Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  It was crowded. Even the bar near the entrance was packed with drinkers, and the tables along both walls and the narrow space in between were crowded with dark people drinking and listening to a group of musicians playing on the bandstand set against the rear wall. A jam session, for which the place was famous, was taking place, and I checked my coat at the door and took a seat at a side table near the rear.

  The room was warm, reeking with perfume, smoke, and alcohol and quickly made me so drowsy that I found it difficult to focus as I looked around for Laura in the dim, smoke-filled light. There were many women in the room, but I couldn’t tell who were alone, who with escorts. A waiter came, and I ordered a double bourbon, drank it quickly, and ordered another as he rushed past on his way to the bar. Although no one paid me the slightest attention, I felt strange and out of place. Then a big dark man, wearing a tuxedo which threatened to burst across the shoulders and a very white shirt with a black bow tucked beneath the collar, came over and spoke as though he knew me.

  “And how are you this evening?” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “That’s fine,” he said with a smile. “That makes me feel good, just to hear it. We want you to make yourself at home, enjoy yourself. We’ll be having a real battle of music in a little while. You know, when the top musicians start coming up from their jobs downtown. Big DeWitt is coming in soon, and he’ll get it started. You want anything you just ask the waiter; anybody get out of line with you, call me. I’m the owner and the bouncer.” He chuckled.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m waiting for a friend who should be here by now.”

  He leaned over the back of a chair.

  “A gentleman friend or a lady friend?”

  “A girl,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said pointedly, waiting. “Did you look around?”

  “Yes, but it’s so crowded and dim and …” My voice trailed off.

  He laughed again. “And it’s so awfully hard to see us in this light and everything,” he said.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, “but there’s no point in being embarrassed by the facts, is it now? In fact, some of us are proud of it. Not me, necessarily, but some are. What kind of looking chick is she?”

  “She’s … she’s beautiful,” I said.

  He studied me a second, his face suddenly blank.

  “I bet she is too.” He shook his head, smiling. “It’s the damndest thing, they all beautiful. Yes, it’s the damndest thing, you just mix ‘em up a bit and give ‘em some contrast and they beautiful!”

  “But she is,” I said, “very beautiful….”

  “I don’t doubt it one single bit; didn’t I just say it? But what I mean is, what shade is she?”

  “Shade?”

  “Color,” he said.

  “I don’t know, really, but maybe brown. Her name is Laura Johnson. Do you know her?”

  He was no longer smiling.

  “Is her daddy named Stone Johnson?” he said.

  “That’s right, her father is called ‘Stone.’ Have you seen her?”

  He straightened up.

  “No, I haven’t seen her, and if I were you I wouldn’t ask anybody about her. I’d just sit here and enjoy myself until she comes in. Stone’s a friend of mine, and a fool. He’s one way on those dining cars—smiling and laughing for tips and all that. But on the streets of Harlem he’s a different man. Stay away from him. He’s rough. He quotes the Bible like a goddamn preacher, and he whips heads—anybody’s head—in the name of the Lord. Have fun now,” he said, and was gone.

  And I was more uneasy than ever now, even though he hadn’t been unfriendly. As I drank I continued to look about at the women’s faces, but guardedly, so as not to give offense. Why had he laughed at me? I wondered. What did he know?

  A large yellow man, looking shaggy in a loosely fitting tux, squeezed past the table now, carrying a saxophone, and he was smoking a cigar and smiling, and I saw a girl jump up from one of the center tables and embrace him.

  “It’s Big D,” she cried, and I thought it was Laura. “He’s here like they said he’d be,” she cried delightedly, then she turned to wave toward the bouncer, and I saw my mistake.

  “Thanks, Barrelhouse,” she called to him. “Now we’ll have some action. Daddy D, I mean the great Big D, is going to blow and blow!”

  She knew whereof she spoke, for though I returned to my drink and thoughts of Laura, the atmosphere seemed to change. Spurred by the big man with the saxophone, the music soon reached a hysterical pitch of surprise-producing unrestraint, creating a mood which reached inside and grabbed me. They played now with a controlled wildness, a dazzling burst of improvisational pyrotechnics which left me even more out of phase than before. Around me the rapidly drinking audience had begun shouting exhortations to first one and then the other of the drum-, guitar-, and bass fiddle–driven soloists. The room shrank and expanded before my eyes. The trumpet player drew himself into a knotted, squat position as the drummer rolled away with a set, remote expression, and blasted my ears with what sounded like screams of mocking laughter. There was something cruel about the sound, something unforgiving intensified by his posture, which was neither one of standing nor of sitting but of some strained torturous position in between. My eardrums throbbed. I wanted a drink, but the waiters kept rushing past me with their trays held high, literally dancing back and forth between the tightly grouped tables. Finally one stopped and took my order, and it was then, as my eyes followed him back to the bar, that I saw a short dark figure, dressed in the black habit and head cloth of a nun, coming forward carrying with ceremonial gravity a Bible which rested on a small tambourine.

  Moving with strange, crablike steps she seemed headed straight for me, when a passing waiter yelled, “Lawd, lawd, here comes Mother Smathers!” And I saw her bow piously to him, then, pausing for a long moment to look me straight in the eye, she moved on to the table next to mine and extended her tambourine.

  “Darlings,” she said in a hoarse voice, “give a little something for the poor widow womens and the hongery little orphans.”

  I looked around for the bouncer. It seemed hardly the place or time for such a figure, but evidently she bore special privilege. For despite looks of annoyance, most of the guests paused long enough to toss coins into the tambourine, then, ignoring her “God bless you, baby,” they returned to the roaring contest of sound. To what order does she belong? I wondered. Who is her bishop, her mother superior? She had the full-cheeked, full-lipped expression of a petulant baby and seemed to regard my presence with silent disapproval as she continued from table to table. I looked away.

  The big saxophonist was improvising now, seeming to talk, to speak in a hoarse, reedy stylization of human speech; pleading, crooning, coaxing, then rising to great heights of abstract eloquence which evoked for me, in my disturbed state, those movies in which great Indian chieftains bespeak in the native tongue their tribe’s vision of the world to representatives of the white man’s church, his army, and the executive branch of his government. I could see mountains and canyons, forests and plains, a row of horsemen bearing feathered lances, their warbonneted heads outlined against the sky along the curve of a noble hill. Then he was laughing maliciously through the melody of a popular love song, lacing it with raucous catcalls, hoots, howls, bear growls, and belches which ridiculed its sentiments, mocked its pretensions. Then the sound subsided into a serene, delicately phrased song. And it was the same song but now transformed by a mood which belied the man’s appearance, the people, the place, the very banality of the song itself. Tears flooded my eyes as I watched his big bulk swaying gently back and forth, thinking as applause roared up, You nasty bastard, you’re playing with me. You’re playing on me, and all the rest, but you’re laughing at me, and I have to stay here for Laura….

  Then, “Go, man, go!” a voice yelled behind me, and looking toward the bar, I wiped my eyes to se
e a slender solitary drunk, wearing a tuxedo and a red cummerbund, who had cleared a spot and was improvising dance steps to the music. Past the toiling waiters I could see him clearly now, shaking his shoulders, bending his knees, gyrating his hips, and snapping his fingers, backwards and forwards with his head loosely bobbing—all in a wild but what seemed to me beautiful relationship to the music. The bartender and nearby customers were urging him on in his struggle to outdo in the extravagance of his movements the intricate patterns created in sound. It was then I saw the nun moving crabwise around a perspiring waiter and coming toward him with her tambourine extended.

  “Hey, watch it there,” the bartender called. “This ain’t no time for no damn preaching; can’t you see this man is riffing him a dance!”

  Preacher? I thought. So that’s her role—just as the circle of wood, taut skin, and metal disks came into contact with the dancer’s arm, causing his eyes and mouth to snap open like one jolted out of a trance.

  “Hell-yeah,” he yelled, “that’s just what I need to blow that tenor player to hell and gone!” And without missing a step in his dance, he snatched the tambourine and sent bills and coins flying—as the lady preacher fell backwards, surprised—and began striking himself on head, elbow, palm, and backside; twisting and turning, sliding and weaving, shaking and skidding, now in spasmodic competition with the big-bellied saxophonist who, as my head came round, stood with widespread legs and backward tilt to his body, sounding as though bent upon blasting himself—hands, feet, and bucket-sized head—through the reed and bell of his own outthrust and rampaging horn. The sound rang the room like hammers, causing it to rise, fall, and reel beneath his blasts and spurring the dancer to ever more frenzied twists and turns.

  Then, through the smoke and roar of sound, I could hear the rapid ching-chingle-jing, chingle-jangle, ching ching ching!of the tambourine as he shook and whirled himself about; moving now like a proud Spanish dancer, stamping his heels and flinging his head; to become with a twist and a flash of leather a prancing horse, a fish on its tail, a circus bear, an aristocrat on roller skates holding his crotch with one hand while the other pointed toward the ceiling; then he became a trailer truck in a crowded street, a knock-kneed camel with a limber neck, a pecking rooster, a mating stallion, a transported supplicant in a frenzied rite, a twisted cripple with two dancing legs—and through these flying formations the watchers were joining in with clapping hands enthusiastically.

  Until now the lady preacher had stood by with arms akimbo, staring like one in a daze at the coins scattered beneath his flashing feet, and it was now that he began to try high kicks, sending a coin rolling across the floor to strike her shoe, that she went into action.

  Bending in what I thought was an effort to retrieve her scattered harvest, Mother Smathers came up flashing a vicious, high-heeled, black patent-leather shoe and charged the oblivious drunk like a pantheress. A blow to his head brought a spurt of blood flashing red beneath the low ceiling light, and as she grunted and struck again, I tried to stand but stumbled and fell back, watching openmouthed as now, her broad backside working as though two furious midgets were fighting beneath her wide black robes, she rushed the drunk like an experienced street fighter, tilting tables and knocking customers aside as she drove him down the polished floor toward the bandstand.

  Now women were screaming, chairs were clattering, musicians with instruments held above their heads were trying to escape. I grabbed a quick drink and got to my feet, sensing danger but too fascinated by what I saw, feeling too intensely alive, to leave.

  Strolling with Laura, I had often encountered such black nuns and women preachers on the streets of Harlem, had listened to the preachers’ apocalyptic sermons, but never had I seen anything like this. With images of a hatchet-wielding Carrie Nation wrecking saloons springing to mind, I took another drink and stepped upon the bench for a better view.

  Looking across the swirling heads, it was as though the drunk was dancing again, only now with the irate preacher. For, with his arms held high, he weaved and bobbed, dodging rhythmically from side to side, back and forth, as Mother Smathers struck at his head with her shoe.

  “Somebody better grab this woman,” he yelled. “They better grab her!” Then, trapped by the bandstand to his rear, with customers milling on either flank and with Mother Smathers before him, he suddenly bent forward and lunged, driving into her middle with his bleeding head. It was his first blow in self-defense, bringing a loud explosion of breath as it bent her double. And I could see him reach out and grab, snatching her forward and sharply down to snap her erect and back with the full jacking force of his knee.

  “Goddamn, save me from Arkansaw and Mississippi,” a man’s voice shouted, and as in an act of magic I could see a black cloth billow up to tremble, momentarily airborne, then turning in upon itself like a child’s parachute and collapsing. I almost lost my balance then, striking my head against the wall in recovering, and it was like watching a motion picture from which, in a television version, an important phase of encrossing action had been cut and spliced together with outrageous disregard for my sense of credibility.

  Below me the faces suddenly flowed, liquid and loose and with a sudden slackening of feature, to freeze into masks of wide-eyed disbelief. I could hear the clanging and lazily shimmering sound of an object striking against the strings of an amplified guitar, producing an idiotic degenerating, slack-mouthed musical chord. And in the sudden hush, Mother Smathers swung around, her back to me now and directly beneath a light, and I was looking down upon a closely cropped Negro head in which a part had been expertly cut with a barber’s razor. An X-shaped scar marked the dead center of her scalp, and I could see the luxurious flowing of a row of wrinkles rippling in stylized and orderly procession down the rear of her skull, disappearing beneath the high neck of her habit.

  She flounced to her left then, and a woman screamed, “Oh, no, it can’t be!” And I could see the lethal shoe flash up and away as Mother Smathers whirled about, throwing her hands to her head as the drunk shot past, making for the door. She backed against the bandstand now, glaring and at bay, as a man yelled, “Hey! Ain’t this heah a bitch!” and grabbed for her robe. And suddenly the faces flowed again, breaking up and coming apart in the hic-cuping beginning of a wild surge of laughter.

  “Don’t a motherfucker move,” Mother Smathers cried, trying frantically to snatch up her gown; and I could see the drummer now, his face agleam with angry concentration, leaning over the bandstand and aiming a nasty blow with the sharp edge of his high-hat cymbal at the squat and exposed head.

  A sharp odor of incense seemed to pervade, arising on the high-pitched, gonglike sound which tore through the room, as Mother Smathers went reeling sideways and back into the waiting hands of Barrelhouse, who, applying a headlock, rushed her, bucking and cursing and striking out, up the stairs into the street.

  There was silence, broken by the sound of shifting feet and creaking chairs, then the room erupted in a laughing uproar. A waiter, short-armed and long-waisted like a dwarf, was scooping up the tambourine and running with rolling, short-legged steps, up the stairs to the entrance where outlined in the brightness of the doorway, white jacket against the dark, he sailed it vigorously into the street, whereafter a madness seemed to take over the room. People were bending double and falling across tables as I climbed down. Someone knocked over the snare drum, a woman shrieked. And by the time I could push my way forward to join the line forming before the checkroom, there came a blast of cold air and Barrelhouse started down the stairs, rubbing his knuckles in his palm. His face was grim, but I could see small insurrections of laughter threatening to break out around the corners of his mouth.

  “Hey, Barrelhouse,” a man laughed at the bar, “that was the lick that did it!”

  “Yeah,” Barrelhouse said, “but that lick was way damn late. My ace had been hunching me all along that something wasn’t right about that fool, but those Jesus clothes fooled me.”

  He
stood on the bottom step looking indignantly around. “Who the hell ordained her, that’s what I want to know!”

  “You mean who ordained him,” the man said.

  “‘Him’ or ‘her,’ I don’t give a damn, from now on I’m barring ‘em all. It makes for too much confusion, bringing religion into a jazz joint—Hey, where you people think you’re going? The session ain’t over, the musicians are still charged up, some others are coming soon, and I’m fixing to serve everybody breakfast on the house. Eggs to order and everything. Come on back and sit down!”

  He came quickly down the steps, then, noticing me, he stopped, his face suddenly blank. “Hey,” he said in a gruff, deadpan voice, “that was a bitch, wasn’t it? A lo-mo funky row, huh?” He watched me shrewdly.

  “It was too much for me,” I said.

  He threw back his head and roared. “Yeah, it was for ole Heapachange Hudson too,” he said. “I never seen such action in a tux in all my born days. When I got to the street he was cold sober and long gone. He was probably in the hospital before I could get that flimflamming phoney bastard up to the street. By the way, did you see your girl?”

  “No,” I said, “she didn’t come.”

  “Well, you never know about a woman. Maybe if you come back tonight she’ll be here. Done mixed up the date, you know. But hell, stay anyway and enjoy the music; have some food. The musicians are bound to come on strong, because there’s nothing like a little extra excitement to get them really jumping.”

  I thanked him but declined. When the check girl brought my coat she was as excited as the others. I tipped her and smiled, but I didn’t share her high-pitched laughter. As I moved away, the musicians had returned to their places, and now deep, rumbling piano chords were sounding beneath the roar. I moved up to the street, feeling a deepening sense of isolation, a growing emptiness.

  It was the weird mixture of sacred and profane which provoked the laughter and gave it its character that got me. There was a note sounding through it that was more upsetting than the violent and androgynous figure who had aroused it. It was too inclusive, it hinted at too many unnameable, chaotic, and unpleasant things, of that were beyond my capacity of confrontation, and I was relieved to put them behind me with the closing of the door. But even so, it wasn’t ended, only muted. For I could still hear it behind me, buoyed now by searching minor chords.