Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
I turned aside and looked at the clutter of household objects which the two men continued to pile on the walk. And as the crowd pushed me I looked down to see looking out of an oval frame a portrait of the old couple when young, seeing the sad, stiff dignity of the faces there; feeling strange memories awakening that began an echoing in my head like that of a hysterical voice stuttering in a dark street. Seeing them look back at me as though even then in that nineteenth-century day they had expected little, and this with a grim, unillusioned pride that suddenly seemed to me both a reproach and a warning. My eyes fell upon a pair of crudely carved and polished bones, “knocking bones,” used to accompany music at country dances, used in black-face minstrels; the flat ribs of a cow, a steer or sheep, flat bones that gave off a sound, when struck, like heavy castanets (had he been a minstrel?) or the wooden block of a set of drums. Pots and pots of green plants were lined in the dirty snow, certain to die of the cold; ivy, canna, a tomato plant. And in a basket I saw a straightening comb, switches of false hair, a curling iron, a card with silvery letters against a background of dark red velvet, reading “God Bless Our Home”; and scattered across the top of a chiffonier were nuggets of High John the Conqueror, the lucky stone; and as I watched the white men put down a basket in which I saw a whiskey bottle filled with rock candy and camphor, a small Ethiopian flag, a faded tintype of Abraham Lincoln, and the smiling image of a Hollywood star torn from a magazine. And on a pillow several badly cracked pieces of delicate china, a commemorative plate celebrating the St. Louis World’s Fair … I stood in a kind of daze, looking at an old folded lace fan studded with jet and mother-of-pearl.
The crowd surged as the white men came back, knocking over a drawer that spilled its contents in the snow at my feet. I stooped and starting replacing the articles: a bent Masonic emblem, a set of tarnished cuff links, three brass rings, a dime pierced with a nail hole so as to be worn about the ankle on a string for luck, an ornate greeting card with the message “Grandma, I love you” in childish scrawl; another card with a picture of what looked like a white man in black-face seated in the door of a cabin strumming a banjo beneath a bar of music and the lyric “Going back to my old cabin home”; a useless inhalant, a string of bright glass beads with a tarnished clasp, a rabbit foot, a celluloid baseball scoring card shaped like a catcher’s mitt, registering a game won or lost years ago; an old breast pump with rubber bulb yellowed with age, a worn baby shoe and a dusty lock of infant hair tied with a faded and crumpled blue ribbon. I felt nauseated. In my hand I held three lapsed life insurance policies with perforated seals stamped “Void”; a yellowing newspaper portrait of a huge black man with the caption: MARCUS GARVEY DEPORTED.
I turned away, bending and searching the dirty snow for anything missed by my eyes, and my fingers closed upon something resting in a frozen footstep: a fragile paper, coming apart with age, written in black ink grown yellow. I read: FREE PAPERS. Be it known to all men that my negro, Primus Provo, has been freed by me this sixth day of August, 1859. Signed: John Samuels. Macon. … I folded it quickly, blotting out the single drop of melted snow which glistened on the yellowed page, and dropped it back into the drawer. My hands were trembling, my breath rasping as if I had run a long distance or come upon a coiled snake in a busy street. It has been longer than that, further removed in time, I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn’t been. I replaced the drawer in the chest and pushed drunkenly to the curb.
But it wouldn’t come up, only a bitter spurt of gall filled my mouth and splattered the old folk’s possessions. I turned and stared again at the jumble, no longer looking at what was before my eyes, but inwardly-outwardly, around a corner into the dark, far-away-and-long-ago, not so much of my own memory as of remembered words, of linked verbal echoes, images, heard even when not listening at home. And it was as though I myself was being dispossessed of some painful yet precious thing which I could not bear to lose; something confounding, like a rotted tooth that one would rather suffer indefinitely than endure the short, violent eruption of pain that would mark its removal. And with this sense of dispossession came a pang of vague recognition: this junk, these shabby chairs, these heavy, old-fashioned pressing irons, zinc wash tubs with dented bottoms—all throbbed within me with more meaning than there should have been: And why did I, standing in the crowd, see like a vision my mother hanging wash on a cold windy day, so cold that the warm clothes froze even before the vapor thinned and hung stiff on the line, and her hands white and raw in the skirt-swirling wind and her gray head bare to the darkened sky—why were they causing me discomfort so far beyond their intrinsic meaning as objects? And why did I see them now, as behind a veil that threatened to lift, stirred by the cold wind in the narrow street?
A scream, “I’m going in!” spun me around. The old couple were on the steps now, the old man holding her arm, the white men leaning forward above, and the crowd pressing me closer to the steps.
“You can’t go in, lady,” the man said.
“I want to pray!” she said.
“I can’t help it, lady. You’ll have to do your praying out here.”
“I’m go’n in!”
“Not in here!”
“All we want to do is go in and pray,” she said, clutching her Bible. “It ain’t right to pray in the street like this.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Aw, let the woman go in to pray,” a voice called from the crowd. “You got all their stuff out here on the walk—what more do you want, blood?”
“Sure, let them old folks pray.”
“That’s what’s wrong with us now, all this damn praying,” another voice called.
“You don’t go back, see,” the white man said. “You were legally evicted.”
“But all we want to do is go in an’ kneel on the floor,” the old man said. “We been living right here for over twenty years. I don’t see why you can’t let us go just for a few minutes …”
“Look, I’ve told you,” the man said. “I’ve got my orders. You’re wasting my time.”
“We go’n in!” the woman said.
It happened so suddenly that I could barely keep up with it: I saw the old woman clutching her Bible and rushing up the steps, her husband behind her and the white man stepping in front of them and stretching out his arm. “I’ll jug you,” he yelled, “by God, I’ll jug you!”
“Take your hands off that woman!” someone called from the crowd.
Then at the top of the stairs they were pushing against the man and I saw the old woman fall backwards, and the crowd exploded.
“Get that paddie sonofabitch!”
“He struck her!” a West Indian woman screamed into my ear. “The filthy brute, he struck her!”
“Stand back or I’ll shoot,” the man called, his eyes wild as he drew a gun and backed into the doorway where the two trusties stood bewildered, their arms full of articles. “I swear I’ll shoot! You don’t know what you’re doing, but I’ll shoot!”
They hesitated. “Ain’t but six bullets in that thing,” a little fellow called. “Then what you going to do?”
“Yeah, you damn sho caint hide.”
“I advise you to stay out of this,” the marshal called.
“Think you can come up here and hit one of our women, you a fool.”
“To hell with all this talk, let’s rush that bastard!”
“You better think twice,” the white man called.
I saw them start up the steps and felt suddenly as though my head would split. I knew that they were about to attack the man and I was both afraid and angry, repelled and fascinated. I both wanted it and feared the consequences, was outraged and angered at what I saw and yet surged with fear; not for the man or of the consequences of an attack, but of what the sight of violence might release in me. And beneath it all there boiled up all the shock-absorbing phrases that I had learned all my life. I seemed to totter on the edge of a great dark hole.
“No, no,” I heard myself yelling. “B
Forcing my way quickly through the crowd, I stood on the steps facing those in front, talking rapidly without thought but out of my clashing emotions. “We’re a law-abiding people and a slow-to-anger people …” They stopped, listening. Even the white man was startled.
“Yeah, but we mad now,” a voice called out.
“Yes, you’re right,” I called back. “We’re angry, but let us be wise. Let us, I mean let us not … Let us learn from that great leader whose wise action was reported in the newspaper the other day …”
“What mahn? Who?” a West Indian voice shouted.
“Come on! To hell with this guy, let’s get that paddie before they send him some help …”
“No, wait,” I yelled. “Let’s follow a leader, let’s organize. Organize. We need someone like that wise leader, you read about him, down in Alabama. He was strong enough to choose to do the wise thing in spite of what he felt himself …”
“Who, mahn? Who?”
This was it, I thought, they’re listening, eager to listen. Nobody laughed. If they laugh, I’ll die! I tensed my diaphragm.
“That wise man,” I said, “you read about him, who when that fugitive escaped from the mob and ran to his school for protection, that wise man who was strong enough to do the legal thing, the law-abiding thing, to turn him over to the forces of law and order …”
“Yeah,” a voice rang out, “yeah, so they could lynch his ass.”
Oh, God, this wasn’t it at all. Poor technique and not at all what I intended.
“He was a wise leader,” I yelled. “He was within the law. Now wasn’t that the wise thing to do?”
“Yeah, he was wise all right,” the man laughed angrily. “Now get out of the way so we can jump this paddie.”
The crowd yelled and I laughed in response as though hypnotized.
“But wasn’t that the human thing to do? After all, he had to protect himself because—”
“He was a handkerchief-headed rat!” a woman screamed, her voice boiling with contempt.
“Yes, you’re right. He was wise and cowardly, but what about us? What are we to do?” I yelled, suddenly thrilled by the response. “Look at him,” I cried.
“Yes, just look at him!” an old fellow in a derby called out as though answering a preacher in church.
“And look at that old couple …”
“Yeah, what about Sister and Brother Provo?” he said. “It’s an ungodly shame!”
“And look at their possessions all strewn there on the sidewalk. Just look at their possessions in the snow. How old are you, sir?” I yelled.
“I’m eighty-seven,” the old man said, his voice low and bewildered.
“How’s that? Yell so our slow-to-anger brethren can hear you.”
“I’m eighty-seven years old!”
“Did you hear him? He’s eighty-seven. Eighty-seven and look at all he’s accumulated in eighty-seven years, strewn in the snow like chicken guts, and we’re a law-abiding, slow-to-anger bunch of folks turning the other cheek every day in the week. What are we going to do? What would you, what would I, what would he have done? What is to be done? I propose we do the wise thing, the law-abiding thing. Just look at this junk! Should two old folks live in such junk, cooped up in a filthy room? It’s a great danger, a fire hazard! Old cracked dishes and broken-down chairs. Yes, yes, yes! Look at that old woman, somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, maybe. We call them ‘Big Mama’ and they spoil us and—you know, you remember … Look at her quilts and broken-down shoes. I know she’s somebody’s mother because I saw an old breast pump fall into the snow, and she’s somebody’s grandmother, because I saw a card that read ‘Dear Grandma’ … but we’re law-abiding … I looked into a basket and I saw some bones, not neck-bones, but rib bones, knocking bones … This old couple used to dance … I saw— What kind of work do you do, Father?” I called.
“I’m a day laborer …”
“… A day laborer, you heard him, but look at his stuff strewn like chitterlings in the snow … Where has all his labor gone? Is he lying?”
“Hell, no, he ain’t lying.”
“Naw, suh!”
“Then where did his labor go? Look at his old blues records and her pots of plants, they’re down-home folks, and everything tossed out like junk whirled eighty-seven years in a cyclone. Eighty-seven years, and poof! like a snort in a wind storm. Look at them, they look like my mama and my papa and my grandma and grandpa, and I look like you and you look like me. Look at them but remember that we’re a wise, law-abiding group of people. And remember it when you look up there in the doorway at that law standing there with his forty-five. Look at him, standing with his blue steel pistol and his blue serge suit, or one forty-five, you see ten for every one of us, ten guns and ten warm suits and ten fat bellies and ten million laws. Laws, that’s what we call them down South! Laws! And we’re wise, and law-abiding. And look at this old woman with her dog-eared Bible. What’s she trying to bring off here? She’s let her religion go to her head, but we all know that religion is for the heart, not for the head. ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ it says. Nothing about the poor in head. What’s she trying to do? What about the clear of head? And the clear of eye, the ice-water-visioned who see too clear to miss a lie? Look out there at her cabinet with its gaping drawers. Eighty-seven years to fill them, and full of brick and brack, a brica-brac, and she wants to break the law … What’s happened to them? They’re our people, your people and mine, your parents and mine. What’s happened to ’em?”
“I’ll tell you!” a heavyweight yelled, pushing out of the crowd, his face angry. “Hell, they been dispossessed, you crazy sonofabitch, get out the way!”
“Dispossessed?” I cried, holding up my hand and allowing the word to whistle from my throat. “That’s a good word, ‘Dispossessed’! ‘Dispossessed,’ eighty-seven years and dispossessed of what? They ain’t got nothing, they caint get nothing, they never had nothing. So who was dispossessed?” I growled. “We’re law-abiding. So who’s being dispossessed? Can it be us? These old ones are out in the snow, but we’re here with them. Look at their stuff, not a pit to hiss in, nor a window to shout the news and us right with them. Look at them, not a shack to pray in or an alley to sing the blues! They’re facing a gun and we’re facing it with them. They don’t want the world, but only Jesus. They only want Jesus, just fifteen minutes of Jesus on the rug-bare floor … How about it, Mr. Law? Do we get our fifteen minutes worth of Jesus? You got the world, can we have our Jesus?”
“I got my orders, Mac,” the man called, waving the pistol with a sneer. “You’re doing all right, tell ’em to keep out of this. This is legal and I’ll shoot if I have to …”
“But what about the prayer?”
“They don’t go back!”
“Are you positive?”
“You could bet your life,” he said.
“Look at him,” I called to the angry crowd. “With his blue steel pistol and his blue serge suit. You heard him, he’s the law. He says he’ll shoot us down because we’re a law-abiding people. So we’ve been dispossessed, and what’s more, he thinks he’s God. Look up there backed against the post with a criminal on either side of him. Can’t you feel the cold wind, can’t you hear it asking, ‘What did you do with your heavy labor? What did you do?’ When you look at all you haven’t got in eighty-seven years you feel ashamed—”
“Tell ’em about it, brother,” an old man interrupted. “It makes you feel you ain’t a man.”
“Yes, these old folks had a dream book, but the pages went blank and it failed to give them the number. It was called the Seeing Eye, The Great Constitutional Dream Book, The Secrets of Africa, The Wisdom of Egypt—but the eye was blind, it lost its luster. It’s all cataracted like a cross-eyed carpenter and it doesn’t saw straight. All we have is the Bible and this Law here rules that o
“We going after that paddie,” the heavyweight called, rushing up the steps.
Someone pushed me. “No, wait,” I called.
“Get out the way now.”
There was a rush against me and I fell, hearing a single explosion, backward into a whirl of milling legs, overshoes, the trampled snow cold on my hands. Another shot sounded above like a bursting bag. Managing to stand, I saw atop the steps the fist with the gun being forced into the air above the crowd’s bobbing heads and the next instant they were dragging him down into the snow; punching him left and right, uttering a low tense swelling sound of desperate effort; a grunt that exploded into a thousand softly spat, hate-sizzling curses. I saw a woman striking with the pointed heel of her shoe, her face a blank mask with hollow black eyes as she aimed and struck, aimed and struck, bringing spurts of blood, running along beside the man who was dragged to his feet now as they punched him gauntlet-wise between them. Suddenly I saw a pair of handcuffs arc gleaming into the air and sail across the street. A boy broke out of the crowd, the marshal’s snappy hat on his head. The marshal was spun this way and that, then a swift tattoo of blows started him down the street. I was beside myself with excitement. The crowd surged after him, milling like a huge man trying to turn in a cubbyhole—some of them laughing, some cursing, some intently silent.
“The brute stuck that gentle woman, poor thing!” the West Indian woman chanted. “Black men, did you ever see such a brute? Is he a gentleman, I ask you? The brute? Give it back to him, black men. Repay the brute a thousandfold! Give it back to him unto the third and fourth generations. Strike him, our fine black men. Protect your black women! Repay the arrogant creature to the third and fourth generations!”