Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  It’s not a coffin ‘til it holds a dead man…. So as I was saying, she rushed up and grabs you in the box and the deaconesses leaped out of their chairs and folks started screaming, and I looked out there for some white folks to come get her, but couldn’t see none, so there it was. I could have cried like a baby, because I knew that one miserable woman could bring the whole state down on us. And there she is, out of nowhere like a puff of poison gas, right smack in the middle of our Emancipation exaltation. Bliss, it was like God had started playing practical jokes.

  “Next thing I know she’s got you by the head and Sister Suzie Trumball’s got one leg and another sister’s got the other and some others are snatching you by the arms. Talking about King Solomon, he didn’t have but two women to deal with—I had seven, and one convinced that she was a different breed of cat from the rest. Yes, and the others were chock full of disagreement and dead set to probe it. I tell you, Bliss, when it comes to chillen, women just ain’t gentlemen, and the fight between her kind of woman and ours goes way back to the beginning. Back, I guess, to when women found that the only way they could turn over the responsibility of raising a child to another woman was to turn over some of the child’s love and affection along with it. They been battling ever since. One trying to figure out how to get out of the work without dividing up the affection, and the other trying to hold on to all that weight of care and those cords of emotion and love for which they figure no wages can ever pay. Because while some women work and others don’t, to a woman a baby is a baby. She ain’t rational about it, way down deep she ain’t. All it’s got to be is little and warm and helpless and cute and she wants to take it over, just like a she-cat will raise a litter of rabbits, or a she-bitch dog will mama a Maltese kitten. I guess most of those deaconesses had been nursing white folks’ chillen from the time they could first take a job and each and every one of them had helped raise somebody’s baby and loved it. Yes, and had fought battles with the white women every step of the way. It’s a wonder those babies ever grow up to have good sense with all that vicious, mute-unspoken female fighting going on over them from the day they was passed from the midwife’s or doctor’s hands into his mother’s arms and then from the minute it needed its first change of swaddling clothes, into some black woman’s waiting hands. Talking about God and the Devil fighting over a man’s soul, that situation must make a child’s heart a battleground. ‘Cause, Bliss, as you must know by now, women don’t recognize no rules except their own—men make the public rules—and they knew all about this so-called psychological warfare long before men finally recognized it and named it and took credit for inventing something new.

  “So there this poor woman comes moving out of her territory and bursting into theirs. Mad, Bliss, mad! That night all those years of aggravation was multiplied against her seven times seven. Because down there her kind always wins the contest in the end—for the child, I mean—with ours being doomed to lose from the beginning and knowing it. They have got to be weaned—our women, I mean, the nursemaids. And yet, it just seems to make their love all the deeper and the tenderer. They know that when the child hits his teens they can’t hold it or help it any longer, even if she gets to be wise as Solomon. She can help with the first steps of babyhood and teach it its first good manners and love it and all like that, but she can’t do nothing about helping it take the first steps into manhood and womanhood. Ha, no! Whoever heard of one of us knowing anything about dealing with life, or knowing a better way of facing up to the harsh times along the road? So the whole system’s turned against her then from foundation to roof; the whole beehive of what their folks consider good—’quality,’ we used to say—is moved out of her domain. They just don’t recognize no continuance of anything after that: not love, not remembrance, not understanding, sacrifice, compassion—nothing. Comes the teen time, what we used to call the ‘smell-yourself’ time, when the sweat gets musty and you start to throb, they cast out the past and start out new—baptised into Caesar’s way, Bliss. Which is the price the grown ones exact for the privilege of their being called ‘miss’ and ‘mister.’ So self-castrated of their love they pass us by, boy, they pass us by. Then as far as we’re concerned it’s ‘Put your heart on ice, put your conscience in pawn.’ Even their beloved black tit becomes an empty bag to laugh at and they grow deaf to their mammy’s lullabyes. What’s wrong with those folks, Bliss, is they can’t stand continuity, not the true kind that binds man to man and to Jesus and to God. My great-great-granddaddy was probably a savage eating human flesh, and bastardy, denied joy and shame, and humanity had to be mixed with my name a thousand times in the turmoil of slavery, and out of all that I’m a preacher. It’s a mystery but it’s based on fact, it happened body to body, belly to belly over the long years. But then? They’re all born yesterday at twelve years of age. They can’t stand continuity because if they could everything would have to be changed; there’d be more love among us, boy. But the first step in their growing up is to learn how to spurn love. They have to deny it by law, boy. Then begins the season of hate AND SHAMEFACEDNESS. Confusion leaps like fire in the bowels and false faces bloom like jimsonweed. They put on a mask, boy, and life’s turned plumb upside down.

  “‘Cause what can be right if the first, the baby love, was wrong, Bliss? Tell me then, where’s the foundation of the world? The tie that binds? You tell me, if with a boy’s first buzz and a gal’s first flow ‘warm’ has to become ‘cold’ and ‘tenderness’ calls forth ‘harshness’ and ‘forthrightness’ calls forth ‘devi-ousness,’ and innocence standing on the shady side of the street is automatically to be judged guilt? Hasn’t joy then got to become flawed, just another name for sadness, like a golden trumpet with a crack in the valves and then with a pushed-in bell? Yes, and gratitude and charity and patience, endurance and hope and all the virtues Christ died to teach us become nothing but a burden and a luxury for black, knotty-headed fools? Speak to me, Bliss. You took their way, so speak to me and let me see by the light of their truth. I have arrived in ignorance and questioning. I’m old, my white head’s almost forgot its blacker times and my sight’s so poor I can almost look God’s blazing sun straight in the face without batting my fading eyes. And I’m a simple man and nothing can change that. But I’m talking about simple things. For me, Bliss, the frame of life is round and looking through I see the spirit does not die and neither does love when she smells of she and he smells of he, and the skirts git short and the voice cracks and deepens to mannish tones. No, but the way they’ve worked it out, tears become specialized, boy; and Jesus looked at the lot of Man and wept for everybody. But those people put a weatherman in control of the sky. They cut the ties between the child and the foundation of his love. Laughter cracks down like thunder when tears ought to fall. And would have too, the year before. But standing in the doorway of manhood and womanhood you have to question yourself how to feel in the simplest things. You fall out of rhythm with your earliest cries, your movements. Little signs have to be stuck up and consulted in the heart: How must I feel, Mister Weatherman? His face over there is dark, though I used to know it, can I say ‘howdy’? She stretches forth the same old hand for charity that used to cook the fudge and plait my braids, can I acknowledge it? She cries for understanding and a recognition of that old cut nerve that twitches in my heart—can I afford to hear the voice of this bowed-down heart? How much money will it cost me, Mister Weatherman? He wrestles over there in pain, ain’t this the time to laugh; with misery monkeying up his wrinkled face? Or he speaks polite and steps aside, isn’t this the way of fear and a sign that God has spit on him? Bow down, bow down! Step aside and out of my exalted human sight.

  “Then a little later, Bliss, when he’s found a mate, that old severed nerve throbs again; they’re laughing like fools out in the quarters—is it to mock my dignity? Is it zippered up? Listen to them praying, is it for my abject destruction? I built my house on King Mountain stone, will it crumble before their envying eyes? In the dark in the alley,
in the summer night some mister man is making a woman howl and spit like a rapturous cat—could that black tomcat have prowled in my bed? Could he? Could he? How now! He’s a buck stallion full of stinking sweat, I’m an eagle, bright with the light of God’s own smile. His woman’s a bitch and mine a doe…. Ah, but think about it with the blue serge hanging on the rack: Has a black stallion ever mounted a snow-white doe at her frisky invitation when the sun was down? What goes on in that darkness I create when I refuse to see? What links up with what? Who reaches out to whom within that gulley, under that lid of life denied? You want me to hush and go away, Bliss?

  “Not now, it’s been too long and some things just won’t stand not being said. Oh, all I’ve been talking about is human, Bliss. All human weakness and human pride and will—didn’t Peter deny Christ? But you had a choice, Bliss. You had a chance to join up to be a witness for either side and you let yourself be fouled up. You tried to go with those who raise the failure of love above their heads like a flag and say, ‘See here, I am now a man.’ You wanted to be with those who turn coward before their strongest human need and then say, ‘Look here, I’m brave.’ It makes me laugh because few are brave enough to be for right and truth above all their other foolishness. There wasn’t a single man in that jail that night they beat me who didn’t know I was innocent, and there wasn’t a single person in that town who didn’t know that woman was crazy, but not a single one was brave enough and free enough simply not to beat me. I don’t mean defend me. I don’t mean take up the cause of Justice. ‘Listen, this man is innocent. He was preaching before a tent full of people and so couldn’t have touched that woman with a ten-foot pole.’ No, Bliss, I didn’t expect that because I knew the score. But even knowing it I found I still had something to learn. I had to lay there while they beat me and what I learned was that there wasn’t a mother’s son among them who, knowing my innocence, had the manhood and decency to refuse to whip my head. I guess if there’d been a preacher among them he’d’ve got in his licks with the rest. I lay there and laughed, Bliss. Sure, I laughed. I laughed because there is some knowledge that’s just too hopeless for tears. That was a long time ago and a few years before you were to make your choice, Bliss, but the devilment I’m describing has been going on for years and it’s a process for blinding and all the hell unleashed in the church that night sprang from it. The eye that was trained by two women’s love to love and respond to life now must be blind to the spirit that shines from all but a special few human eyes, and now you can’t look beneath the surface of a window-pane and see fire and the mirrors are rigged so you can’t see what you would deny in those whom you would deny. Oh, sure, Bliss; you can cut that cord and zoom off like a balloon and rise high—I mean that cord woven of love, of touching, ministering love; that’s tied to a babe with its first swaddling clothes—but the cord don’t shrivel and die like a navel cord beneath the first party dress or the first long suit of clothes. Oh no, it parts with a cry like a rabbit torn by a hawk in the winter snows and it numbs quick and glazes like the eyes of a sledgehammered ox and the blood don’t show, it’s like a wound that’s cauterized. It snaps with the heart’s denial back into the skull like a worm chased by a razor-beaked bird, and once inside it snarls, Bliss; it snarls up the mind. It won’t die and there’s no sun inside to set so it can stop its snakish wiggling. It bores reckless excursions between the brain and the heart and kills and kills again unkillable continuity. Bliss, when Eve deviled and Adam spawned we were all in the dark, and that’s a fact.”

  Suddenly the old man shook his head. “Oh, Bliss; Bliss, boy. I get carried away with words. Forgive me. Maybe a black man, even one as old as me, just can’t understand the mystery of a white man’s pain. But one thing I do know: God, Bliss boy, is Love.”

  The Senator looked up at the fading voice, gripped by the fear that with its cessation his own breath would go. But there was Hickman still beside him, looking down as with the wonder of his Word for God.

  “Perhaps,” the Senator said, “but it makes the laces too tight. Tell me what happened while there’s still time.”

  “Lord, Bliss,” Hickman said, “Here I’ve gone off and left you suspended in those women’s hands and you crying to beat the band. Well, for a minute there it looked like they was going to snatch you limb from limb, tear you apart and dart in seven different directions. And the folks were getting outraged a mile a minute, because nothing makes our people madder and will bring them to make a killing-floor stand than to have white folks come bringing their craziness into the church. We just can’t stand to have our one place of peace broken up, and nothing upsets us worse than that—unless it’s messing with one of our babies.

  “You could see it and hear it, Bliss. I turned and yelled at them to regard the House of God—when here comes another woman, one of the deacon esses, she’s a big six-foot city woman from Birmingham, wearing eyeglasses and who was usually the kindest woman you’d want to see. Sister Beau-masher, she had a French name. But like now she was soft-spoken and easy-going the way some big women get to be because most of the attention goes to the little cute ones. Well, Bliss, she broke things up. I saw her tearing down the aisle from the rear of the tent and reaching over the heads of the others and before I could move, she’s in that woman’s head of long red hair like a wildcat in a weaving mill. I couldn’t figure what she was up to in all that pushing and tugging, but they kind of rumbled around the floor until somebody’s shoe came sailing out of there like a big comet and then they ducked down in a squat like they were trying to grab for better holts and when they come up she’s got all four feet or so of that woman’s red hair wrapped around her arm like an ell of copper-colored cloth. And, Bliss, she’s talking calm and slapping the others away with her other hand like they were babies. Saying, ‘Y’all just leave her to me now, sisters. Everything’s going to be all right. She ain’t no trouble, darlings. Not now. Get on away now, Sis Trumball, and let her go. You got rheumatism in your shoulder anyway. You all just let her loose now. Coming here into the House of God talking about this is her child. Since when? I want to know, since when? HOLD STILL, DARLING,’ she tells the white woman, ‘NOBODY WANTS TO HURT YOU, BUT YOU MUST UNDERSTAND THAT YOU HAVE GONE TOO FAR….’

  “And the white woman is holding on to you for dear life, Bliss; with her head going back, back, like a net full of red snappers and flounders being wound up on a ship’s winch. And this big Amazon of a woman who could’ve easily set horses with a Missouri mule starts to preaching her own sermon, saying, ‘If this Revern’ Bliss the preacher is her child, all the little yeller bastards in the nation has got to be her child. So when’s she going to testify to all that? You, sister, just let her go now. Just let me have her and y’all take that chile. Take that chile, I say! I love that chile ‘cause he’s God’s chile and y’all love that chile, so I say take that chile. Remove that chile out of this foolish woman’s sacrilegious hands. TAKE HIM, I SAY! And if this is the time, then this is the TIME. If it’s the time to die, then I’m dead. But take that chile. ‘Cause this is one kind of foolishness that’s got to be stopped before it goes any further.’

  “Well sir, there you were, Bliss, with that white woman still got holt of you but with her head snubbed back now and her eyes bucking like a frightened mare’s, screaming, ‘He’s mine, he’s mine!’ Claiming you, boy, claiming you right out of our hands. Least out of those women’s hands. ‘Cause us men were petrified, all thrown out of action by the white woman’s awful nerve, and that big strong bear-mashing woman threatening to snatch her scalp clean from her head.

  “And all the time Sister Bear Masher—what was her name?—she’s talking ‘bout, ‘If he was just learning his A.B.C.’s like the average chile instead of being a true, full-fledged preacher of the gospel you wouldn’t want him and you’d yell down destruction on anybody who even signified he was yours—WHERE’S HIS DADDY! JUST TELL US WHO’S HIS DADDY! YOU AIN’T THE VIRGIN MARY SO YOU SHO MUSTA PICKED OUT HIS DADDY. WHO’S THE BLACK MAN YOU
WANT TO DIE?’

  “And women all over the place started taking it up, Bliss. ‘Yes, that’s right, who’s the man? AMEN!’ and all like that. You could almost see the tent start to flapping.

  “Bliss, I’m a man with a great puzzlement about life and I enjoy the wonderment of how things can happen and how folks can act. In this land the unexpected always pops out, there’s no straight lines once you get a few feet off the ground, and I must have just been standing there with my mouth open taking it in. But when those women started making a chorus and working themselves up to do something drastic, I broke loose. I reached down and grabbed my trombone and started to blow but instead of blowing something calming, I broke into ‘The St. Louis Blues’ like we used to do when I was a young hellion and a fight would break out at a dance. Just automatically, and I caught myself on about the seventh note and smeared into ‘Listen to the Lambs,’ but my lip was set wrong and I was half laughing at how my sinful days had tripped me up anyway so it came out ‘LET US BREAK BREAD TOGETHER,’ and by that time Deacon Wilhite had come to life and started singing and some of the men joined in…. In fact, it was a men’s chorus, ‘cause those women was still all up in arms. I blew a few bars and put down that horn and climbed down to the floor to see if I could untangle that mess.

  “I didn’t want to touch that woman, so I yelled for somebody who knew her to come forward and get her out of there. Because even after I had calmed them a bit she kept her death grip on you and was screaming and Sister Beaumasher still had that red hair wound round her arm and didn’t want to let go. Finally, a woman named Lula Strother came through the crowd and started talking to her like you’d talk to a baby and she gave you up. I’m expecting the police or some of her folks by now but luckily none of them had come out to laugh at us that night. So Bliss, I got you into some of the women’s hands and me and Sister Beaumasher got into the woman’s rubber-tired buggy and rode off into town.