Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “Say, McIntyre!”

  It was Tolliver again, coming toward me. And looking back past his rolling shoulders, I could see Bates and Hickman watching me, and tensed, wondering if Hickman had sent him to question me further. Then he had reached me, saying, “Listen, McIntyre, I don’t want you to misunderstand me; that old darky gets on my nerves as much as he gets on yours. Sitting there with his eyes closed, praying and mumbling to himself. But hell, I can’t let you attack him; he’s in custody.”

  He frowned, staring. “Man, you look all done in. Why don’t you take a breather and back off of this thing a bit? Go stretch your legs.”

  “I’m tired as hell,” I said, “but I can’t risk it, because the moment I leave, something new is sure to erupt.”

  “I doubt if anything will happen,” he said. “At least not for a couple of hours.”

  “What are you telling me?”

  “I mean that the Senator won’t come out of sedation before that.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I heard one of the surgeons instructing the nurses.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said. “Still, I’d better stick here. But thanks for the information, and I’m sincerely sorry I caused the trouble. I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Oh, forget it, that old bastard provoked you. He got out of line somehow.”

  “I don’t know,” I lied. “I was thinking about something else, something unrelated—then bang!—and I was standing over him.”

  “Well,” Tolliver said, “I have no doubt who triggered it. He said something or did something extreme. In fact, the whole bunch of those people seem to have turned extremist all of a sudden. You’d be surprised at the reports coming into the Bureau. Like the one who set that fire on the Senator’s lawn …”

  I looked away, holding on tight to myself. Here comes that burning Cadillac again!

  “What is it, fellow?” Tolliver said. “Are you ill?”

  I shook my head, closing my eyes to find flashes of flame streaked behind my lids. For a split second the name whirled up and away from me, then struck fire in my mind.

  “You mean Minifees,” I said, “LeeWillie Minifees.”

  “Right,” Tolliver said, “that’s the boy. That’s him! Could you’ve imagined such a thing? It’s gotten so that every time one of these spades moves within shouting distance of Sunraider everything goes to hell!”

  Down the corridor Bates had returned to his post, and I could see Hickman, resting like a bear stuffed into the white iron chair, his hands clasped peacefully over his stomach. A tremor swept over my body.

  “Burning a Cadillac!” Tolliver said with strong feeling. “It’s an atrocity!”

  “Yes,” I said. “In the excitement I’d almost forgotten the incident. Has Minifees been released?”

  “Released! Are you kidding? After what he did? And now this shooting?”

  “Are you saying that he’s implicated?”

  “That’s just the point, we don’t know, we’re investigating him. But anyone who’d do what he did is capable of doing anything. So we’ve got him right here, in the psycho ward.”

  “Here?” I said. “My God, I’d like to see him. What are the charges?”

  “He’s under observation, he hasn’t been charged. But when he is, if you ask me, it can be any number of charges: arson, felonious assault, resisting arrest, the wilful destruction of private property, endangering the public safety, inciting to riot, making incendiary speeches—er, if it turns out he’s connected with this shooting, it could even be treason.”

  “He’s in bad trouble,” I said. “If there’s any way possible, I’d like to have a talk with him. I had no idea he was here.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Tolliver said. “It’ll depend on others. But you shouldn’t be surprised that he’s being held here. A number of suspects and criminal psychopaths, rapists, and the like are held here. Clyde Sterling the poet is here; a Negro janitor—what’s-his-name—who’s suspected of murdering his rich buddy and stealing his life’s savings, is here—killed him at a birthday party.”

  Suddenly I came down hard on the bench, my legs giving way beneath me. “But that man was drunk,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “McMillen, Aubrey McMillen.”

  Tolliver leaned close. “What do you know about it, McIntyre?”

  “I covered the story. The dead man’s name was Jessie Rockmore.”

  “That’s right, it was. And as you say, McMillen was drunk, but it’s our guess that he’s also a murderer and a psychopathic liar. That’s why he’s under observation. There’s a three-ringed circus of psychos here, but if you ask me, that fellow Minifees takes the cake!”

  “He was pretty wild,” I said, “but it hadn’t occurred to me that he might be implicated in the shooting.”

  “Listen,” Tolliver said, “in an event like this anyone could be involved. You have to look for motives everywhere and in everybody. Maybe this fellow has nothing to do with it, but on the other hand that car-burning might have been an act, a diversionary tactic intended to prepare for an attack that misfired until this morning. During that Minifees confusion anything could have happened to Senator Sunraider. In fact, if we’re able to place some character on the scene with a pistol or grenade or rifle, we’ll have him nailed. I understand that there were important details to what went on out there which didn’t get into the news accounts. Even your paper ran an odd little story that played the incident for laughs. Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “No.” I shook my head. “No, I didn’t.”

  “I wish you had, maybe you’d have supplied us with more to work on, some significant detail instead of that lame attempt to make a joke out of it.”

  “We do our best,” I said.

  “Sometimes you do. But I’m not criticizing you, McIntyre; I’m speaking of the press in general. For instance, I heard that that clown was wearing alligator shoes which cost fifty bucks apiece! Now if you ask me, that’s some kind of crime in itself!” He grinned. “Anyway, you take it easy. Take a nap if you like, and don’t worry about Hickman, he’s not going anywhere. And when the Senator comes out of it we’ll alert you.”

  He moved away and I was relieved that he hadn’t questioned me further. I felt completely turned around, what with his having thrown Minifees into juxtaposition with the gunman and having revealed McMillen’s presence in the hospital. Watching Tolliver disappear into the Senator’s room, I began to shake and tremble. Then I was looking at Hickman nodding in his chair, and suddenly I was laughing within myself.

  I wanted to roar, to scream, but held it inside. I turned back. I bent forward, head upon knees. I held my breath. I shut my eyes and bit my lips. But as it continued, I saw that I couldn’t contain it and got up and hurried past the elevator to the other end of the corridor and turned the corner. And there, under a dim light and facing a wall, I stuffed a handkerchief into my mouth and let go.

  It was a painful laughter, tearing at the lining of my empty stomach, a laughter springing from my sudden awareness that each second I had waited for the outcome of the Senator’s wounding and had searched my mind for the motives behind it, I was being forced steadily back upon myself. It was as though Sunraider, McGowan, Minifees, McMillen, the fellows at the club, Vannec, and countless forgotten or unknown others had combined to force me into retracing my movements, not only over the last several hours, but over a period which I’d long ago forced from my mind.

  Even Laura had come back to haunt me. How had I ever managed to forget her? How had I exorcised that painful period so completely from my mind after having been so intensely involved? Loving her, I’d lost myself in Harlem for a highly intense time, had surrendered to its fascination as to some great foreign city. And willingly, as one gives one’s heart and mind to Paris. I had spent every free moment of my time there. I had wandered for hours among its street scenes, I had haunted its bars and nightclubs, spent hours in its dance halls and burlesq
ue houses. And Laura had taught me to see the life there as not exotic but as extensions of her own life (a life quite different from that of which McGowan ranted) in the South. And through my fascination with language—languages are best learned in bed, it is said—I had come to see its speech idioms and its slang as extensions of Southern speech modified and amplified by the exciting contrasts of the Harlem melting pot. Ever concerned with children, Laura had even taught me to understand the games played and danced by kids in the streets as versions of games and jingles which she had played and sung in Georgia. I’d been so spellbound, so enthralled, so captured by the black magic of the area that for a time I had come to see the crime and squalor which I found there as part of the poetry of the place; and the street characters, the eccentrics, the pimps, the drunks, the criminals (I had known no preachers, not even one like Hickman, and only a few teachers, a labor organizer, and two physicians)—all as part of a vital and somehow hopeful scene. Then I had approached the people then through my love for Laura, had seen them, in effect, through her own eyes. And then when it had reached its end in the basement nightclub, and I went there no longer, I had resolved my pain and my inability to deal with the problem of marriage and her mother’s rejection by substituting instead the theories and definitions of sociologists and politicians. I had, in effect, accepted their formulas as a means of ordering that sense of chaos which had been released in me by my loss of love.

  But what else could I have done after the shock and disappointment I sustained? I was not given to lost causes, I had to establish myself in life, and with Harlem no longer a place of adventure, Laura out of sight was Laura out of mind—until at this great distance in time and place, the depths, as old Hickman had put it, had been stirred.

  Now everything had been stewed together, the mighty, the lowly, the past and the present, the seen and the unseen. And I was in trouble because, in putting Laura behind me, I had developed a different quality of attention, a different sense of direction. Events had come to possess a more limited extension of significance, and I no longer thought of the world in which she moved—wherever she now moved—as relevant. I lived in a quite different sphere, bound by different values, and events drew their meaning from within a different frame of reference. All else was beyond the pale, lost in the abyss of the past or in the mist of the future. All tock and tick with nothing in between. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  Actually, I could hardly remember the sensation of love, the thrill of being with Laura, or the sense of release and power-over-life which she had afforded me. I did realize that the sense of daring which I had felt had come not so much from the unabashed gratification of forbidden emotions, but from the fact that the atmosphere in which we moved had then seemed to condone and encourage broad freedom of expression. For there life had seemed generally more openly expressive. Thoughts were uttered, actions were taken—even violent actions, erotic actions—with a facility and openness that was unknown to my own background. But now, even as these thoughts came painfully to me in an agony of laughter, I realized that I had seen and experienced only a part of the truth, for I knew now that Aubrey McMillen was here in the hospital, and Jessie Rockmore had died his strange death for his own strange motives, and Miss Duval had been present to create a situation which would have made McGowan’s wildest fantasies seem tame by comparison. I’d touched another world.

  Suddenly two images flashed through my mind. I could see a fat black woman with a face rouged almost lavender standing on a spotlighted stage, dressed in a white satin suit of tails which gave her a full, pear-shaped, Henry-the-Eighth aspect, as she sang a song of double entendre with a refrain of “Sweet Violets” as a diamond flashed from a tooth in her wide, darkly painted mouth; and that of myself chasing myself desperately around the rim of a depthless crater. It was quite vivid, but what, I wondered, does it all mean?… I felt faint. I threw it off.

  Across the corridor I noticed a window and went over to stand looking out. It was dark. The streetlights silhouetted the tender new leaves of a tree. Down the walk from the hospital a tulip tree showed pink in the light of a street lamp. A white ambulance with lighted interior and roof beacon lazily revolving flashed a rhythmic message of red and white as it cruised silently along the curving drive, moved out into the avenue. There was little traffic and no pedestrians but the world out there in the dark seemed enormously normal and I, the lone disorganized and agitated witness to the scene. I didn’t trust it—I didn’t trust my vision. How could I after such a day? I went back and sat down, expecting anything to erupt and trying to prepare myself. For whatever it would cost me there was a story here, and I meant to get it, come hell, come high water, come fire, come smoke, come laughing gas. And now I had no doubt but that anything and everything could come. And not only once but, I suspected, several times and in several forms and in widely scattered places.

  Like the car-burning, which appeared first as a farce only to turn up now as a foreshadowing of something close to tragedy.

  All great, world-historical facts and personages occur twice …, I suddenly recalled from the thirties, the first as tragedy, the second as farce, but here this analysis of history offered no security. For who involved, other than the Senator, could be called “historical”? Could LeeWillie Minifees? Could Laura? Could Hickman? Could Aubrey McMillen? I doubted it. Nevertheless, they each kept popping up in wild reversals. And under the most devious circumstances.

  But who, you ask, was McMillen?

  CHAPTER 12

  IT WAS LIKE THIS: Last night, during the drinking and joking at the club, I had completely forgotten that earlier in the day I had agreed to cover for a young colleague who had decided, rather impulsively, I thought, to slip away to Boston to marry a Radcliffe girl. The night editor had left me alone during the evening (he knew where to locate me), but then around four A.M. I found myself rushing in a still-drunken and dream-thronged state with notebook and tape recorder to the scene of a killing which had been reported in the vicinity of the Capitol. It was the location which disturbed Scoggins, the night editor, and caused him to awaken me.

  The cabbie let me out in front of an old three-storied Georgian house, and I hurried up the steps to find two beefy policemen being directed in a thunderous attack against a door set to the right of a dimly lit vestibule by a sergeant of detectives. He acknowledged my press card with a nod, but when I tried to get a line on what had happened his hands flew to his ears and he gestured toward the two officers who threw themselves forward—hungh!— and bounced off the door as though they were made of rubber.

  “Hit ‘em again!” a deep voice growled behind me, and I became aware of other faces emerging from the darkness.

  Back in the shadow of the vestibule a half dozen or so black folk in night dress stood on the steps of the stairs leading up to the second floor, quietly looking on. Two of the women held their hands over their mouths and eyes, as though suppressing tears or the sound of weeping. I thought, Grieving servants. Then a man’s hostile gaze caused me to turn away, thinking, But you can trust me to tell the truth. Then came a crash, the door flew open, and I hurried behind the policemen into a blaze of light and brilliant color.

  We didn’t get far. A few steps inside, a wave of alcohol fumes swept to meet us, and I discovered that I had entered a ragtag museum that had been thrown together according to no easily discernable plan. In the first blinding glare of light, vague objects and artifacts appeared to have been wrenched from their place, time, and function and thrown together in such volatile and insane juxtaposition that I feared that one false move, one stumble or jog or careless pitch of voice might trigger a debacle. Dust and signs of disuse and decay were everywhere. Crystal flashed from obscure corners, a policeman sneezed from the dust. And yet, it was not the disorder of a junkyard nor attic nor cellar; I sensed a design underneath it all. But whose and to what end, that was the perplexing question. It was the last place I would have imagined.

  I was familiar with th
e fashionable notion that the American home has been steadily becoming a combination art gallery and technological museum, but here the process had gotten quite, and most deviously, out of hand. Tables and chairs, divans and chaise longues, cabinets and chests, scale models and sculptures—all of miscellaneous styles and periods, and many in various stages of disrepair—confronted me on every hand, and some of the furniture was loaded with books, musical instruments, objets d’art.

  “What the hell kind of joint is this?” someone said.

  “I was about to ask myself,” I said.

  “Yeah, and where the hell is it? Who put it together, that’s what I’d like to know.”

  “Hell, men, this is our own, our native land. And I’ll bet you two for one that we’ll find some booze. Isn’t that right, McIntyre?”

  I shook my head. “I’m as puzzled as the next man. Besides, I can hardly see.”

  “Better put on your shades, McIntyre,” the first man said.

  “No luck, I left them at home.”

  “Then squint, my friend, and you’ll find your way.”

  My trouble was caused by a collection of converted oil lamps and vases, some of which blazed away innocent of shades. Across the room two panels of the long wall were loaded from wainscoting to picture molding with sconces and bracket lamps which threw such a glare that the intention appeared to be deliberate concealment rather than revelation. And while the others moved about, I closed my eyes and puzzled over what made the place so personally disturbing.

  Perhaps, I thought, it’s simply the fact of finding such a place so close to the Capitol, so near the center of our national source of order. There are slums nearby, of course, but slums are different. They emerged from history and are unhappy marks on the road of progress. What’s more, we were doing something about the slums. But this place—my God, the fact that it exists means that something has been going on that has completely escaped me and everyone else….