Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  The essential plot elements of the Georgia material are the thirty-year-old report by Walker Millsap, an associate from Hickman’s jazz days, and a letter from Janey Glover, a sweetheart of Hickman’s youth, warning ominously of lethal trouble facing Bliss/Sunraider. In an undated note (139/5), Ellison writes that “Hickman has Janey’s letter with him [in D.C.?].” “It is the envelope of the plot, the seed of the catastrophe.” The letter would take Hickman from Georgia to Oklahoma, and from Oklahoma to Washington, unwittingly leading Sunraider’s assassin to his target. With so much significance resting on a single plot device, it is no wonder that Ellison puzzled over where to place it.

  Ellison briefly considered opening the novel with Janey’s letter. He writes the following in an undated note:

  Start with Janey’s letter, but conceal the important information. Cut wherever possible, then to Washington. The letter should hint at motive for a quest, but not reveal it directly. And yet it should provide Hickman enough propulsion to involve the reader. Later there can be flashbacks in which needed information can be revealed. The point is to build up momem thrust. (140/1)

  The letter’s most effective location may have been its earliest, in the typescript fragment known as “Bliss’ Birth” in which Hickman, deep in reverie at the Senator’s bedside, recalls Janey’s brief letter in the immediacy of dramatic action. In the computer files, the version of the letter reads instead like an appendage, a transparent plot device.

  By strict chronology, then, “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” should begin the novel. Not only does the action come before the D.C. sequence (in fact, providing the impetus for Hickman to go to D.C.), the D.C. files make reference to particulars one could only know having previously read “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma.” This presents the most obvious of many editorial challenges to sequencing. It was a problem Ellison had never completely resolved, though he seemed most compelled to present the Georgia and Oklahoma files in flashback, with “Arrival” opening the novel. The Georgia files offer nothing that might properly be considered the beginning of a novel. To the contrary, they open quite perfunctorily with Hickman at his desk going through mail.

  The Oklahoma files comprise Hickman’s return to Oklahoma City. His purpose is to visit Janey and ask her to clarify the meaning of her letter. This section includes, in addition to the Janey visit, a protracted exchange with Love New, and a performance by a teller of tall tales and toasts, Cliofus. Ellison’s narrative method consists of discursive summary rather than immediate creation or re-creation of action. Particularly with Love New, a story leads to another story, circles within circles, relevant to the novel’s theme of fathers and sons and the spiritual knowledge and atonement needed for true identity, but weighted down by sheer textual volume.

  This sequence includes one of the most puzzling textual quirks in all the computer files. One file in the sequence, “Blurring,” ends mid-sentence with “Which was.” The file that follows, “Smoking,” completes the sentence with “the truth.” From this point, however, the next seven pages of “Smoking” simply recapitulate (often to the word) the last pages of “Blurring.” Likely this was an accident in formatting, a hazard of digital composition. It nonetheless presents a challenge to an editor wishing to present Ellison in his own words, even if those words are the likely product of accident or oversight. An earlier printed draft from the computer found among Ellison’s papers, and marked in his hand, reveals the same anomaly, suggesting that at the very least he had been aware of the replication. However, in the printout, he made no correction. This is only a particularly striking example of something that occurs several times throughout the computer files.

  “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s” is the shortest of the three sequences, consisting of only five files. Consequently, it also has the fewest number of variants. However, it appears that it was the last portion of the novel to receive Ellison’s attention. “Rockmore,” the second file in the sequence, was last saved on December 30, 1993, the most recently dated file from Ellison’s computer. Although it initially seems curious that Ellison would devote his final days of revision to what might appear to be a digression from the dominant Hickman narrative, it fits well within his overall conception of the novel.

  The unity of the novel’s two perspectives, the third-person Hickman narrative and the first-person McIntyre, is best achieved in Book I, where Ellison begins with Hickman and his parishioners’ arriving at Washington’s National Airport and jumps to McIntyre narrating the shooting on the Senate floor. No such unity exists in the computer files. Instead, Ellison has composed two separate but related Hickman sequences and a wholly distinct McIntyre sequence, a revision of Chapter 12 from Book I that relates an episode also rendered, as discussed above, in the Hickman computer files.

  It seems likely that Ellison wrote “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s” with Chapter 12, and perhaps even Hickman’s Rockmore scene from Book II, in front of him. Not only are the incidents nearly identical, but a number of the passages are rendered verbatim. In some cases, the differences are a matter of embellishment—for instance, the addition of a Native American lithograph and a photo of Klansmen in Rockmore’s memorabilia-crammed rooms. Often a mere substitution of detail or phrase distinguishes the drafts. For example, in the computer materials Mister Jessie asks for “a redhead or some kind of blond,” while in Book I he asks for “a raving blond.”

  Like the other two sequences, “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s” contains a handful of textual anomalies. The most revealing of these comes in the final file of the sequence, “Dance,” where Ellison interrupts the narrative with the following note: “N.B. See later version of Bootleg.” The “later version” to which he refers could be either one of two files labeled “Bootleg,” both of which are versions of “Dance.” All three files are substantially the same save for a small but significant addition: In “Dance” Ellison has the police sergeant mention that “two colored fellows” are waiting outside. This is undoubtedly a reference to Hickman and Wilhite, which suggests that Ellison was looking for ways to fuse the McIntyre and Hickman narratives through this scene.

  The Rockmore scene is the only episode rendered in typescript as well as in both Hickman and McIntyre computer files. Yet its relation to the central plot elements is never fully developed. There is McMillen’s recollection of a mysterious white man, likely Sunraider, who barges in and claims the coffin, shocking the aged Rockmore to death. And there is the fact that the scene offers a nexus between the McIntyre and Hickman narratives, a connection only provisionally utilized. In many ways this episode’s multiple variants represent both the promise and the limitation of Ellison’s novel-in-progress. It holds out the titillating possibility of unity, not simply for this section, but for the novel as a whole—a place where Ellison might have gathered together the disparate strands of narrative—while ultimately underscoring the dogged diversity and disconnection among Ellison’s many visions of his second novel.

  What Ellison composed on the computer between the early eighties and his death in 1994 reimagines yet again his long-awaited second novel. He achieves its transformation not by changing plot or character, but by reorienting point of view and episodic importance. What were once central concerns, the political assassination and the relationship between Hickman and Bliss/Sunraider, become tertiary or even nonexistent. In their place Ellison has elevated the incidental (the comings and goings of Hickman and his congregation in D.C., the visit to Oklahoma, and Hickman’s excavation of the past—both his and others’—and his complex relation to the place) to a role of elemental importance.

  Ellison’s multiple drafts, prospective sequences, and multifarious connections might best be understood as producing a kind of living text, amoebic in its fluidity, integral in its essence. His improvisational relation to his material afforded him the freedom to compose and create synthesis later, or to experiment simultaneously with multiple narrative sequences. How did he plan to integrate the third-person Hick
man narrative with the first-person McIntyre? How would he fuse the disparate fragments into a whole? The writing itself offers no clear answers. Instead, Ellison’s computer sequences challenge his readers to imagine potentialities of order and expression in the manuscript he left unrealized.

  * Ellison’s financial records show that he purchased an Osborne I on January 8, 1982 (in addition to another for his wife, Fanny, on September 30 of that year); an Osborne Executive on October 11, 1983; and an IBM computer on January 7, 1988. The Osborne I, introduced in April 1981, was the first truly portable personal computer commercially available in the United States. After strong initial sales, Osborne ran into financial difficulties, filing for bankruptcy in September 1983.

  * Ellison used an early word-processing program called WordStar, which required its user to employ a series of keystrokes rather than a drop-down menu as in Microsoft Word to perform simple operations. For someone proficient in its method, it enabled the user to keep his or her fingers in the touch-typing position at all times, potentially facilitating the flow of expression. The program also employed a feature called “merge print,” which allowed the user to string a series of files together to be printed through a typed command. There is evidence of Ellison’s use (and occasional misuse) of this function.

  * Those who recall the 1,369 lightbulbs Invisible Man wires underground may be familiar with Ellison’s playful reference, reprised here, to the dream-book symbolism of the number representing excrement to policy gamblers.

  * The Library of Congress has a sequential fragment that includes the last file of Georgia (“Decision”) and the first of Oklahoma (“Bustrip”) in a continuously paginated draft (134/5).

  EDITORS’ NOTE TO “HICKMAN IN WASHINGTON, D.C.”

  IN THE SUMMER OF 1993, Ralph Ellison revised all sixteen computer files that comprise the untitled portion of the manuscript we’ve labeled “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” As with the sequences that follow, we present the latest identifiable series of Ellison’s computer files, including whenever available his own penciled revisions to printouts in the archives.

  “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” is essentially a long elaboration of the seven-page Prologue from Book I, including new versions of several other key scenes from the typescripts—most notably, those episodes at the Lincoln Memorial and at Jessie Rockmore’s mansion. The balance of the scenes appear also to have been conceived at an earlier period in the novel’s composition, perhaps decades before these computer files were composed. In other words, Ellison seems to have dedicated most of his work on the computer to revising scenes first written as early as the 1950s. These early fragments and the later computer sequences share a clear tendency toward the picaresque—moving the narrative from the psychological realm familiar from Hickman and Bliss/Sunraider’s antiphonal exchanges in Book II to the physical realm of Hickman and his parishioners making their way through the capital in the days before the shooting. At times, this dissipates dramatic tension, leaving only Hickman’s long essayistic asides, occasionally punctuated by events that seem at best distantly related to the novel’s central conflict, the assassination. (It is revealing to compare the version of the scene at the Lincoln Memorial from the computer files [pages 574–578] with the sparer, more dramatically rendered version from Book II [pages 418–421].)

  As in Book II, “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” closes with Hickman and Wilhite leaving Jessie Rockmore’s townhouse. In both cases, it is unclear how Ellison intended to proceed from this point in the narrative. Did he plan for this scene to close the novel, or did he plan to fashion a transition to the material set in Georgia and Oklahoma or some other portion of the manuscript? At no time in the novel’s forty-year composition does Ellison appear to have written anything that moves the narrative beyond this point, even though a number of his notes refer to Bliss/Sunraider’s death as an event that would occur at or near the end of the novel.

  “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” is at once integrally related to, yet distinct from, the two computer sequences that follow—“Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” and “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s.” Following “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” in actual chronology, it appears certain that Ellison intended “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” to come first in narrative chronology. Ellison long imagined opening his novel with Hickman and his parishioners arriving at Washington’s National Airport. For its part, “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” offers an extended clarification of motive, providing essential background on the novel’s main actors—the victim, Sunraider; the assassin, Severen; and the would-be savior, Hickman. “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s” offers a rendition of the final episode from “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” from the first-person perspective of the white newspaper reporter who narrates Book I. Although Ellison’s notes suggest that he had long considered including both versions of the episode in his novel, it is unclear how he planned to connect them.

  This section is notably the only place in the computer sequences that Sunraider makes an appearance. While he is the putative motivation for much of the action, he remains a subject of discussion rather than an actual character. Even his one appearance is at a remove; it happens when Aubrey McMillen, Jessie Rockmore’s assistant, recalls an unidentified white man arriving earlier in the evening and accusing Rockmore of stealing his coffin. Although McMillen cannot remember the man’s name, he recalls having seen him on television. It seems more than conjecture that the man in question is Sunraider. Bliss/Sunraider’s near disappearance in “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” is perhaps the most striking of the many differences from Book I and Book II. It suggests Ellison’s shifting conception of his fiction and evolving sense of aesthetic purpose.

  Although the computer sequences mark a decided shift away from the narrative style of the typescripts from the 1960s and 1970s, they are very much in keeping with the episodic nature of the miscellaneous undated drafts Ellison most likely composed decades earlier. The difference, an important one, is that Ellison’s labors in the 1990s resulted in long narrative sequences such as “Hickman in Washington, D.C.,” while no such substantial narratives are apparent among the antecedent typewritten drafts. One of the most puzzling questions about Ellison’s compositional practice in the last decades of his life is why he would step away from the Book I and II typescripts, much of which appears so close to completion, in favor of returning to the long-neglected and fragmentary episodes that he seems to have discarded decades earlier. The precise relations among the computer drafts, the typescripts, and these fragmentary episodes deserve careful consideration by scholars.

  We have chosen to identify in brackets the sixteen files by the file name Ellison used when saving them to disk. We follow this practice in the other two computer-composed sequences as well. He seems not to have conceived chapter breaks, nor do we intend the computer file titles to function as such. Although some files contain discrete episodes, others follow directly upon the files that come before them, even picking up in mid-sentence. In “Hickman in Washington, D.C.,” as throughout Ellison’s computer disks, we have had to contend with occasional corruptions in the computer files themselves. Most often, the result was little more than lost formatting (quotation marks appearing where Ellison intended underscores, unintended paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, and so forth). Whenever possible, we have silently restored these sections in keeping with Ellison’s preferred habits. We have, however, let a number of Ellison’s textual irregularities stand. Evidence of the preliminary nature of some parts of the computer drafts is apparent, from linguistic quirks like repeating words at the beginning of sentences (“And,” “But,” and “Yes” are among the most prevalent), to imperfect transitions between files, to unresolved details of plot (for example, the number of Hickman’s parishioners is given as both forty-four and fifty).

  Clearly, Ellison had yet to attend to a number of the issues that either he or his editor would have caught and corrected had he lived to publish his novel. As editors of
a posthumous edition, we have elected to show forbearance, knowing that, without Ellison, we could never hope to bring his novel up to his exacting standards. Instead, we have chosen to pay tribute to his legacy by making available to readers this insider’s look into Ellison’s compositional method. Even more than in the typescripts, which underwent far more extensive revision, Ellison’s computer sequences bear witness to the fact that his novel was still very much in progress.

  HICKMAN IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

  [ARRIVAL]

  TWO DAYS BEFORE THE bewildering incident a chartered planeload of those who at that time were politely identified as Southern “Negroes” swooped down upon Washington’s National Airport and disembarked in a confusion of paper bags, suitcases, and picnic baskets. Most were quite elderly: old ladies wearing white uniforms and small white lace-trimmed caps tied beneath their chins, and old men who wore rumpled ready-made suits and wide-brimmed hats. The single exception being a towering dark-brown-skinned man dressed in a blue well-tailored suit with a vest, a pongee shirt, blue pastel tie, and soft planters-style panama. Quiet and exceptionally orderly, considering their number, they swept through the crowded terminal with such an unmistakable air of agitation that busy airport attendants and travelers alike paused to stare.

  They themselves paused but briefly when one of the women came to a sudden stop and looked around the crowded terminal with an indignant frown.

  “Hold it a second, y’all,” she said, looking high and low, “whilst I see if they have one of them up here like they have down in Atlanta….”

  “One what, Sister Bea,” one of the other women said. “What you talking about?”