Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “That’s the ticket!” someone cried.

  “That’ll fix the black-hearted bitch!”

  “It’s just what she deserves!”

  “I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you dirty slut,” the soprano sang:

  “We’ll be glad when you’re dead, you dawg!

  We’ll all yell, ‘Hooray!’ in Rome

  When they ship your dead bones home

  We’ll be stoned when you’re gone

  You black bitch, you!”

  “Wait! Hold it right there,” a voice commanded. It was a jolly-faced brown-skinned fellow, holding up his hand. “I want to remind you fellow members that that bitch ain’t black, she’s blue!”

  “Come on, men,” someone yelled behind me, and suddenly four male members of the party plunged in, grabbing the doll, then whirled and crashed through the crowd and into the hall. I followed as they reeled down the long corridor and up a marble staircase as one man sang, “On away awake, beelooooved,”all the way to the offending woman’s door. Where, stumbling and cursing, they hung the doll to the knocker with a necktie. By now the party was reduced to a drunken and incoherent shouting, and in spite of my own drinking I was profoundly disturbed. What had begun as highly civilized and sophisticated play, a conscious sublimation of hostile emotions, had become a force which had swiftly swept the annoyed colonists into regions where I was sure they had never ventured before, regions where they would have been outraged had anyone suggested they might ever arrive—except, perhaps, a psychoanalyist in slow, private sessions. And now I feared that should the woman show herself she would be attacked most brutally.

  I watched as they hammered on the door, demanding that she appear, and when she failed to materialize they stood in a drunken row and, as by prearranged signal, relieved themselves thunderously against the oaken panels of her door.

  I reminded myself that these were all refined, scholarly Americans, people with whom I was proud to be identified. Doubtless their opponent was vastly provocative, and there was the added circumstance that they were living far from home and the scenes of their childhood, apart from the landscapes of their dreams, the countries of their minds. Indeed, all were dangling out of the familiar ridges and grooves which would have guided them at home. There they would have found quite adequate forms for dealing with both their emotions and their trying stone measurer. At home they would have ignored her, snubbed her. So, I thought, perhaps M. Vannec’s leading man of letters is correct: Lose your supports, and go into a spin. Fall out of your well-worn groove, and you skate in chaos. Perhaps our little colony was pushed by irrepressible forces like those which I felt myself.

  We’re all being subjected to strange forces these days, I thought. Not only from abroad but right here at home. Only yesterday, a man of fifty, an early pioneer in the sexual revolution, a master of ideas, ancient and modern, a Ph.D. in anthropology, sociology, and English literature, was convicted of seducing an eleven-year-old babysitter while occupying a stool in an Orgone Box—which is, I understand, a scientific device designed to capture from the air an elusive element which is said to be the source of the life force. In fact, the man’s defense was that there was such a concentration of life force within the box that he was compelled to his sad action. He insisted that the force was irresistible; he had been bombarded to supersaturation with orgone, that substance of which the best and most metaphysical orgasms are made, to the point where, he insisted, he was no longer responsible for his actions. His indiscretion, he argued, was thus no more than the discharge of a natural force, like a flash of lightning.

  Unfortunately, it was brought out by the prosecutor that he had given in to this irrepressible force on other occasions and with other babysitters, frumpy cooks and rump-sprung matrons in suburbia. When I read of this case, I had dismissed it as a special instance, but now I wasn’t so sure. Perhaps the uncommon is far more real than we like to suspect. And perhaps, I thought, this is a country for shooting the bearer of bad news after all. Perhaps Sunraider had become for too many people the bearer of bad news….

  CHAPTER 9

  THEY SWEPT AROUND THE far corner of the corridor in double-quick time, four dark-suited men hurrying toward me with submachine guns at the ready, followed by two men in white pulling and pushing a sheet-covered form on a smoothly rolling table. Two tense nurses, flanking the table, steadied a blood-plasma apparatus, their quick-thudding heels the dominant sound as they came on, followed by the two familiar security men, Tolliver and McKnight, armed with pistols. They moved on so swiftly that I could see old Hickman’s head snap around at their approach, and then he was pulling quickly to his feet. I plunged the letter into my jacket pocket then and started forward—only to be motioned back by the hard-faced advance guards. They were swinging the table in a wide arc before the Senator’s room now, opening the door and starting inside, and I got a glimpse of old Hickman’s anxious eyes as they swept over the Senator’s prone, white-faced form; then the door snapped shut, the security men were taking positions to either side, and old Hickman was asking,

  “How is he?”

  “Just stand aside,” Tolliver said.

  “I asked you how is he doing?” Hickman said.

  “Just sit down and wait!” Tolliver said.

  Hickman gave him a long, slow look, then turned abruptly back to his chair, his face a mask.

  My attempt to question the security men bringing no better results, I hurried downstairs and telephoned Scoggins my information. Then, after making a vain attempt to locate the operating surgeon for a statement, I hurried back to the seventh floor. Where, I wondered, are the members of the Senator’s staff?

  I was relieved to see that old Hickman hadn’t been called into the Senator’s room while I was downstairs, but sat as before, huge in his chair. The corridor was hot and silent and I nodded to the security men, Tolliver and Bates, and threw myself back onto the bench, thinking to study Vannec’s letter while I waited. I must have dozed off immediately, for suddenly the red image of plasma which I had seen sloshing in the blood-transfusion apparatus when the Senator was rolled past, burned in my mind. I could see the operating table with the Senator’s chest cavity laid open, the flesh rolled back, clamps, lights; an atmosphere of tense concentration, the perspiring precision of nurse and surgeon, the labored diastole and systole of the struggling heart as they balanced his life on the tip of needle and suture, scalpel and sheer professional skill. The click and slap of instruments sounded in my mind, the rasp and pause of anesthetized breathing—I came to with a start, hearing the interrupted gasp which came with my own snoring.

  I looked around. Hickman was still there. How was the Senator faring? Surely the very best surgeons had been called in, but what of his luck? What if he were on the fading edge of life? What if he possessed some rare blood type and old Hickman should actually have to be called in to supply it? Though aware that I was in the grip of an irrational force, a superstition, I shuddered at the thought but was unable to throw it off even while realizing that the main thing was to save the Senator’s life.

  Damn Hickman anyway; if he wasn’t an accomplice, why was he here in the first place? Could the Senator be laughing at the confusion which his presence was causing—even while deep in anesthetic slumber? Hickman was under arrest, of course, but why had he been so obscenely willing to come here? Was it that he’d gladly surrender his pride in order to be near an important man? But what did he expect would come from his standing by an archenemy of his people? A headline? He called himself a minister; was he opting for some sort of sainthood? Did he think that he’d be considered the spokesman for a higher morality? The embodiment of some higher Christianity, some black fundamentalist agape? Was something like this behind his confounding conundrum of a forgiveness and charity surpassing earthly understanding? If so, he was politically naive, for no one in his right mind would accept the intrusion of such a kooky religious motive into the world of Sunraider politics, certainly not from anyone like Hickman.
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  I closed my eyes, seeing once more the Senator reeling under the impact of the bullets, the stain blooming through his shirt, Hickman crying out with upraised arms. Politics and blood, blood and religion, I thought, what a confusion has been released. And now, remembering that during the war I had written one of the first articles on blood-bank techniques, my irritation intensified. I realized that my upset over Hickman’s offer of a transfusion was concealing something else, something painful and vile which I feared to face. But even as I snatched out Vannec’s letter to try to switch my train of thought, I looked up to see old Hickman staring at me and shaking his head mysteriously. What does he mean? I thought. Is he reading my mind? It was something in his expression which started it, something abstractly accusatory and evocative of a buried time and a repressed defeat, all there on the broad dark face. Then I could hear McGowan’s voice as it had sounded last night at the club, and something seemed to crash in my head and I was on my feet, propelled by a surge of pain which, like a long-suppressed sob, tore through me accompanied by an excruciating sense of shame.

  I could see Hickman there as though illuminated by a spotlight, his face seeming to draw out that which I knew and did not know to lie behind my pain, and I could hear the sound, the rumble of an elevated train, could see the blue of sparks shooting from its wheels onto a dark day of slanting snow illumined by flashing lights, and I sensed where the speeding phantom train would stop, and to prevent its doing so, to block it, wreck it, I felt a compulsion to swift physical action, any relieving action, and Hickman was its target. I could feel my face flaming, and I wanted to tear him apart, but even as I willed myself to move forward I was overwhelmed and stood there, before my bench, staring through him in a paralysis of pain and lucid memory, pleasant now but then, oh, the pain.

  Shortly before the war, back when I still thought of myself as a champion of “social significance”—Oh, sing ah-me/ ah-song/ ah-so/ ah-glad—I met while attending a dance held in a famous Harlem hall now destroyed, a young girl, a Negro (she taught me to capitalize the N and to never say “Negress”) with whom I had an affair. It was intense, it was passionate, it was brief. But during the first blush of what we both regarded as love, I considered it as the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to me. For beyond the normal explosion of youthful emotion, there was a daring about it, a thrill arising from the socially forbidden made acceptable by the approbation of our friends, and rendered titillating by the hostility of those who automatically disapproved. Personally, I lived in a state of high delight. I felt that Laura endowed me with a special potency, thus I considered myself the possessor of a mysterious knowledge which gave me a touch of swagger whenever we strolled the easily challenged streets arm in arm, eye to eye, mentally hypnotized by our daring. And all this was given further sanction by our group zeal to improve, redeem, and, if need be, revolutionize society. But basically we were in love, and in our circles it was agreed that Laura and I represented, if not the future, at least a good earnest of that time when the old conflicts left unresolved by the great war between the states (and we were nothing if not historical-minded) and the wounds, outrages, and inequities which haunted contemporary society would be resolved by transcendent love. I spent hours in Harlem. I visited clubs, attended dances, absorbed the slang, the music, the turns of phrase, made great efforts to identify with all of Laura.

  “Democracy is love, love is democracy,” we often said, and our friends agreed. And this became, for a time, my personal slogan. Laura was lovely, eager, and brave, and there was much about the world which she didn’t know, and I was delighted and proud to teach her of the many things which lay beyond the arbitrary boundaries placed around her freedom, and mine. We were dedicated to love and society, thus we looked to the future but, as it turned out, not quite far enough ahead.

  Our affair went on for a year of glory that began in the spring and reached wild heights of passion, discovery, and delight during the holidays which ended the fall. Then during the winter, nature caught up with us, and what with our dream of a socially ideal alliance become a matter of parturition, we were suddenly faced with the hostile realities of both society and state, and I with my own astonished self.

  I say “astonished” because of what I discovered about myself when facing the ordeal of confronting Laura’s mother. I delayed for days, rushing about like a man searching for a hidden time bomb. It was a sore, nerve-racking trial; for as the implications of our situation began to come home to me, I found myself torn between my love, my sense of honor, and the fierce new aspect which the future revealed, now that I would have a dark wife and child perhaps as dark. Frankly, I was frightened. The rose-tinted bloom of Laura’s brown complexion which had been until now an intriguing veil hiding a lovely human mystery, had suddenly become the very skin of terror itself. In my passion and joy I had never allowed the practical problems of our relationship to give me real concern; now the questions of where we would live and how my parents and employers would react to our marriage confronted me—and suddenly I was no longer courageous, nor avant-garde, nor even sure of my own mind and heart.

  I told myself that I loved Laura just as much, perhaps even more, now, with the confluence of our bloods. And for herself alone, for she was a unique and lovely individual, a rare person. But now the questions of who I was, and who and what my parents and relatives were and had been, tore me apart. History, both past and future, haunted my mind. It was no longer merely an Hegelian abstraction, for I had been plunged into its bewildering interior. Now, for the first time since childhood, I felt need for the security symbolized by that thin chain of being personified by my parents, that lifeline of kinship which extended through time and space, from England and France to America, that I hoped would sustain me in my adventure into the dark interior of society. I visited the genealogical room of the Forty-second Street Library and brooded over the charts. I became obsessed with coats-of-arms, the signs and symbols of heraldry, the sounds and overtones of the name “McIntyre.” I burned to know by what chain of genes Laura was sustained, and knowing my own pressing need and being alerted to the existence of gaps and mysteries, I surmised that Laura probably knew very little of whence she came, and this filled me with panic. Where, out of what past had she actually come to so dazzle me? Who and what stood back there in the dark behind her? How would they assume form, become repersonalized, now that they were linked with my future destiny? And what, I wondered—and here was the most embarrassing question of all—just what color would the baby’s bottom be?

  I became so upset that I couldn’t eat. Nevertheless, I was determined to do the manly thing, although I couldn’t imagine that any pressure of outrage or revenge would be brought against me as might have been true had ours been a more orthodox relationship. Instead, I reassured myself that when the initial shock and unpleasantness were past, Laura’s parents might even find our marriage highly desirable. Given the shape and values of society, I saw no reason why they shouldn’t. After all, my prospects were, relatively, unlimited.

  Nevertheless, I realized my inexperience in these matters; I knew that mothers were formidable—at least, my own could be—and thus I found myself numb before the prospect of meeting my girl’s parents. We’d never met because her father was always away on his job, her mother was never a participant in our activities, and because Laura had been shy about inviting me to her home (a circumstance that I had interpreted generously in my own direction—which was, I believed, the direction of the smooth and unhampered future). Since my own parents lived in another state, there had been no problem of introducing Laura to them. And this aside, I was on my own and, I thought, in absolute rebellion against the past, all ties of family. I would cross that bridge when and if I came to it.

  But now, since I had the responsibility of informing a mother of her daughter’s unwed condition, it was necessary that I meet Mrs. Johnson. She would become aware sooner or later, since Laura was attending City College and living at home, and I hoped
that, by informing her now, things would be made easier for all concerned. There would soon be doctor bills and special care for which, naturally, I would pay, and the time would soon arrive when she’d walk heavy with my love and then, by mid-July, be introduced to motherhood. So after a night of terror and a morning of indecision, I braced myself and took the elevated train up Columbus Avenue to Harlem….

  Standing there numb in my pain and watching old Hickman squirm in his chair, it was as though he were sitting beside me on the heavy-hearted ride, high there above the street. Then in my mind’s eye I was looking out at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which loomed to our left, a flock of pigeons kiting lazily above its unfinished dome as the train climbed high above 110th Street, curving eastward. Then we were rumbling down to the dark of Eighth Avenue and curving northward again with a noisy grinding of wheels and rails.

  It was a chill, slate-gray wintry day when I climbed down to the street. Dirty snow lay over the ground and, though now late afternoon, cans spilling over with snow-drifted ashes and garbage still lined the walks. I moved beneath the thundering El for a few blocks, past small restaurants, barbershops with idle, slickheaded barbers, pink-and-blue-fronted beauty parlors and cheap law offices with windows prominently displaying red public notary seals, then turned into Laura’s windy side street, where a funeral cortege of black limousines with dark people in mourning dress, the women in crepe-covered hats, the men grim-faced and still, began creeping eastward behind a dark maroon hearse. Behind the ornately framed glass a gray coffin with a large military flag lay exposed beneath a wreath and a few sprays of white carnations. In the family car a light-skinned woman in widow’s weeds sat silently weeping. A soldier, I thought. I had forgotten that some were career army men. Then, keeping carefully to the deeper ruts of the ice-caked street, it was past, and a gang of ragged, snotty-nosed black children swept by, brushing my legs and jeering like a catastrophe of starlings. A short distance ahead I saw them sliding, arms and legs spread wide, over the icy walk to stop before a basement candy store, then, shouting like a band of Comanches taking a fort, they plunged inside. There was not a single mulatto among them….