Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “Dear Hickman,” he read,

  It is interesting that you should write in regards to that incident in which we were involved so many years ago. For it so happens that I, too, had been thinking of it quite recently while going through an old notebook which contains some of the observations which I made during my investigation. Even so, I’m surprised to learn that you’re still interested in such an old cold trail. And all the more when I realize that by now the young man who was the focus of our interest must be well into his fifties. Over the years I have often puzzled over the events of that period and wondered why you, who had knocked me for a loop by becoming a minister, could have become so mysteriously interested in such a questionable young “pecker-wood.” And please, let me assure you that I use that old down-home term without bias but by way of expressing the attitude which I held at the time—yes, and an attitude that was increased by certain resentments which I felt over being drawn into your mysterious problem. And especially the disappointment I felt after I had sniffed around and thought I had spotted your man, and then had you instruct me to watch his every move but keep out of his sight.

  Which made my task all the more difficult, because in order to keep him in sight I had to risk being seen, and if he became aware of my scrutiny and I remained silent as you instructed it might have aroused his suspicion and anger. Fortunately, there were others of us in the company he kept who disliked him because of his color, and since there was a possibility that he might well number me among them I used that possibility as a cover under which to operate. I didn’t like it, but because of you and the mystery involved I kept on his trail to the best of my ability and hoped that in learning more about him I’d discover what the hell you were up to.

  Now, however, I can tell you quite frankly that I hoped that somewhere along the line you’d tell me what you had going. Instead you remained silent, and since I was hooked it seemed better to wait, use my eyes and ears, and ask no questions. It rankled me, but perhaps that’s why certain details of my “investigation” remain so vivid in my mind. You seemed to be playing a game of “ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,” so I was forced to look, listen, and wonder. Still, you were certainly shrewd in asking someone with my inclinations to play detective. For while I had an endless curiosity about the unseen underside of this country it was too restricted in its range and you provided an opportunity to extend it. And then to my surprise I found myself going about playing your detective-observer in such a fashion—and enjoying it—that it seemed fairly natural. What’s more, by getting me out of the library and into the streets the experience proved helpful in pursuing my studies, and for that I thank you.

  But you’ve asked me to refresh your memory as to my findings; so now, assuming that you know most—if not all—of our little saga, I’ll do my best:

  After you offered to pay me for keeping an eye out for any youngster showing up in the Negro sections of this area who matched your rather vague description I finally spotted a likely candidate and started checking him out. Having so little to go on I still wasn’t sure of my quarry, but by stretching your description a bit (and allowing for the rapidity of adolescent change) I chose a likely prospect. And here, I must confess, luck and intuition played a significant role. Luck, in the circumstance that this young fellow started showing up at one of the joints where I hung out after classes; intuition, in the sense that something about him—perhaps his mixed, kind of improvised character—told me that he just might be your little man. But as I say, I was uncertain and so remain.

  Anyway, I spotted a likely suspect and the best way to proceed is by saying that in the beginning he struck me as some kind of poor orphan of a white boy who, as a child, had passed through the loving hands of some Negro nursemaid or cook who treated him as one of her own. Which meant that he had the good luck of having had not one mother but two, and thus had been doubly loved. And, since it happens so often, I figured that his dark mother may well have spoiled him by treating him like a little prince. Incidentally, as I look back I find it interesting that my imagination was so involved in fleshing out the maternal roles in his background that I was on the point of completely overlooking his paternity. For other than entertaining the vague possibility that he must have been a man of substance who had strayed, died, or been enticed away, I was unable to provide the little bastard with a father!

  I guess I simply left the matter of his daddy’s identity and character up to you. But if my assumption that the boy was without blood relatives was correct, it followed that he’d also had the bad luck of being twice orphaned; first physically, and then psychologically. Because given his footloose condition, I speculated that his white mother had actually died, while her black extension had survived. And that then, following the normal course of such relationships, the boy would have presumed to have outgrown his black mother and cast her aside.

  As you can see, I was improvising a scenario out of very thin air. And yet I was keeping to a well-known pattern whereby such a child lives for a time in a kind of Eden that is bright, shaded, and full of wonderful colors—then WHAM! and he or she reaches adolescence and the world becomes strictly white or black. Then the child is forced to withdraw his or her affection from its black protectors and adopt attitudes more in keeping with its acclaimed racial superiority. Nor does it matter a damn that its black relatives are resentful, or that its second “mother” feels deprived and betrayed. Obviously, my improvised application of this sad old pattern ran the risk of being farfetched, and yet something about the boy gave me the feeling that it was valid, but that there had been a twist to the pattern in which, after losing his natural mother and rejecting her dark counterpart, he had become a rather unique type of “motherless child.”

  Whether this projection of his possible background was false or true I was never to learn, but it seemed a likely seedbed for what I identified as such an unmistakable air of defiant loneliness that I thought of him as a young, mammy-made Ahab. It would also account for his habit of hanging around Negroes so long after the normal period of initiation into his role as one of superior racial and social status. Indeed, the fact that he continued such relationships stirred my suspicious imagination. But while I felt safe in projecting him as mammyless, something about him, an echo of style and a quality and volume of sound behind his laconic silence, suggested that he was far from being fatherless. Therefore I asked myself, “Why, if it is possible that he could have two mothers, couldn’t he have also had two fathers? One to plant the seed which shaped his physical image and connected him to his biological past, and still another to endow him with a certain attitude, and cultural style?” It was then that I decided that it really didn’t matter if the influence of one of his fathers was merely spiritual, or if his influence were good or bad! In other words, I concluded that even if it appeared obvious that none of us had strayed into the boy’s “genes” pile there was no question but that we were hiding in his “style” pile!

  Hickman, the idea was as shocking as that of a monster with two heads inhabiting a single body, and yet it seemed to fit my original assumptions. For where there’s an Eve there has to be an Adam, and where there’s a Hagar it’s likely that there’s an Ishmael with his hand turned against all mankind. Therefore I speculated that it was probably through the very kindness of his Negro “mother” that the poor fellow had failed the test of putting her and all her kind behind him, and that thanks to her he was stuck to Negroes as tight as Brer Rabbit to Tar Baby. Therefore I concluded that it was through his black “mother” that he’d come under the fateful influence of some Negro stud of a type who fills white children with delight, but whose very existence their parents prefer to ignore. If so, it would have been precisely through the boy’s association with such a fellow that a white boy suckled at a Negro woman’s breast would have fallen into the confusion that left him unable to make the traumatic break which white kids brought up among us are forced to make come adolescence.

  Hickman, my
preacher friend, here I must confess that lacking your Christian virtue of total forgiveness, I’ll never really understand the nasty, sadistic business those kids can come up with when they reach that stage of their development. Such as their adolescence-triggered insistence that even the adults who’ve loved and protected them from infancy must address them as “Miss” or “Mister.” Then there’s their contemptuous name-calling and calculated rudeness—not to mention the boys’ sexual exploitation of Negro girls with no social risk to themselves. It’s the direct opposite of what they’re taught in regard to their own, and yet many appear to make the change from relations to us as friends (if not as members of common families) to assuming the roles of social and spiritual superiors as easily as falling off a log into a warm pool of water. But since they are Bible-belt human and possessed of some sense of morality there has to be some kind of masochism involved, some form of nagging guilt if not of self-hatred. And this even though they are supported in their rejection of their racially and culturally ambiguous childhoods by all the laws and customs, religious and civic, that support the crooked color line.

  So as I mulled over these notions I came to feel that in the boy’s case something unusual had short-circuited the process. And I suspected that it had to do with the strength of his early physical and emotional bonding. Something that left him unable to ignore the difference between what was said about his old associates as members of a rejected group, and his own complex memories of them as individuals. In fact, I see his early bonding as having an effect like that of the religious rite which you call “a laying on of hands,” for while it was by no means “sacred” it is so powerfully human and tenacious and affective that it appears to me that many white Southerners spend the rest of their lives struggling with its traces even as they deny its source.

  Anyway, following this line of conjecture, I imagined that my suspect’s choice of Negroes as companions began early in his life in the person of some son, husband, or boyfriend of his black mother-figure, and that he in turn was most likely a worldly and utterly irreverent hustler and con man. Not a professional, mind you, but one of a type familiar to us but least suspected by their white victims. Here I refer to that home-grown variety of rascal who operates behind the mask of a genial but not too intelligent butler, waiter, bellhop, chauffeur, or yardman, but who will manipulate anyone rash and arrogant enough to confuse his personality with his job or his color and social status with his intelligence to a fare-thee-well. Those who make such mistakes are his natural prey, and he’ll lure them into a serene quicksand of black-and-white illusion and leave them as naked as fledging jaybirds while strutting like the king who wore no clothes.

  But hell, Hickman, you know the type better than I do. Therefore you know that such a trickster will let white folks knock themselves out over chicken-stealing jokes in which he is quoted as asking, “Who dat who say who-dat when Ah say who dat?” and grin like the Cheshire cat. But never in this world will he reveal that when necessary he can speak schoolbook English, understandable French, Spanish, and Yiddish—or that he is knowledgeable as to which of their best friends are having affairs with their supposedly faithful wives.

  Since there are many musicians among them I’m sure that you know the type I mean. They can be found in almost any town large enough to provide the conflict of values and stereotypes based on notions of racial superiority that form the social briar patch in which to operate. Playing dumb, they can be quick-witted and even wise; though perceived as cowardly they are capable of a reckless, life-risking daring when the chips are down; and though treated as inferior beings, they delight in taking advantage of such misconceptions of their humanity by infiltrating the most private areas of their employers’ lives. And once there they can manipulate the stereotype role thrust upon them like a magician drawing doves, rabbits, and white elephants out of a hat.

  Here—not that he did any of that—I’m reminded of a slave-servant who appears in a book in which two paintings of George Washington are reproduced. In the first the General stands before a field tent holding a scroll of papers as he strikes a pose, à la Napoleon, with his left hand stuck in the breast of his jacket; while in the background, wearing a plumed turban, his round-cheeked, white-toothed young servant holds the bridle of his master’s horse and grins as he looks back knowingly at its docked, high-lifted tail. Incidently, the portrait was done by a Frenchman who was probably as familiar with the natural ways of horses as the slave boy with the ways of his master….

  The second painting is actually a family scene in which, resplendent in dress uniform and boots with spurs, General Washington sits crossed-legged beside a table upon which his hat and the hilt of his sword rest upon a large military map. The map covers most of the table but the General appears to be staring far into the future as, to the right of the table, his young grandson stands close by with a hand resting on a globe of the world which sits on a convenient stand. And as the boy looks on, his willowy young lady of a sister (who sits across the table) is holding a furled end of the map in her delicate fingers so that Mrs. Washington (who sits beside her, richly bedecked in a ribboned bonnet, lacy scarf, and silken dress) may trace what appears to have been the course of one of the General’s battles. I’m not sure of what she’s doing, but whatever it is the map is the focal point of the painting. For with the map as its axis the ladies and young boy are portrayed as sweetly genteel and the General relaxed and peaceful. Which was most suitable for a Tory aristocrat who opted for revolution, fought difficult battles, and triumphed against great odds. The General stares from the canvas as though contemplating the invisible viewers who would inherit it, and if so, he was right on target.

  Because across the table and in a corner behind the elegant ladies there hovers a shadow of the past—and that shadow is the point of all my bumbling attempt at description.

  Because the embodiment of that “shadow” is none other than the man who had been the young boy who appears in the first painting. Presented in semi-profile, he stands erect and attentive with his left hand thrust into the bosom of his vest and his eyes properly averted. His name was William Lee, and though no member of the family he, he’s there because the General must have insisted that his friend and companion through war and peace be included to give depth to the scene and convey some of its historical complexity. Who knows, maybe Washington recognized that William performed an important service which, for one in his own heroic position, could be rendered best by a man beyond the pale. Maybe the slave kept the hero’s feet on the ground and warned him against becoming puffed up with pride. Perhaps he served his hero-master as well by being an ever-present reminder of his human mortality, and thus helped deflate any illusions he might have had as to his infallibility. For after all, the length of his shadow may inspire questions as to the true measure of any man, even as it adds texture to and helps define the scene in which he acts. So it is that not only does Lee deepen the painting’s historical perspective but foreshadows other “shadows” to come. What’s more, he’s standing right behind Miss First Lady Martha—which must have been one hell of an observation post! Because if I know anything about our people, old Bill has his eyes and ears wide open to what’s going down, and nobody, not even the surveyor, slave-master, general, and father of our country, knew what the hell he was thinking—much less the influence for good or evil that he might have been having on the first family’s grandchildren. And here you might recall that the father of our country fathered no children of his own….

  Black William Lee was with George Washington for thirty-one years, during which time an undeclared independence of observation was, perhaps, his only self-defining area of freedom. But don’t forget that although a slave he was still privy to many matters having to do with affairs of family, state, and politics. And if interested he might well have used his shadowy position as unsurveyed landscape for self-exploration, or a dimly lit stage upon which to perform the kind of playacting which is the speciality of the type I mention
ed above. And like the type he could have been quite fascinating to children; perhaps because in the eyes of the children of that day the slaves were natural allies in a silent war with powerful forces that limited their own freedom of self-assertion. A similarity of situation which makes for a potent point of mutual identification and ground for all kinds of rebellion, and perhaps explains why their parents insist that they break with us once they reach the stage of self-discovery and procreation—which is adolescence. No wonder white kids are admonished not to act like “niggers”!

  Hickman, I suspect that all this abstract speculation is bugging you, so now, back to the boy. While keeping clear of any eye-to-eye contact of which I was aware I scouted around for some down-close down-home contact of color who might fit the type I’ve been describing—and by George it worked! For by keeping an eye on our strange bronco stray I finally tracked him to a most unrighteous stud! And in the course of my investigation I learned exactly what type of Negro had taken him in charge. I must warn you, however, not to take my “exactly” too seriously, because this character who I finally connected with the boy was so tricky that he could walk straight through a plate-glass window without a scratch, or dive through a sieve without leaving even a microscopic shred, thread, or bubble!

  [PAIRS]

  This was a guy who went by the name of “Missippy Brown,” or simply “Sippy,” a self-bestowed moniker which sums up the mocking irreverence of his character. But if Mississippi missed the rascal it was only because he eluded some irate mob by being so fast on his feet. At the time he came to my attention he was supposed to be the butler of a young multimillionaire, but the moment I laid eyes on Sippy I doubted that he’d ever worked for anyone except himself—and I was right. For although quite personable, he turned out to be of the type who never loses sight of the “bread” or the side that’s spread thickest with butter. And even if the “bread” is tossed past them and out of a ten-story window they’ll be there waiting to grab it before it can hit the ground. So while I’m hopelessly fascinated by maverick types (being something of one myself) I found Sippy’s character so unusually outrageous that my initial impulse was to steer clear of him and all his exploitations. I was already having enough trouble trying to bring a college course in Culture and Civilization into line with the reality around me, so why make matters more confusing by introducing a rambunctious embodiment of living chaos into the neat symmetry of my textbook? Nevertheless, out of respect for your interest and spurred by my own irrepressible curiosity, I felt compelled to investigate Sippy’s connection with the boy. But again I must confess that my decision was also influenced by sheer chance.