Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Crying—Amen! Crying, Lord, Lord—Amen! On a cross on a hill, His arms spread out like my grandmammy told me it was the custom to stretch a runaway slave when they gave him the water cure. When they forced water into his mouth until it filled up his bowels and he lay swollen and drowning on the dry land. Drinking water, breathing water, water overflowing his earth-bound lungs. Nailed! NAILED! Riveted to the cross-arm like a coon-skin fixed to the door of the House of God, but with the live coon still inside the furry garment! Still in possession of his body and his mind, with all nine points of the Roman Law a fiery pain to consume the earthly house. Yes, and every point of law a spearhead of injustice.

  Look! See with me! His head is lollying! Green gall is drooling from his lips! Drooling, yes! down his chin like pap from his mammy’s breast as it had drooled in those long, sweet, baby days long gone.

  AH YES! BUT NO TIT SO TOUGH NOR PAP SO BITTER AS TOUCHED THE LIPS OF THE DYING LAMB!

  Oh, no! Oh, Grandmother Death was suckling the son of MAN! Yes, and the son of God was beginning to shine in all His beauty.

  There He is, hanging on; hanging on in spite of knowing the way it would have to be. Yes! Because the body of Man does not wish to die! It matters not who’s inside the ribs, the heart, the lungs. Because the body of Man does not sanction death! Suicide is but a sulking in the face of hope! Ah, Man is tough. Man is human! By definition Man is proud. Even when heaven and hell come slamming together like a twelve-pound sledge on a piece of heavy-gauged railroad steel, Man is tough and Man is mannish—and Ish means like. There He was, stretching from hell-pain to benediction; head in heaven and body in hell…. Tell me, who said He was weak? Who said He was frail? Because if He was, then we need a new word for strength. We need a new word for courage! We need a whole new dictionary!

  Ah, but there He was, with the others laughing up at Him, their mouths busted open like rotten melons—laughing! You know how it was, you’ve been up there; you’ve heard that contemptuous sound: “IF YOU BE THE KING OF THE JEWS AND THE SON OF GOD, JUMP DOWN.” Jump down, black bastard, dirty Jew, Jump down!

  Scorn burning the wind. Enough halitosis alone to burn up old Moloch! The many ganged up against the few! … He’s bleeding from his side. Hounds baying the weary stag…. And yet there is the power and the glory locked in the weakness of His human manifestation; bound by His human limitation, His sacrificial humanhood! Ah, yes; for He willed to save Man by dying and dying as Man died. And He was a heap of man in that moment, let me tell you. I say, let me tell you, that mister was much man in that awful moment. He was Man raised to his most magnificent image, shining like a prism with all the shapes and colors of man, and dazzling all who had the vision to see. Man moved beyond mere pain to tragic joy … There He is, with the spikes in his tender flesh. Nailed to the cross—first with it lying flat on the ground, and then being raised in a slow, flesh-tearing, bone-scraping arc, one hundred and eighty degrees—Up, up, UP! Aaaaaaaaah! Up until He’s upright like the ridge-pole of the House of God.

  Lord, Lord, Why?

  See Him! Watch Him! Feel Him! His eyes rolling as white as our eyes, looking to His, Our Father, the tendons of his neck roped out, straining like the steel cables of a heavenly curving bridge in a storm. Help me! Help me now! His jaw muscles bursting out like kernels of corn on a hot stove lid. Yes! And His mouth trying to refuse the miserable human questioning of the words….

  Lord, Lord…

  … Oh yes, Reveren’ Bliss, crying above the laughing ones for whom He left His Father to come down here to save, crying.

  … Lord, Lord, Why?

  Amen! Crying as no man since, thank you, Jesus, has ever had to cry.

  Ah Man, Ah human flesh! This side we all know well, on His weaker, human side we were all up there on the cross, just swarming over Him like ants. Yes, but look at Him with me now. Look at Him freshly, with the eyes of your most understanding heart. There He is now, hanging on in man-flesh, His face twitching and changing like a field of grain struck by a high wind, hanging puzzled, bemused and confused, mystified and teary-eyed—wracked by the realization dawning in the gray matter of His cramped human brain; knowing in the sinews, in the marrow of his human bones, in the living tissue of his most human veins—realizing that Man was born to suffer and to die for other men! There He is, look at Him. Suspended between heaven and hell, hanging already nineteen centuries of time to one split second of His torment and realizing in that second of His anguished cry that life in this world is but a zoom between the warm womb and the lonely tomb. Proving for all time, casting the pattern of history forth for all to see in the undeniable concreteness of blood, bone, and human grace before that which has to be borne by every man…. Proving—proving that in this lonely,

  lightning-bug flash of time we call our life on earth we all begin with a slap of a hand across our tender baby bottoms that starts us to crying the puzzled question with our first drawn breath—Why was I born…. Aaaaaaaah! …

  And hardly before we can get it out of our mouths, hardly before we can exhale the first lungful of life’s anguished air … even before we can think to ask, Lord, what’s my true name? Who, Lord, am I?—here comes the bone-crunching slap of a cold iron spade across our puzzled countenance and it’s time to cry, WHY, LORD, WHY WAS I BORN TO DIE?

  Yes, why? Reveren’ Hickman, tell us why?

  Why, Reveren’ Bliss? Because we’re men, that’s why! The initiation into the lodge is hard! The dues are outrageous, and nobody can refuse to join. Oh, we can wear the uniforms and the feathered hats, the tasseled fez and the red-and-purple caps and capes a while, and we can enjoy the feasting and the marching and strutting fellowship—then Dong, Dong! and we’re caught between two suspensions of our God-given breath: one to begin and the other to end, a whoop of joy and a sigh of sadness, the pinch of pain and the tickle of gladness; learning charity if we’re lucky, faith if we endure, and hope in sheer downright desperation!

  And now, thank God, because He passed his test like any mannish man—not like a god, but like a pale, frail, weak man who dared to be his Father’s Son … amen! Oh, we must dare to be, brothers and sisters…. We must Dare,

  my little children…. We must dare in our own troubled times to be our Father’s own. Yes, and now we have the comfort and the example to help us through from darkness to lightness, a torchlight along the way. Ah, but in that flash of light in which we flower, we must find Him so that we can find us, ourselves. For it is only a quivering moment—then the complicated tongs of life’s old good-bad come clamping down, grabbing us in our tender places, locking like bear’s teeth beneath our short hair—Lord, He taught us how to live, yes! And in the sun-drowning awfulness of that moment, He taught us how to die. There He was on the cross, leading His sheep, showing us how to achieve the heritage of our godliness which HE in that most pitiful human moment—with spikes in His hands and through His feet, with the thorny crown of scorn studding His tender brow, with the cruel points of Roman steel—not Jewish, Roman—with those points of Roman steel piercing His side….

  Crying, Lord…

  … Lord!

  LORD! Amen. Crying from the castrated Roman tree unto His Father like an unjustly punished child. And yet, Reveren’ Bliss, Glory to God….

  And yet, He was guaranteeing with the final expiration of His human breath our everlasting life….

  Bliss could feel the words working in the crowd now, boiling in the heat of the Word and the weather. Women were shouting and far back in the dark he could see someone dressed in white leaping into the air with outflung arms, going up, then down, over backwards and up and down again, in a swooning motion which made her seem to float for a moment in the air which was being stirred by the agitated motion of the women’s palm-leaf fans.

  It was past the time for him to preach Saint Mark, but each time he cried “Lord, Lord,” he couldn’t hear his own voice as they shouted and screamed even louder. He tried to see to the back of the tent, back where the seams in the ribbed white
cloth curved down and were tied in a roll; past where the congregation strained forward or sat in rigid fixation, seeing here and there the hard, bright disks of eyeglasses glittering in the hot yellow light of lanterns and flares. The faces were rapt and owl-like, gleaming with perspiration in the heat of Daddy Hickman’s interpretation of the Word.

  Then suddenly, right down there in front he could see an old white-headed man beginning to leap in holy exaltation, bounding high into the air and sailing down; then up again higher than his own head, moving like a jumping-jack, with bits of sawdust dropping from the bottom of his white tennis shoes. A brown old man, whose face was a blank mask, set and mysterious, his lips tight, his eyes starry like those of a china doll, soaring without effort through the hot shadows of the tent; sailing as you did in dreams just before you fell out of bed and woke up. A holy jumper, Brother Pegue….

  Bliss turned to look at Daddy Hickman, seeing the curved flash of his upper teeth and the swell of his great chest as with arms outspread he began to sing…. When suddenly, from the left of the tent he heard a scream. It was a different note, and when he turned he could see the swirling movement of a woman’s form, but strangely, no one was reaching out to keep her from hurting herself, or from jumping out of her underclothes and showing her womanness as some of the ladies sometimes did. Then he could see her coming on, a tall, redheaded woman in a purple-red dress, coming on screaming through the soprano section of the big choir where the members, wearing their square, flat-topped caps, were standing and knocking over chairs, letting her through as she dashed among them striking out with her arms as she moved forward toward the front.

  She’s a sinner coming to testify, he thought…. A white—? Is she white …?hearing,

  He’s mine, mine! That’s Cudworth, my child. My baby. You gypsy niggers stole him, my baby. You robbed him of his birthright!

  Yes, she is white, he thought, seeing the wild eyes and the hair streaming like a field of wheat coming toward him now at a pace which seemed suddenly dream-like. What’s she doing here, a white sinner? Moving toward him like the devil in a nightmare, as now a man’s voice boomed from far away, Madam, Lady, please—this here’s the House of God! But even then not realizing that she was clawing and pushing her way toward him; thinking, Cudworth? Who’s Cudworth? Until suddenly there she was, her hot voice screaming in his ear, her pale face shooting down toward him like an image springing out of a toppling mirror, her green eyes wide, her nostrils flaring. Then he felt her arms lock around him and his head was crushed against the hardness of her breast, hard into the sharp, sweet woman-smell of her. Me, she means me, he thought, as something strange and painful stirred within him. Then, as she crushed him closer, he could no longer breathe, squeezing and shaking him and he felt his Bible slipping from his fingers and tried to hold on, but she screamed again with a sudden movement, her voice bursting hot and shrill into the sudden hush. And he felt his Bible fall away in the well-like echo now punctuated by the heavy rasping of her breathing. It was then he realized that she was trying to lift him from the coffin. Tearing at it to get him out.

  I’m taking him home to his heritage, he heard. He’s mine. You understand. I’m his mother.

  It was strangely far away, like a scene unfolding under water. Who is she? flashed through his mind. Where’s she taking me? She’s strong. But my mother went away. Paradise, up high…. A ghost…

  Then he was looking at the familiar faces, seeing their bodies frozen in odd postures like Body and the others when they played a game of statue. He thought: They’re scared. She’s scaring them all…. Then his head jerked around and he could see Daddy Hickman leaning over the platform just above them, bracing his hands against his thighs, his arms rigid, with a look of amazement on his great laughing-happy face as he violently shook his head.

  Then he was twisted again and as his head came around, his teeth clicking, it was as though a stick had stirred quiet water. He could see the people all standing looking on, one woman still rapidly fanning herself, while some were standing on chairs, holding on to the shoulders of those in front of them, their eyes and mouths wide with disbelief—until the scene crumpled like a funny paper burning in a fireplace and he saw their mouths open to utter the same words so loud and insistently that he heard only a blur of loud silence. Yet her breathing came hard and clear. His head came round to her now, close up, so that he could see the light fringe of freckles shooting across the ridge of the straight, thin nose like a covey of quail flushing across a field of snow, the wide-glowing green of her eyes. Stiff copper hair was bursting from the white temple like the wire of Daddy Hickman’s red rubber “electric” hairbrush. Then the scene swirled again and he heard a calm new sound bursting in.

  JUST DIG MY GRAVE, he heard, JUST DIG MY GRAVE AND READY MY SHROUD, ‘CAUSE THIS HERE AIN’T HAPPENING! OH NO, IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN. SO JUST DIG MY GRAVE!

  It was a short, stooped black woman, hardly larger than a little girl, whose shoulders slanted straight down from her neck and into the white collar of her oversized black dress, from which her deep and vibrant alto voice seemed to issue as from some source other than her mouth. He could see her coming through the crowd, shaking her head and pointing toward the earth, crying, I SAID DIG IT! I SAID GO GET THE DIGGERS! the words so intense with negation that they sounded serene, the voice rolling with eerie meaning as now she seemed to float in among the white-uniformed deaconesses. And he could see the women turning to stare wonderingly at one another, then back to the little woman who moved between them, grimly shaking her head. Then suddenly he could feel the arms tighten around his body and he was being lifted up out of the coffin and the redheaded woman screamed past his ear, Don’t you blue gums touch me! Don’t you dare!

  And again it was far away, beneath the water in a dimly lit place where nothing responded as it should. For at her scream he seemed to see the little woman and the deaconesses pause as they should have paused in the House of God as well as in the world outside the House of God—then she was lifting him higher and he felt his body come up until only one foot remained caught in the pink lining and he looked down just as she swung him in her arms and he felt the coffin hard against his foot. Then it was going over, slowly like a turtle sliding off a log. It seemed to rise up of its own will, lazily; then one of the sawhorses moved and it seemed to explode.

  He felt that he was going to be sick; for, glancing downward from the woman’s tightening arms, he could see the coffin still in motion. It seemed to rise up of its own will, lazily, sleepily, like Daddy Hickman turning slowly in a pleasant sleep—only it seemed to be laughing at him with its pink frog-mouth. Then as she moved him again, one of the sawhorses shifted violently and he could see the coffin tilt up at an angle and heave.

  It seemed to vomit now, spilling Teddy and Easter Bunny and his glass pistol with its colored-candy BB bullets, like prizes from a paper horn-of-plenty And now even his white leather Bible was spilling out, its pages fluttering open for everyone to see. He thought, He’ll be mad about my Bible and my bear—and he felt a scream start up from where the woman was squeezing his stomach, as now she swung him swiftly around, causing the church tent, the flares and the people, to spin before his eyes like a great tin humming top. Then his head snapped forward and back, rattling his teeth, and in the pause he could see the deaconesses spring forward even as the spilled images from the toppling coffin lingered vividly before his eyes—gone like a splash in the sunlight, as a tall woman with short, gleaming hair and steel-rimmed eyeglasses shot from among the deaconesses, her lenses glittering harshly, and he could see her mouth come open and the other women freezing in their places, making a great silence beneath the upward curve of his own screaming voice and her head went back with an angry toss, and he could feel the high shrill slap hard against him.

  What! Y’all mean to tell me? the woman shouted, Here in the HOUSE OF GOD? She’s going to come in here? Who? WHO! JUST TELL ME! WHO BORN OF MAN’S HOT CONJUNCTION WITH A WOMAN’S SINFUL BOWELS?


  And like an echo now, the larger voice of the smaller woman, seeming to float up from the floor,

  JUST DIG MY GRAVE, JUS’ READY MY SHROUD! I SAY JUST … the voices now booming and echoing beneath the tent.

  And it was as though something heavy had plunged from a great height into the water, throwing the images into furious motion. His face was pressed hard against the red hair as now the women moved. They came like shadows flying before a torch tossed into a darkened room, their weight seeming to strike him and the strange woman who held him out of a single slow, long-floating, space-defying leap, sending the woman staggering backwards and causing her tightening arms to squash the air from his lungs so that his chest ached as it did whenever he held his breath too long between sobs. Their faces, hallowed with wrath, loomed before him, seeming to enter where his breath had been, their widespread hands beginning to tear at his body like the claws of great cats with human heads, lifting him clear of earth and coffin, and he felt himself suspended there between the redheaded woman, who now held his head, and the sisters who had seized his legs, arms, and body. And again he felt, but could not hear, his own throat’s painful Aaaaaaaaaaaaah!

  The Senator’s eyes rolled, the taste of fever filled his mouth. It was as though the stream of memories had reopened his wounds. His fingers found the button with which he could ring for the nurse but he hesitated. The large, kindly face was still looking across at him, the hoarse voice moving mellow, still evocative and compelling around him. He would wait, this time he wouldn’t run. Not now…

  “Well sir, Bliss,” Hickman was saying, “here comes this white woman pushing over everybody and up to the box, and it’s like hell done erupted at a sideshow. She rushed up to the box….”

  “Box?” the Senator said wearily, “You mean coffin, don’t you?”

  Hickman looked quickly down, slightly frowning. “No, Bliss, I mean ‘box.’