Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  So now I had to cook for her. Go out and get that little boy, Raymond, to go bring me milk and bread and meat from the store, pretending it was for his mama, and me picking the vegetables that Robert had planted for Mama’s needs and then stand over the stove and prepare the meal and then feed it to her spoon by spoon. Yeah, and remembering, A little bit of poison helped her along, that old slave-time line, and coming as close to breaking out of my despair and grinning as I ever did for a long, long time. But still granting nothing to the facts. So all right, I told myself, you’re just fattening her for the time she can understand what she did and pay for it. You just be patient, just count the rest until your solo comes up. This rhythm won’t stop until you take your break, just keep counting the one-two-three-fours, the two-two-three-fours, the three-two-three-fours…

  So I didn’t eat, only took water and a few sips of whiskey, never leaving the house, knocking on the windowpane in the afternoons to get little Raymond to go to the store, or to stand out on the back porch in the dark to get some fresh air. And with all that feeding and clumsy grudging ministering to them I wouldn’t let myself think a second about life and living, only about dying. About how to kill and the way our bodies would look when they found us. And the quickest way to get it over with, how the flames would announce the news in the night, whether to just let them find us or to have little Raymond take a note to Mama’s pastor to tell the folks to keep off the streets….

  Everything, but never whether I could save myself because that would have meant to run and I didn’t believe I had anything left to run for.

  Ah, but Hickman, you were caught deaf and blind. With eyes that saw not, and ears that heard nothing but the drums of revenge. And there was that baby growing more human every second nudging his way into your awareness and making his claim upon you, and her crying all the time—in fact, more than the baby did. You had fallen into the great hole and they’d dropped the shuck in on you. There was simply too much building up inside of you for clear vision. I guess if I could have played I might have found some relief, but I couldn’t play, even if I hadn’t left my horn in Dallas when I got the word. And I couldn’t sing and if I had after all she’d done to me I’d probably sung falsetto. Then came the day…

  Poor Bliss, the terrible thing is that even if I told you all this, I still couldn’t tell who your daddy was, or even if you have any of our blood in your veins…. Like when I was a boy and guessed the number of all those beans in that jar they had in that grocery window and they wouldn’t give me the prize because one wasn’t a bean, they said, but a rock! What a bunch of rascals, Ha! Ha! So outrageous that I just grinned and they had to laugh at their own bogusness. Gave me a candy bar…. No, I’d still have to tell him as I told myself in the days that were to come: that who the man was was made beside the point by all that happened. Bliss started right there in that pain-filled room—or back when the fish grew lungs and left the sea. You don’t reject Jesus because somebody calls Joseph a confidence man or Mary a whore;

  the spears and the cross and the crime were real and so was the pain….

  So then came the day when I started in from the kitchen to find her sitting on the side of the bed, her bare boney feet on the bare boards of the floor as she sat there all heavy-breasted in Mama’s flannel nightgown; her hair swinging over her shoulder in one big braid and with eyes all pale in her sallow skin; and all weak-voiced, saying:

  Listen, Alonzo Hickman, the time has come for me to leave.

  Leave, I said, who told you you were ever going to leave here?

  Yes, I know, but he’s growing to me too fast. So if I’m ever to leave I must do it now.

  What makes you think…

  No, let me tell you why I came here….

  Yes, I said. As though I don’t know already; you tell me. Just why, other than the fact that you had no damn where else to turn?

  Don’t you be so sure, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t quarrel with me after helping me. There’s more to it than you think….

  So why? I’m listening.

  I came to give you back your brother, do you understand?

  You what!

  Yes, it’s true. I never knew your brother and I meant him no special harm. It was just that I am what I am and I was in trouble and so desperate that I couldn’t feel beyond my heart. You must understand, because it’s true and it’s a truth that’s cost us both all this. —No, let me finish. So now you must take the baby…

  WHO?

  … Take him and keep him and bring him up as your own.

  WHO? I said, looking at her feet, that braid swinging across her breast….

  WHO?

  It’s the only way, Alonzo Hickman. And don’t just stand there in that doorway saying “who” like that. Who else can save us both? I mean you. It’s the only way. After what I’ve done you’ll need to have him as much as I need to give him up. Take him, let him share your Negro life and whatever it is that allowed you to help us all these days. Let him learn to share the forgiveness your life has taught you to squeeze from it. No, listen: I’ve learned something, you won’t believe me, but I have. You’ll see. And you’ll need him to help prevent you from destroying yourself with bitterness. With me he’ll only be the cause of more trouble and shame and later it’ll hurt him….

  And you expect me…

  Yes, and you can. You have the strength and the breadth of spirit. I didn’t know it when I came here, I was just desperate. But I’ve seen you hold him, I’ve caught the look in your eyes. Yes, you can do it. Few could but you can. So I want you to have him—and don’t think I don’t love him already at least as much as I love my own mother, or that I don’t love his father. I do, only his father doesn’t know about him; he’s far away, and unless I do something to undo a little of what I’ve done there’ll never be a chance for us. I could go to him—Oh, Alonzo Hickman, nothing ever stops; it divides and multiplies, and I guess sometimes it gets ground down to superfine, but it doesn’t just blow away. Certainly none of the things between us shall. So you must take him. Later there’ll be money and I’ll get it to you. I’ll help you bring him up and pay for his education. Somewhere in the North, maybe. He’ll be intelligent like his father and he deserves a chance … and I’ll see that you’re taken care of….

  And I thought, so now I’ve got to be a pimp too. First animal, then nursemaid, and now pimp, seeing her shake her head again:

  No, please don’t speak yet. I must do this for both of us….

  And you think that that child there can do all that?

  No, but he’s all I have—unless you still want my life. And if you take that somebody will still have to take him. You don’t just help a child to be born and then leave it alone. So very well, if you mean to kill me, all right, but could you destroy something as weak as that, as helpless as that?

  I have killed snakes.

  A snake? Can you even with death in your eyes call him a snake? Can you? Can you, Alonzo Hickman?

  Ha! Hickman, and you couldn’t. No, but if your heart had been weak I would have died right there of the sheer, downright nerve of it. Here I had been pushed even in Alabama. Well, God never fixed the dice against anybody, we have to believe that. His way may be mysterious but he’s got no grudge against the infants, not even the misbegotten. It’s a wonder I didn’t split right down the middle and step out of my old skin right then and there; because even after all these years I don’t see how I stood there in that doorway and took it all without exploding. And yet, there we were, talking calm and low like two folks who arrived late at the services and were waiting in the vestibule of the church. She sitting on the edge of the bed, kinda leaning forward, with arms spread out to the side and gripping the bedclothes to support herself. Still weak but with her crazy woman’s mind all set. And me, telling myself that I was waiting to learn just how far she intended to follow the trail of talk she’d blazed before I would set the house afire, saying:

  So supposing I say all right—what are you going
to call him?

  You mean what shall we name him?

  Yes.

  It’s not for me to do, he’s yours now. But why not Robert Hickman?

  No!

  Then just Robert, and you give him a last name. But I name him Robert as he should be….

  Just like that. She couldn’t face life with him, wanted to give him to me but wanted me to always remember all the circumstances that brought him to me. So there it was. Like a payday, when all the sweating and aching labor that went into a dirty job is reduced to some pieces of dirty paper and silver and coppers, which the hateful bossman handed to you in a little white envelope. As though that was the end of it and Monday would never come to start you out all over again. It was too much for me. I just listened to her and then backed out of the doorway and went and lay down and tried to think it clear. Ha! Hickman, you had wanted a life for a life and the relief of drowning your humiliation and grief in blood, and now this flawed-hearted woman was offering you two lives, your own, and his young life to train. Here was a chance to prove that there was something in this world stronger than all their ignorant superstition about blood and ghosts—as though half a town was a stud farm and the other half a jungle. Maybe the baby could redeem her and me my failure of revenge and my softness of heart, and help us all (was it here, Hickman, that you began to dream?). Either that or lead him along the trail where I had been and watch him grow into the wickedness his folks had mapped out for him. I thought, I’ll call him Bliss, because they say that’s what ignorance is. Yes, and little did I realize that it was the name of the old heathen life I had already lost.

  So she got her way. She asked the impossible of a bitter man and it worked; I let her walk out of that house and disappear. Let her stay around and nurse the baby until dark, four or five hours more, and still let her leave. Let her come in crying and put him in my arms then walk out of the back door and gone. Oh, thank the Lord, I let her. Ah, but who but those who know life would believe that out of that came this? That out of that bed came this bed; that out of that sitting and a-rocking came this remembering, and this gold cross on my old watch chain?

  That was the end of the old life for me, though I didn’t know it at the time. But what does a man ever know about what’s happening to him? She came in there heavy and when she went out I had his weight on my hands. What on earth was I going to do with a baby? I wasn’t done with rambling, the boys were waiting for me out in Dallas. I hadn’t ever met a woman I thought I’d want to marry, and later when I did she wouldn’t have me because she insisted I had been laying around with a white gal because she thought I was traveling with a half-white baby. So not only had the woman placed a child on my hands, she made me a bachelor. And maybe after that night, after seeing what a woman could be, after that revelation of their boundless nerve and infinite will to turn a man’s feelings into mush and rubber, I had lost the true will to join with one forever in matrimony. I was still young and full of strength but after that I could only come so close and no closer. I had been hit but I hadn’t discovered how bad was the damage. Master, did you smile? Did you say, “Where’s your pride now, young man?” Did you say, “How now, Hickman, can you hear my lambs a-crying? You’ve got to do something, son; you can’t stand on the air much longer. How now, Hickman?”

  And didn’t I try to get away! I must have sat there for hours, numbed. Then when the realization struck me I got up and put him in the bed with a bottle and went to Beaulah’s and ordered a pitcher of corn, broke in the door because she didn’t want me in there and all the others leaving when they saw who I was. And I drank it and couldn’t feel it so I left there. And walking down the railroad tracks, between the two shining rails not caring if a manifest struck me down or if I could get to Atlanta in one piece, stumbling between the gleaming rails like a man in a trance. Then finding myself at Jack’s place and beginning to shoot craps with those farmhands and winning all the money and having to break that one-eyed boy’s arm when he came at me with his blade after my winning with their own dice. Then stumbling out of there into another dive and then another, drinking and brawling, but always seeing that baby reaching out for me with his little hands that were growing stronger and stronger the farther I moved away from him. ‘Til I could feel him snatching me back to the room as a dog leaping the length of his chain is snatched back to the stake driven in the ground.

  That little ole baby, that lil’ ole Bliss. So I had to go back and get him. Made up my mind. Slept all day and left the next night with him in a satchel. That was the beginning. Took him to Mobile where we stayed in a shack on the river. And him getting sick there, almost dying, and getting him a doctor and pulling him through with the help of God; still mixed up over why I was trying to save him but needing to bad enough to learn to pray. The Master must have really smiled then, but I was still trying to leap my chain. Running out of money in Dallas because the boys were afraid to play with me because they had heard about Robert and Mama and then I show up with the baby and they didn’t know who would come looking for me and I wouldn’t explain a thing. Pride, that’s what it was, but I said that if they couldn’t take me back for my way with a horn then they didn’t need to know anything else about me. So I shined shoes and I swept the floors and cleaned the spittoons in that barbershop and paid for our room and his milk and my whiskey. Then Felix came and told me about Reverend McDuffie being in town and needing a musician for his tent meetings and I began playing my music for the Lord. That was Bliss then. He couldn’t remember any of that even if he hadn’t willed himself to forget us; now it was too far back. I lied that he was my dead sister’s child and the ladies were kind and looked after him while I played and we were always traveling and that made it easier for me. Then a year old and never from my side, me still mixed up in my emotions about him but always having him with me…. Had to leave Memphis on a freight train once and just managed to grab a bottle of milk to feed him and them right behind me for kidnapping, running over those cinders with him under my arm like a bear cutting out with a squealing pig. Lord, but I could really pick ‘em up and put ‘em down in those days, kicking up dust for a fare-thee-well and making that last boxcar just in time. Poor little fellow, he didn’t know what it was all about. Stripped the paper from the boxcar walls to make him a bed, then setting there with the car bumping under me wondering why I hadn’t let them have him and be free…. But what could I have told them, when any part of the truth meant trouble? Master, did you grin? So we went rolling through the land over the rhythm of those wheels clicking along the tracks and when he started to cry, me lullabying him “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” ’til we were long gone to Waycross.

  Then gradually beginning to find my way, finding the path in the fog, getting my feet on the earth and my head in the sky. Yes, my heathen freedom gone, I followed the only thing I really knew about, my music. Followed it, right into the pulpit at last. Had found a sanctuary where all babies could grow without too much questioning as to where they came from. After all, I testified to my sins before a crowd and sat down at the welcome table and learned to open up my heart—and I was heard.

  They took us in and they loved him. That was Bliss then. All the love we gave him. Now no trust for me; none of us, even though we kept the faith through all those watchful and gravelling years. We held steady, stood firm in face of everything; even after he ran away and we picked up his trail. I had been claimed by then and they loved him. Foolish to do but all those from the old evangelizing days felt the same need I felt to watch him travel and to hope for him and to learn. Yes, I guess we’ve been like a bunch of decrepit detectives trailing out of love. We didn’t even have to think about it or talk it over, we all just missed him and keep talking about him and seeking for him and there. Lord, but we missed little Bliss. We missed his promise, I guess, and we were full of sorrow over his leaving us that way, just up and gone without a word. So we kept looking for him and telling all those who had heard him when he was traveling with me throughout the c
ountry to keep a lookout. Some thought he had been kidnapped and some that he was dead, and others that his people had come and taken him away—though they didn’t know who his people were and were too respectful to ask me about him.

  So we started looking and asking questions, all the chauffeurs and Pullman porters and waiters, anybody who traveled in their work—’til finally we picked up his trail again and I knew that it wouldn’t do any good to go to him and say Come home, we miss you, Bliss; and we need you. Oh no, he was on another track by then and it was up to him to miss us in his heart and need us. So we just watched and waited.

  Someone was always near him to watch him; maids and butlers, dining-car waiters, cooks—anybody who traveled, anybody who could keep him in our sights. Even a few of the younger ones were recruited; a few every year or so given hints that he was one of us, telling them just enough so that they could feel the mystery and start to watching him and reporting back. And all of it building up our amazement. Even when what he did left our hopes pretty weak. I guess we hoped for the prodigal’s return. But in a country like this, where prodigal boys have so much that they can do and get that they can never waste it all and which makes it easier for them to forget where home is and that made our hoping and waiting a true test of our faith or at least our love. There he lies, worth about three million dollars, I understand, and ran away with five saved dollars and a leather-bound Bible. Lord, I could laugh at the “laugh-cry” of it and I could cry sure enough right now. I was pretty bad when that child started shooting, pretty hysterical. But Lord forgive me for violating my manliness, because it was little Bliss I saw going down. Instead of this one lying here I saw a little boy with the white Bible as in a waking vision. I’m getting old, but how is a man who’s had to do with children but only had one child supposed to act when he sees such as we were witness to? Yes, and who’ll be a witness for my grief, my awful burden? Who, when nobody knows the full story? Still the old-timers were with me and they prayed that he’d find his way back home! Bliss. All the old ones and some of the young and some of the old ones committed so long ago, many forgot just why, but still. We came when we sensed the circle was closing in upon him. Poor Bliss, he had wrapped up his heart in steel, stainless steel, and I guess he’d put his memory down there in Fort Knox with all that gold. He wouldn’t see us and he only had to remember us as we were and as he was to know that we didn’t come here to rebuke him, his own heart would do enough of that, considering the line he’s been taking against our people all these years. Still, that too is the way of man, so he couldn’t trust even me, even though I told him way back when he seemed bent on leaving us that I would live a long time and that I would arrive in his presence when he was in sore need. And I tried. We arrived and he didn’t trust me enough to see me. So why’d we come, why’d we hold on so hard to hope? What about this, Master? Is this one more test of faith put to us in our old days, or just our own foolishness, just some knotted strings of slavery-time weakness still clinging to us?