Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  But then, two months later, when rubbing at the itchy new skin that had replaced the scab he was shocked to see it burst with a watery spurt of fluid. And when he gave it a squeeze, what appeared to be the sodden head of an insect had slowly protruded from the joint of his ankle like a worm emerging from the pierced skin of an apple. And with the strange object setting off fantasies of blood poisoning the effect had been far worse than the sight of the original gashing. But then, more fascinated than frightened, he had continued squeezing and watched with awe as two slimy inches of splintered pine wood emerged from the smelly, pus-filled wound. To his relief there had been little pain, but during the days that it took the wound to heal he had lived with the fear of tetanus…. That

  too, he thought, but the worst of it was realizing that I’d lived that long with that thing buried so deep in my flesh and didn’t feel it or even know it was there. I must have been no older than nine years at the time, but I still have the scar—And suddenly aware that he was thinking less about his early accident than about the strange letter from Janey, he thought,

  Yes, it was a way of thinking about it while not approaching it too directly. It didn’t work, but sometimes you can be hurt in such a way that you can’t bear to face up to the full extent of your wounding. Like my being so afraid of blood poisoning that instead of telling my mother I simply refused to feel what was left in my ankle. So you slick some hurts over with forgetfulness and try to get on with your life as though nothing has happened, and after a time the body forgets what the mind refuses to acknowledge. And while the processes of the blood carry off any poisons that might have formed, the mind turns to other problems, other fears.

  But not always. Sometimes something happens and years later you’re forced to realize that something alien, something you couldn’t deal with at the time it happened, remains buried beneath scars you’ve long forgotten. Like bullets or pieces of shrapnel beneath an old soldier’s skin long after the war in which he recieved it has been won or lost. Then you have to recognize that whatever caused the wound has become so much a part of you that you remember it only when you bend the wrong way or accidently strike the scar. Some old wounds to the flesh act like barometers announcing changes in the weather, but wounds to the spirit can become encrusted in such a way that they lose all sensitivity to the pressures of time and change, becoming like embalmed shafts of experience that are armored against change but still capable of acting up when you least expect.

  And suddenly he understood why Janey’s letter disturbed him. It wasn’t its message so much as the voice which it evoked in his ear; a voice that clashed with the emotion-encapsulated image which was buried deep in his mind. For while the image was that of a girl whom he’d first known in the fresh bloom of womanhood, the voice which sounded from the letter was not only that of an elderly woman, but of a woman schooled in the suffering and uncertainties of living. It was having the two, the young image and the old voice, brought into unexpected conjunction that was disturbing. For it was as though an elderly woman were addressing him through the form and figure of a young girl—or as though a young girl had addressed him with a voice that echoed the experiences of age. That voice, issuing suddenly from the page, had assaulted a memory that had been inviolate for years, and he was shocked by the extent to which he had sustained an image of a reality that had long since faded.

  Years ago there had been a moment when the girl of the image had caused him such unhappiness that he had thought he would never recover, but in time the pain had dulled through the mysterious process by which memory selects that to which it clings and that which it puts out of mind. It was as though he and the image had been part of a motion-picture sequence in which at the moment he’d attempted to embrace a smiling Janey she had snatched out a pistol and fired at his heart. Her impulsive, unanticipated gesture had not been in the script he thought he was enacting, so with the action completed, he had carefully clipped the frame in which her smile glowed its brightest and set fire to the frames that recorded the disillusioning sequence in which she’d fired at his heart. Then, having encased that single frame in thick crystal, he had hidden it away in his trombone case. Shortly afterwards he had left town, but while over the years his image of himself had changed—and in many ways as drastically as it might had Janey actually fired an unfatal bullet—in his private relationship with the cherished image of the girl in the frame it was as though the two of them had been transported into a realm beyond duration and fixed in a deathless posture of appeal and rejection, with himself ever reaching out and Janey ever turning away.

  Not that there had been no period of trauma, for again and again he had relived the painful moment of her rejection. But usually it was enacted in the breathless pantomime of dreaming. Then he had trained himself to return to sleep and dream of other women, other loves. And later, when the experience of rejection returned to haunt his waking mind with fantasies in which he appeared abject and prideless, he had learned to blunt his anguish with the same irreverent laughter which was evoked when he gave voice to the blues. The process had been something of a desperate maneuver, a blues-like laughing at pain. For gradually he had come to see that desperate emotions required antidotes that were drastic and had been so successful that he no longer thought of Janey even when singing or blowing the blues.

  Then in his travels he had come to associate his experience with a stage routine performed by the Zephyrs, a team of dancers who were famous for a comic dance of epic chase and combat performed on a shadowed stage. Where, bathed in the flickering of stroboscopic lights, their violent, ultra-slow-motion, larger-than-life gestures took on the illusion of a fluid and dream-like struggle in which the two men danced out a riddle in which failure was a success, and a success a failure. The choreographed story of which presented the agony of a worm turning into a hero and a hero turning into a worm, a battle in which there was neither winner nor loser, but only a cycle of engrossing action. Clashing on the stage in soundless give-and-take, the dancers appeared to acquire a weightlessness discovered later by the men who walked on the moon, with the split-second flashing of the strobes endowing their exaggerated gestures with the appearance of a magical domination of time and space, gravity and pain. For as they fought with a flashing of knives, the imaginary wounds they dealt and sustained were no hindrance at all to their will to dominance. There was a magic evoked by the act and he, like the audience, had loved it.

  And yet he knew that much of what the Zephyrs appeared to do took place only in the eye of the viewer. That each of their leaps, their blows, their turns, falls, and soundless winces, their snarls or cries, were but near-immobile segments in a pattern of carefully controlled and juxtaposed movements that were as carefully synchronized as those of puppets animated by invisible strings. Each gesture, raised leg, up-flung arm, dodging head, or falling body, was executed according to a strict count like that required when performing classical music or an arrangement by Ellington. Each movement was followed by the next and appeared to flow from it, but actually depended upon the flashes of light which filled in the blank spaces between and connected and gave them the appearance of a continuous flow. It was all illusion which depended upon the Zephyrs’ marvelous body control and sense of timing. Yes, it was an illusion assisted by the hypnotic lights that had given reality to the impossible and defied time, space, and the laws of gravity. But it was not that their success was due to the lights alone, for often he had watched them rehearse without strobes and was still impressed by their ability to make their bodies defy the laws of time and space. They had made him laugh with admiration; and, better still, they had taught him how to exorcise his pain by allowing him to laugh with admiration at the endless rise and fall of pride. And the point of his self-directed joke was that he, by having reached out for a love that was no more than a flickering light in his own self-hypnotized eyes, had been the composer of his own sad song of failure. It was a strange form of instruction, yet by associating his failure with the triump
h of the Zephyrs’ illusion he had relieved his anguish. And he had learned that in some matters atmosphere and sheer timing were the key to success; just as selective forgetting was one way of dealing with heartache. Thus, by repressing his pain he had been able to retain Janey’s youthful image in a state that was illogical but invulnerable to time. Thank God, he thought with a smile, for the Zephyrs….

  Now, riffling through the letter’s tightly written pages, he frowned and thought, Here she’s given me a burning house and then a burning hearse, a snakebite and somebody she calls a “little man” who’s going around disturbing buried secrets. But what secrets, and whose? Why all this hinting and signifying? Yes, and why did she save the part about the “little man” for the last? Why not give him a name? After all, she’s used that phrase for years and it was always for one of those homeless boys she’s taken in and cared for until they went off on their own, or were removed by social workers or their parents. They were always her “little men,” never her sons. And neither did she allow them to call her “Mother,” come to think of it, even though there’s no question that she loved and mothered each and every one of them. But maybe it was her way of helping them keep their parents alive in their memory. Yes, and if I’m not mistaken it was her way of making it known that looking after them was her way of fulfilling her responsibility as a Christian. That Janey! That husbandless, virginal mother! For years, by taking in washing, sewing and cooking, and doing housework, she’s kept her house full of otherwise homeless boys. And not only feeding and clothing them, but sending them to school—and all of it, except for the help she got from a few friends and neighbors, out of her earnings. Hickman, that took far more than faith and charity, it took a kind of love that’s past most understanding.

  And at her age she’s still at it! Because this Cliofus is a grown man now—at least in age—and he’s been with her since the day his folks got discouraged and threw up their hands. Well, time and Janey’s love have proved that he’s not the idiot they thought he was, but even with that admitted that Cliofus is one strange fellow! Thank God that the others she took in have gone on to make comfortable lives for themselves and are doing what they can to help her along, especially the one with a reputation for operating outside the law. He makes her uneasy but she loves him along with the rest, and no matter how big and rusty or smooth and educated they’ve grown up to be they’re still her “little men.” Talk about your matriarchs and extended families, Janey’s a one-woman institution!

  Her “little men,”his mind repeated, and suddenly, echoing an old spiritual, it was as though the phrase was trying to tell him something which he had no desire to hear.

  Oh, death is a little man who goes from door to door, he hummed. Then with a shrug he said aloud, “Now she’s got me doing it!”

  But why doesn’t she know if this fellow in question is one of hers or not? Nothing else in here indicates that she’s lost her memory. And even if it happens to fail her once in a while, why didn’t she ask Cliofus? Because far from being an idiot he’s been blessed (or cursed) with too much memory, and she knows it! Why, that fellow remembers everything he’s ever seen, read, done, or heard talked about. And once he gets started on a subject he drones away at it like a talking robot. So if he says that this stranger—if he is a stranger—is one of hers, he must be. Because that Cliofus is a walking depository of happenings, whether they’re organized or unorganized, classified or beyond all classification. Say something to him and it’s like dropping a nickel into a slot machine that’s sure to pay off. But instead of producing the usable cash you hope for, any and everything comes pouring out. So by now he’s probably spilled every detail about whoever this man is, from his arrival at Janey’s to the times he was spanked, given castor oil, or had his diapers changed.

  So who does Janey think she’s kidding? Why write that she’s uncertain about this particular fellow? Could he be one of her strays who wandered away and she wants to forget it? If that’s the case, then she isn’t uncertain and expects me to recognize that she’s not. Maybe that’s why she’s skipping around her real meaning like one of these beboppers who try to stand a melody on its head and then turn it wrong-side out so that the listener will be more impressed with his flying and stuttering over the keys than with what he has to say. And yet she’s basically serious, too serious for her own good, so it might be her way of warning me to probe between the lines for her meaning….

  But why? Is she protecting something or somebody, or simply having fun? If so, Hickman, you’ll have to face up to the fact that for better or worse the ways of slavery are still with us even in the way we talk. So use what you know! You were a word man—even if it was mostly for the dozens—long before you became a man of the Word, therefore you know that our people like to talk around a subject even when there’s no danger. They enjoy it, and if they know you well enough they’re apt to leave their true subject unstated so you’ll have to supply the missing meaning. And even in music. Didn’t you sing something called “Squeeze Me” and look all innocent, when anyone who’d been around recognized that you were really giving them “The Boy in the Boat” and automatically supplied the words? Sure you did, and thought you were having it both ways, because it was too funky a subject for polite society, and that whether the listener knew about woman-lovers or not he could still enjoy the melody. Sure, it was a worldly, gut-bucket subject, but the fun was in communicating with the insiders while leaving the innocent untouched in their innocence.

  “Are you with it,” the drummer would yell, and you never knew who was or wasn’t. That was the fun of the game, and deep down the point was cautionary as the Ten Commandments—even for those who loved to play it. Besides, there was always a risk in such signifying. Because you could direct it at someone you thought uninitiated, and he kept a straight face and turned it back on you….

  Like the barber in the crowded barbershop who assumed that the schoolteacher whose hair he was cutting would consider the food he’d had for dinner low class deciding to have some fun by using double-talk in describing his meal to his partner. There he was, showing off and talking with straight-faced deliberation as he went into detail about everything except those “things” which he had eaten as his main course, and being urged on by the barber working in the next chair feeding him questions that had all the customers grinning. “How did you find those things she served?”

  “Well now, I’ll tell you: The first were only fair to middling. But, man, man! that second serving was something else!”

  “What you mean, something else?”

  “I mean that seeing how fast I put away the first she must have decided to dig way down in the pot and give me some real action. Because on that second go-around she really came on with the come-on. That woman dived into that pot and when she came up those things she hit me with were pure-dee out of this world!”

  But then as he gave a self-satisfied wink and began removing the neck-cloth, those “things” he’d left unnamed backed up on him. Because after the teacher had stretched and paid for his haircut and added a tip, he snapped a dollar bill between his hands and took a step back so that everyone could see as he applied the hot sauce.

  “My friend,” he said, “I enjoyed that description of your meal so thoroughly that on one simple condition this is yours….”

  “Why thanks,” the barber said, looking surprised as the shop got quiet, “what’s your condition?”

  “That you’ll be so kind,” the teacher said, “as to give me the name and address of the good lady who serves such excellent chitt’lin’s.”

  And with that even the barber broke down and joined in as we laughed at the teacher’s reminder that it’s a mistake to judge a man’s knowledge and experience by his job or appearance. But what’s this got to do with Janey’s little man?

  Suddenly tossing the letter aside, Hickman went to his old oak-wood file, removed a worn manila folder, and returned to his desk.

  It’s been quiet for a long time, he
thought, but now it seems to be stirring again. And removing a faded sheaf of papers, he leaned forward and stared at its fading typescript.

  [SIPPY]

  HE HAD RECEIVED THE report, undated and stamped “Confidential,” during the early twenties from Walker Millsap, a young college student whom he’d hired whenever his regular drummer was unable to make a string of one-night stands. Too bad, he thought, that a young man so good on the drums would let himself get hung up on liquor…. Personable, too, and at the time I felt that if he’d been more interested in music than in books and his abstract ideas he might have ended up with one of the big bands. But what did I know, me who thought that playing music and chasing women made the best of all possible worlds? And when I learned that he aspired to become something as unglamorous as a college professor, the very idea was such an outrageous challenge to my own untested notion of possibility that I tried to discourage the man. Treated him as though he had no right to reach out for goals in which I had no interest…. So what happens? After giving him hell for reading so many books and preaching to him about the rewards he’d receive if he stuck to music I almost lose his respect by becoming a man of the Word! Mr. Ignorant Arrogance, thy name was Hickman! Instead of encouraging his hope in the possibilities of life I took his ambition as a threat to my own timidity and self-satisfaction. Talk about pride and fear of the unknown parading as wisdom….

  For a moment he stared into space, marveling at how things had turned out and the price in ridicule his own change of role had cost him. But now as he began reading he recalled the complications that had led to his change of life, and the old mood of hope, frustration, and wonder which caused him to turn to Millsap for help.