violent climax only because the poet suddenly came alive and agreed to hold the flag and repeat the Oath of Allegiance as administered by the indignant little paratrooper in a thick Mississippi accent.

  But, as though this were not enough of a spectacle for the round-eyed and by now utterly delighted Europeans, a madness of patriotic redemption swiftly caught fire. Whereupon each and every American present felt compelled to repeat the Oath, and had to administer it one to the other on a Gideon Bible, which some thief in the crowd just “happened” to’ve had with him. I joined in, there was simply no escape. It was enough to make a man shed tears.

  Sitting there in the hospital, the very memory made me all the angrier and more certain that M. Vannec had chosen me as his point of attack. Worse, his questions seemed to imply a low opinion, both of my intelligence and stability—and his aim was most accurate. Sitting there with my eyes focusing on his letter and with my mind throwing up wild scenes from the past, I suddenly, and for no rational reason, saw the image of a horse, a huge Percheron such as I’d seen during the war in the fields of Normandy. Rising some twenty hands in the hindquarters, she was moving along a frost-white cobblestone road in the dawn, stepping with that haughty, heavy-hipped, iron-shod yet delicate, matronly movement—

  Shift, hip, clop, clip, shift, strike-sparks, cloppity-clip—of such great beasts moving; over cobbles, ringing the stones, rocking so gently from side to side—a ship in a swell, a kite on a breeze—that her old dour-faced dozing farmer, resting high there on her rump, needs grasp only his pipe while the brass-studded harness gently jangles from her collar far ahead with the flowing of her mane. On
they come, clip-clop, ignoring the din in the dawn’s early light that precedes our advance to the small village square—

  Clop, shift, hips, shift, hooves, scrape-sparks, cloppity-clip—and now great vaporous apples are falling, steadily as she goes, to steam in her wake as she takes her time, switching the flies, tossing her wide prehistoric head—a great, broad fawn; fat, indolent matron of the fields, a creature of peace suddenly blocking the road to bring machines and men to a brake-slamming, spine-jolting, helmet-banging halt! And the old farmer yelling, “Eh? Eh?” as the air rings loud with curses….

  Now where in the hell did she come from? I wondered. It was insane, I know. Nevertheless, I felt as though M. Vannec had thrown such a mare from outer space and, with old Hickman astride, to hit me squarely on the head while I sat in the press gallery of the United States Senate. I knew this was preposterous. I even found myself laughing, but deep within myself, lest old Hickman think I’d lost my grip. Still, I couldn’t break my train of speculation. I was sure that Vannec was bent upon a policy of épater les Américains. I asked myself: Didn’t Comrade Fu Manchu force us to fight for perfectly worthless military objectives in Korea simply because they were worthless and thus of inestimable value to him, because no matter how many lives they themselves lost, they knew that we Americans would be rattled, as though fighting a dragon with an endless capability for sprouting heads? And didn’t Comrade Fu take advantage of the circumstance that we cling so tenaciously to the rational, to the “plan,” to the slippery surface appearance of reality, that we go to pieces when we confront the unexpected, the illogical? And especially in strange countries? Upset our frame of values, and you have us dead and gone. Ditto when reversed English, Russian, Chinese, Spanish—you name it—is used against us. We go into a spin, fall out of stance. No, McIntyre, I thought, you mustn’t keep to the national pattern. Calmly does it. Vannec’s timing could only have been coincidental, his letter has nothing to do with what’s happened, and he couldn’t have been aware that it would arrive when it did. Relinquish the last hero of your youth if you must, but don’t make him a scapegoat. You’ll have to take action, start talking, and reveal your state of mind to others. Wait until all of the results are in. Look to yourself! What has happened is but a coming together of disparate incidents. Vannec merely helped to jar you with questions, so don’t hold it against him. This is no time to kill the bearer of bad news or for shooting those who raise embarrassing questions.

  But immediately I asked myself if this was actually true and the argument started all over again. Such thinking is out of place in the U.S., I told myself. Science is against it. The times are against such primitive reactions, McIntyre. And even most of the primitive countries are becoming active in the U.N. The witch doctors are patronizing Brooks Brothers, the shamans are taking the M.D. degree and lining up with Sartre, Freud, Jung, Horney, Sullivan, and Norman O. Brown. They’re dabbling in the market, doing analyses for B. B. D. & O. They’re advising government. Even Negro ministers like old Hickman there have underground connections with U.S. senators. Former medicine men are shooting around the great capitals of the West in Jaguars, Rolls-Royces, and Mercedes SL 300s. Americans have lived the unexpected, unstructured life longer than any other people. Therefore they simply do not do certain things.

  Yes, but who, I asked myself, really knows what Americans will or will not do? How can you be sure? And I recalled an incident which had occurred in Rome where I had gone to visit friends on my way home from Salzburg. It concerned a dispute which developed among the members of a colony of Americans living in that ancient city of Christendom, cat cults, the evil eye, and la dolce vita, and took place in an old palazzo where the group was experimenting in communal living.

  It began either with some mild argument over a menu or the attitude which the American wives and women should hold toward the Italian servants—nothing of real consequence. But soon they were squared off in two passionate camps—which reminds me, wasn’t it another of our leading men of letters who said years ago that disruptions of class lines are productive of a type of social insanity? Which, I suppose, is a polite and scholarly way of saying that most Americans are nuts. For, logically, if there are no stable class lines in this country—as we so endlessly repeat—how can there be any norm of rationality? Is that a fair question, or am I merely projecting my own upset condition? Perhaps this explains our tendency to go off half-cocked at the slightest opportunity. Or, to put it in a whiter light, this is why we do as well as we do in all the sound and fury of this reeling world. Perhaps it’s when we come up against strange circumstances, when the world starts whirling to a different asymmetrical rhythm (or to no definable rhythm at all) that we really blow our tops. Strange personality types come out of the sunlight and do dark deeds. Anonymous figures appear and attack the illustrious. This is perhaps what happened with the opposing members of the colony. Soon, as I say, they were lined up on opposing fronts. One was led by an acquaintance of mine, a specialist in Greek tragedy, and the other by a small maiden lady who possessed, as my friends informed me, “bluest blood, blue stockings, and a nose downright indigo from having it stuck in places where it had absolutely no business.”

  A lean, thyroid type of stubborn will, great energy, and scornful eloquence, she was said to have measured personally every stone along the Via Appia Antica. With her blue-dyed hair and, at sixty-five years of age, weighing eighty-five pounds in her stocking feet and measuring seventeen inches in the tongue, she was capable, my friend said, of swarming over any opponent or group of opponents like a flock of crows attacking an owl—even if it were the Owl of Minerva. I was never able to learn the true cause of the dispute. Some said that it was over the servants and the state of the cooking, then someone hinted confidentially that although it started with these matters, it really became nasty when someone introduced the issue of the Civil War, General Sherman’s march, and the contrasting attitudes toward ritual and ceremony held respectively by Generals Grant and Lee.

  Whatever, in the ensuing argument this woman so infuriated the others that the next evening, when her name was mentioned at a cocktail party, the participants became so worked up that soon the place was an emotional shambles. We had been having a perfectly good time, drinking, reciting limericks, playing charades, and improvising verses—which, being the play of those highly cultivated and clever people, were quite ingenious and a witty delight to hear.

  But during the lull, when a thin, boyish-looking little composer, wearing thick glasses and a heavy forelock of black hair, pounded on the seat of a chair for order and uttered the fateful name, the colonists became so incensed that soon they were yelling at the tops of their voices, stamping the floor, smashing wine carafes, and before anyone realized what was under way they were chin-deep in a raving rite of primitive magic. Which, giving way to alcohol, frustration, yes, and to the heady sense of unrestraint which Americans seem to feel when they collect together in strange lands, they improvised right there on the spot.

  I watched a prominent sculptor (who the moment before had been improvising amusing verses) seize a piece of stove wood and a knife and in a flash he had whittled an effigy, protruding eyes and all, which he slammed angrily upon the cocktail table, shouting, “Here, damn her, is the image of the bug-eyed bitch who bugged us!”

  This brought a volley of angry cheers. Then I heard a tipsy, raven-haired Latinist, a lovely girl visiting Europe for the first time, yell, “Yes, yes, YES!” and saw her grab a pair of scissors and stumble off into a corner where she went through a swift and occult operation and returned to the center of the room waving a fistful of bright orange hair.

  “And here, dears,” she said, waving the tuft above her head with a grand gesture, “is royal red hair for the wooden head of the bug-eyed bitch who bugged us!”

  There were gasps of delight, both at the surprising contrast and the bravura offering and several of the colonists were seized with an image-making fervor.

  Quickly with lipstick, c
hewing gum, and pecan hulls, they assembled an ingenious mana-exuding, eye-fixing fetish, complete with orange coiffure, enormous breasts, delicate legs—although the original of the image was quite flat of chest and knocked of knee—carpet-tack teeth, and a gay red rag of a dress. I downed my drink in a gulp as they drove nails into it, scarified it with pocketknives and nail files, burned it with cigarettes, and spat upon it, all to the accompaniment of a great uttering of curses.

  A visiting Fulbright singer broke into a soaring and quite florid rendition of “I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead” which spurred the colonists to further extremes. The participants were jumping up and down now, and I watched a group lock hands and swing in a reeling square-dance circle around the modeling table on which the doll had been propped against a glass brick.

  Others knocked them aside by ducking under the chain of arms to squirt the fetish with fountain pens, to jab it with needles, hairpins—anything with a point or cutting edge. I pushed one man away as he tried to smash it with a small hand axe, only to have him swing at me, miss, and go shooting head-long into a corner where he crashed against the bottom of an upright piano. He lay yelling, “Praise the Lord and pass the goddamn ammunition,” then, “Somebody give me a fucking drink….”

  Now people were rushing into the room from other parts of the palace. Small, white-jacketed servants with bright eyes and gleaming hair, elderly scholars in bathrobes, fat ladies in wrappers and with hair done up in curlers. Someone slung a howling black cat into the room, and I saw it land atop the piano, where it stood arched-back and wild-eyed, spitting and striking the air with a wide-spread claw.

  The tortured doll was now doused with brandy and set afire, raising a stench of burning hair, cloth, and Strega. And in a flash the fetish took on the look of an insane gollywog, and this raised the pressure all the more.