Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “Yes,” the Senator said, “I remember him. And there was the tongue-tied one….”

  “Yes, yes, I’m not forgetting Reverend Eubanks. He’s the one who folks couldn’t understand any more than they could Demosthenes before he put those rocks in his jaws—but when he got into the pulpit and raised his hands to heaven—then whoooo, Lord! didn’t the words come down like rain!

  “Well, Bliss, coming after all them and having to start up there in the clouds where Eatmore left those five thousand or more folks a-straining, I found myself knowing that I had to preach them down into silence. I knew too that only a little child could really lead them, and I looked around at you and gave you the nod and I saw you get up wearing that little white dress suit—you were a fine-looking little chap, Bliss; a miniature man of God … and I saw you leave the platform to go get ready while I tried to make manifest the Word….”

  Suddenly the Senator twisted violently upon the bed.

  “Words, words,” he said wearily. “What you needed was a stage with a group of actors. You might have been a playwright.”

  “Rest back, Bliss,” Hickman said. “I preached them down into silence that night. True, there was preacher pride in it, there always is. Because Eatmore had set such a pace that I had to accept his challenge, but there was more to it too. We had mourned and rejoiced and rejoiced and moaned and he had released the pure agony and raised it to the skies. So I had to give them transcendence. Wasn’t anything left to do but shift to a higher gear. I had to go beyond the singing and the shouting and reach into the territory of the pure unblemished Word. I had to climb up there where fire is so hot it’s ice, and ice so cold it burns like fire. Where the Word was so loud that it was silent, and so silent that it rang like a timeless gong. I had to reach the Word within the Word that was both song and scream and whisper. The Word that was beyond sense but leaping like a tree of flittering birds with its own dictionary of light and meaning.

  “I don’t really know how I got up there, Bliss, there’s no elevator for such things. First it was Eatmore and then I was leading them in Let Us Break Bread Together, on our knees—and it happened. Instead of sliding off into silence I started preaching up off the top of that song and they were still singing under me, holding me up there as I started to climb. Bliss, I was up there, boy. I was talking like I always talk, in the same old down-home voice, that is, in the beloved idiom, but I was no loud horn that night, I was blowing low—and we didn’t have microphones either, not in those days. But they heard me. I preached those five thousand folks into silence, five thousand Negroes, and you know that’s the next thing to a miracle. But I did it. I did it and it was hot summertime, and the corn whiskey was flowing out back of the edge of the crowd. Sure, there was always whiskey—and fornicating too. Always. But inside there was the Word and the Communion in the Word, and just as Christ Jesus had to die between two criminals, just so did we have to put up with the whiskey and the fornication. Even the church has to have its outhouse, just as it has to have a back door as well as a front door, a basement as well as a steeple. Because Man is always going to be Man and there’s no true road without sides to it, and gulleys too, no true cross without arms that point away in two directions from the true way. But that Juneteenth night they all came quiet. And, Bliss, when I faded out they were still quiet. That’s when ole Fess took over and got them singing again and I came down out of it and gave the nod to the boys and they started marching you down the aisle….”

  Wait. Wait! the Senator’s mind cried beneath the melodic line of Hickman’s reminiscing voice, feeling himself being dragged irresistibly along. And now he could see himself, Bliss again, dropping down from the back of the platform with the seven black-suited preachers in their high-backed chairs onto the soft earth covered with sawdust, hearing the surge of fervored song rising above him in the hot night and Daddy Hickman’s voice sustaining a note without apparent need for breath, rising above the tent as he moved carefully out into the dark to avoid the rope and tent stakes, walking soft over the sawdust earth and heading across the clearing for the trees where Deacon Wilhite and the big boys were waiting. He moved reluctantly as always, yet hurrying, thinking, He still hasn’t breathed, he’s still up there, hearing Daddy Hickman soaring above the rest like a great dark bird of light, a sweet yet anguished mellow cry edged with a painful sob. Still hearing it hovering there as he began to run to where he could see the figures standing around where the box lay supported by a table set under the pines. Leaning huge against a tree was the special-built theatrical trunk they shipped it in. Then he was climbing onto the table side, hearing one of the boys giggling and saying, “What you saying, Deadman?” Then looking back without answering he saw with longing the bright warmth of the light beneath the tent with the worshippers and caught the surging movement as they rocked in their chairs to the song which now seemed to rise up to the still sustained note of Daddy Hickman’s soaring cry. Then Deacon Wilhite said: “Come on, little preacher; in you go,” lifting him, his great hands around his ribs, then his feet going inside and the rest of him slipping past Teddy and his Bible, lying and beginning to shiver as the tufted top brought the blackness down.

  And not even ice cream, nothing to sustain me in my own terms. Nothing to make it seem worthwhile in Bliss terms.

  I seemed to float in the blackness, the jolting of their measured footsteps guided by Deacon Wilhite’s precise tones, across the contoured ground, all coming to me muted through the pink insulation of the padding which lined the bottom, reaching me at blunt points along my shoulders, buttocks, heels, thighs. A beast with twelve disjointed legs coursing along, and I its inner ear, its anxiety, its anxious heart; straining to hear if the voice that sustained its line and me still soared, because I believed that if he breathed while I was trapped inside I’d never emerge, and hearing the creaking of a handle near my ear, the thump of Cylee’s knuckles against the side to let me know he was there squinch-eyed and probably giggling. And through the thick satin cloak of the lining the remote singing seemed miles away and the rhythmical clapping of hands coming to me like sharp, bright flashes of lightning, promising rain. Moving along on the tips of their measured strides like a boat in a slow current as I breathed through the tube in the lid the hot ejaculatory air, hushed now by the entry and passage among them of the ritual coat of satin, my stiff dark costume in their absurd, eternal play of life and death…. Back to that? No!

  “Bliss, I watched them bringing you slowly down the aisle on those strong young shoulders and putting you there among the pots of flowers, the red and white roses and the bleeding hearts—and I stood above you on the platform and began describing the beginning and the end, the birth and the agony, and …”

  Screaming, mute, the Senator thought, not me but another. Bliss. Resting on his lids, black inside, yet he knew that it was pink, a soft silky pink blackness around his face, covering his nose. He was fitted in the satin closing round him like the lining of the knife case which he’d seen in a jewelry store window, only the box was closed and the pinkness was turned to blackness. Always the blackness. Inside everything became blackness, even the white Bible and Teddy, even his white suit. It was black even around his ears, deadening the sound except for Reverend Hickman’s soaring song, which now, noodling up there high above, had taken on the softness of that piece of soft black velvet cloth which Grandma Wilhite had used to make him a nice full-dress overcoat like Daddy Hickman’s, only better because it had a wide cape for a collar…. He listened intently, one hand gripping the white Bible, the other gripping Teddy’s paw. Teddy was down there where the top didn’t open at all, unafraid, a bold, bad bear. He listened to the voice sustaining itself, the words rising out of the Word like Ezekiel’s wheels, without breath, straining desperately to keep its throbbing waves coming to him, thinking, If he stops to breathe, I’ll die, my breath will stop too. Just like Adam’s clay if God had coughed or sneezed. And yet, he knew too that he was breathing through the tube set in the lid. Hu
rry, Daddy Hickman, he thought, Hurry and say the word. Please, let me rise up. Let me come up and out into the air….

  The big boys were walking him slowly over the smooth ground and he could feel the slight rocking movement as the box shifted on their shoulders. That means that we’re out in the clearing. Trees back there, voices that-away, life and light up there. Hurry! They’re moving slow, like an old boat drifting down the big river in the night and me inside looking up into the black sky, no moon or stars and all the folks gone far beyond the levees. He could feel the shivering creep up his legs now and squeezed Teddy’s paw to force it down, thinking, Hurry, please hurry. Then the rising rhythms of the clapping hands coming up to him like storming waves heard from a distance; waves that struck the boat and flew off into the black sky like silver sparks from the shaking of the shimmering tambourines, showering at the end like the tails of skyrockets. If I could only open my eyes. It hangs heavy-heavy over my lids. Please hurry! Restore my sight. This black night is dark and I am far … far … He came from the dark inside of a red-and-white-striped egg….

  They took my Lord away

  They took my Lord

  Away,

  Please, tell me where

  To find Him….

  Then they were letting him down, down, down and he could feel the jar as someone went too fast, as now a woman’s shout came to him, seeming to strike the side near his ear like a flash of lightning streaking jaggedly across a dark night sky:

  Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-sus! Have mercy, Jeeeeeeeeee-sus!

  and a quivering flashed up his legs.

  Everybody’s got to die, sisters and brothers, Daddy Hickman was saying remotely through the dark. That is why each and every one must be redeemed. YOU HAVE GOT TO BE RE-DEEMED. Even He who was the Son of God and the Voice of God to man—even He had to die. And what I mean is die as a man! So what do you, the lowest of the low, expect you’re going to have to do? He had to die in all of man’s loneliness and pain because that’s the price He had to pay for coming down here and putting on the pitiful, unstable form of Man. Have mercy! Even with His godly splendor which could transform the built-in wickedness of Man’s animal form into an organism that could stretch and strain toward sublime righteousness—Amen! That could show Man the highway to progress toward a more noble way of living—even with all that, even He had to die! Listen to me tell it to you: Even He who said, Suffer the little ones to come unto Me! had to die as a Man. And like a Man crying from His cross in all of Man’s pitiful puzzlement at the will of Almighty God!

  It was not yet time. He could hear the waves of Daddy Hickman’s voice rolling up against the sides, then down and back, now to boom suddenly in his ears as he felt the weight of darkness leave his eyes, his face bursting with sweat as he felt the rush of bright air bringing the breath of flowers as he lay blinking up at the lights, the satin corrugations of the slanting lid, and the vague outlines of Deacon Wilhite, who now was moving aside. And it was as though Deacon Wilhite had himself been the blackness. He lay breathing through his nose now, deeply inhaling the flowers as he released Teddy’s paw and grasped the white Bible with both hands, feeling the chattering and the real terror beginning, aching his bladder. For always it was as though it waited for the moment when he was ready to answer Daddy Hickman’s signal to rise up that it seemed to slide like heavy mud from his face to his thighs to hold him like quicksand. Always at the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice he came floating up like a corpse shaken loose from the bottom of the river and the terror came with him.

  We are the children of Him who said, Suffer…. And in his mind he could see Deacon Wilhite, moving up to stand beside Daddy Hickman at the lectern, holding on to the big Bible and looking intently at the page as he repeated:

  SUFFER….

  And the two men standing side by side, the one large and the other small; and behind them the other reverends rowed behind them, their faces staring serious with engrossed attention to the reading of the Word; like judges in their carved, high-backed chairs, as Daddy Hickman’s voice began spelling out the text which Deacon Wilhite was reading just as he did with his trombone when he really felt like signifying on a tune the choir was singing:

  Suffer, meaning in this workaday instance to surrender, Daddy Hickman said.

  Amen, Deacon Wilhite said, repeating, Surrender.

  Yes, meaning to surrender with tears and to feel the anguished sense of human loss. Ho, our hearts bowed down!

  Suffer the little ones, Deacon Wilhite said.

  The little ones—ah yes! Our little ones, Daddy Hickman said. Our little loved ones. Flesh of our flesh, soul of our soul. Our hope for heaven and our charges in this world. Yes! The little lambs. The promise of our fulfillment, the guarantee of our immortal continuity! The little wases-to-bes—Amen! The little used-to-bes that we all were to our mammys and pappys and with whom we are but one with God….

  Amen! Deacon Wilhite sang out. Now the Scripture next says, To Come….

  Oh my Lord, just look how the word leaps! Daddy Hickman said. First the babe, then the preacher. The babe father to the man, the man father to us all. A kind father calling for the babes in the morning of their earthly day. Then in the twinkling of an eye Time slams down and He calls us to come….

  … To come, Brother Alonzo!

  Ah yes, to come, meaning to approach. To come up and be counted; to go along with Him, Lord Jesus. To move through the narrow gate bristling with spears, up the hill of Calvary, to climb onto the unyielding cross on which even lil babies are transformed into men. Yes, to come upon the proving ground of the human condition. Vanity dropped like soiled underwear. Pride stripped off like a pair of duckings that’ve been working in all week in the mud. Feet dragging with the gravity of the moment; legs limp as a pair of worn-out galluses; with eyes dim as a flickering lamp wick! Read to me, Deacon; read to me!

  He said, Come unto me, Deacon Wilhite cried.

  Come to me—Yes! Meaning to take up His burden. At first the little baby-sized load that with the first steps we take weighs less than a butter-ball; no more than a sugar-tit. Then, Lord help us, it grows heavier with each step we take along life’s way, until in that moment it weighs upon us like the headstone of the world. Meaning to come bringing it! Come hauling it! Come dragging it! Come on, even if you have to crawl. Come with your abuses! And come with no excuses! Amen! Let me have it again, Reveren’ Wilhite….

  Come unto Me, the Master said.

  Meaning to help the weak and the downhearted. To stand up to the oppressors. To suffer and hang from the cross for standing up for who you are and for what you believe. Meaning to undergo His initiation into the life everlasting. Oh Yes, and to cry … cry…. cry…. eyeeee!

  Bliss could hear the word rise and spread to become the great soaring trombone note of Daddy Hickman’s singing voice. It seemed somehow to arise there in the box along with him, shaking him fiercely as it rose to float with throbbing pain up to Daddy Hickman again, who now seemed to stand high above the tent. And trembling now, he tensed himself and rose slowly upright in the controlled way Daddy Hickman had taught him, feeling the terror gripping like quicksand. He could feel the opening of his mouth and the spastic flexing of his diaphragm as the words rushed from his throat to join the resounding voice.

  Lord, Lord!

  Why…

  … Hast Thou…

  … Forsaken me?

  And now Daddy Hickman was opening up and bearing down,

  More man than men and yet in that world-destroying-world-creating moment just a little chile calling his father…. Then pausing before his next cue:

  HEAR THE LAMB A-CRYING ON THE TREE!

  LORD, LORD, Bliss cried, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?

  Amen, Daddy Hickman answered, Amen!

  Then his voice came fast, explosive, with gut-toned preacher’s authority, awe-inspiring:

  The Father of no man who yet was the Father of all men; the human-son-side of God—Great God A-mighty! Calling out from the agony of the
cross!

  Ho, open up your downcast eyes and see the beauty of the living Word….

  All babe, and yet in that mysterious moment, ALL MAN. Him who had taken up the burden of all the little children crying, LORD….

  LORD, Bliss cried.

  Crying plaintive as a baby sheep …

  … Baaaaaaaa!

  The little lamb crying with the tongue of Man…

  … Lord…

  … Crying to the Father…

  … Lord, LORD…

  … Calling to his pappy…

  Lord, Lord, why hast…

  … Amen! Lord, Why…

  … Hast Thou…

  … Forsaken me….

  Aaaaaaaah!

  WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME, LORD?

  Bliss screamed the words in answer and now he wished to cry, but the sound of Daddy Hickman’s voice told him that this was not the time, that the words were taking Daddy Hickman where they wanted him to go. Now he could hear him beginning to walk up and down the platform behind him, pacing in his great black shoes, his voice rising with his heavy tread, his great chest heaving: