Juneteenth by Ralph Ellison
“Now you watch it, Mac,” the handler called. “Respect the working man!”
“Respect?” the fat man called. “You don’t need respect, you get paid. And if you were earning your pay you’d give that stupid bird a goose so the match could continue. Instead, you make us speeches about the rights of labor!”
The fat man was speechless, his face red with anger, but as he started out toward the handler a tall distinguished-looking man in a white deerstalker hat grabbed him and pushed him back. Then, raising his arms for quiet, the tall man called out, “My advice is to have the handlers wring the bird’s neck and end this impasse! Anyway we look at it, a bird such as that is a disgrace. It’s a disgrace to the breed and to the sport. It’s a bloody spoilsport, a cringing dog-in-the-manger! A malicious nigger in the woodpile! A vengeful ghost at the wedding! In other words, it makes everything go bad. So I say, let’s wring its neck and immediately after the shoot I shall call a meeting of the governing board to see to it that in the future all such birds are blackballed….”
“There’s no need to wait,” the fat man said, slamming a shell into his weapon. “I’m taking no more crap from this walking …” But just as he raised his gun to fire a woman ran forward and knocked him off balance, causing the gun to discharge into the air and sending the fat man back with a bump upon the grass where he sat cursing the woman.
Watching the pigeon’s progress, the Senator felt that he was suffocating. He felt responsible for the pigeon’s life but was unable to do a thing about it. Flashes of blue-green appeared above the ring now as the crowd began lobbing Coca-Cola bottles at the bird; but still the pigeon refused to flush, and its orange-ringed eyes seemed to look straight at the Senator as skirting both the bottles and the bodies of its fallen fellows it continued with calmly bobbing head toward the barrier. He watched the iridescent play of the light upon its gorget and the slow pulsing of blood from its breast with painful feelings of identification which were interrupted by a sudden silence: The bird had stopped its stroll and was extending its wings.
“Now! At last,” the Viking called, “he’s found his courage! He’s about to take off, so careful, Mr. Marksman, careful!”
Thinking, Oh, no! Not after resisting this far, the Senator strained forward, seeing the pigeon’s head come around and the remoteness of its orange-ringed eye as the bird plucked a single feather from its breast and released it with a sharp snap of its head. Then with a series of short, hedge-hopping spurts it covered the remaining distance to the barrier, where it paused, calmly preening itself for a moment, then turning its back to the crowd it dived with set wings below the cliff.
As the bird dropped from sight the Senator seemed to fall within himself and as he struggled to keep his feet he was aware of a sudden darkening of the sun and looked up to see, at the point where the pigeon had disappeared, a huge hatch of flies boiling up from the river and swarming above the ring, where once again the birds were flighting before the guns.
Perhaps for you there’s safety in darkness, the Senator thought. Perhaps a few will have a chance….
But already the flies were thinning out, swarming veillike in broader circles, and as they boiled above the ring he heard an explosion of shrill cries and watched the arrival of a virtual aerial circus of small, sharp-winged birds.
Pouring down as from a net released high in the sky, a flock of swallows began swooping and wheeling between the booming patterns of the guns as they attacked the flies, bringing the air alive with graceful motion. Plunging and climbing, banking and whirling, skimming and gliding, the hunting birds filled the air with high-pitched, derisive cries as they executed power dives and Immelmanns, sideslips and barrel rolls, and dazzled the Senator with the cool, audacious miracle of their flight. Not a single swallow was struck by the flying shot and as they swirled above the ring it came to him that the swallows were contemptuous of both the pigeons and the guns, and there, braced between the auburn-haired woman and a man in a wide planter’s hat, and feeling the dank, steaming wetness of their bodies against him, he watched the swallows swoop and soar in grace, moving invulnerable among the doomed and falling rock doves….
Suddenly released and moving through the crowd, the Senator had started along the walk leading back to the clubhouse when suddenly something landed a sharp, stabbing blow to his right heel and he whirled to see a small handsome child who looked up at him out of a pair of intense, black, long-lashed eyes.
Why, I’ll be damned, the Senator thought, it’s a boy! A fine, grand rascal of a little boy!
The little boy, whose hair was cut in a Buster Brown bob, was dressed incongruously in red satin pantaloons and white satin blouse such as were worn by a child in a painting by Goya, a copy of which the Senator had seen long ago in a museum. Even his pompom-topped white satin slippers were from another time, and behind him, attached to a silken cord which the boy held in a chubby fist, there stood a stuffed goldfinch mounted on a small gilded platform equipped with wheels.
He’s been gotten up for either a wedding or a masquerade, but in either case he’ll steal the show. Dressed to kill, that’s the word, the Senator thought, resisting an impulse to sweep the child into his arms as he smiled down, saying,
“Why, hello there! Don’t I know you from somewhere? You look awfully familiar….”
But instead of answering, the little boy darted around him, the goldfinch clattering on the walk as the Senator turned to see the child standing in the middle of the path confronting him with an expression of hostility which distorted his tiny face.
“My, but you’re fast,” the Senator said. “What’s your name? Mine’s Adam Sunraider….”
Silently the little boy stuck out a small blue tongue, making an angry face, then with his fingers rigidly extended he thumbed his nose.
The Senator laughed, thinking, My, but he’s aggressive. Probably a dissatisfied constituent … And yet he had a nagging impression that he knew the child, had seen him before even though he could think of no one with a child so young.
“Look,” he said, leaning forward, “I don’t know what you’ve got against me but I’d like to befriends with such a fine young fellow as you. Shall we shake hands?”
His head shaking violently, the boy’s hands flew behind his back as he stared up at the Senator out of hot black eyes.
“Very well,” the Senator said, “people who can’t talk probably can’t know very much. I’ll bet you can’t even say your father and mother’s name….”
The boy grinned, his face transformed into that of a malicious adult as he retreated a step and spat at the Senator’s feet, and in a flash his tiny hands were at his head, fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird as he stuck out his tiny blue-coated tongue and thumbed his ears.
Thinking, How on earth could he have become so ill-mannered so young?, the Senator chuckled at the incongruity between the child’s size and his aggressiveness.
“Young man,” the Senator began, “I have an idea you’re lost. Maybe you’d better try to take me to where you last saw your mother—” and broke off, taken aback as the child went suddenly into a frenzy of action.
Turning his back and jackknifing forward, the boy was looking up from between his short legs and making a horrible face as he patted his backside and made nasty sounds with his vibrating lips. Then straightening, he raised his leg like a dog and with a grave expression on his face he thumbed the seat of his red satin pants.
“Hey!” the Senator cried, “that’s enough of that! Cut it out! What do you think you’re doing?”
But instead of answering, the boy began to run in circles before him, moving like a demented toy and stopping every few feet to repeat his insulting gestures. Profoundly disturbed and depressed, the Senator looked beyond the child into the crowd, hoping to see a frantic mother emerging to find the boy. A bird was rising above the crowd and all backs were turned, watching the marksman and the flighting target.
This is awful, the Senator thought, this one certain
It was too much for the Senator but as he reached out the boy leaped backwards, running and making a turn which caused the stuffed bird to disintegrate in an explosion of flying head and whirling feathers as it struck the walk and lay vibrating there as the boy shot silently into the crowd.
For a moment the Senator stood looking blankly at the shattered goldfinch in his path, thinking, He’ll be furious, absolutely furious; and his mother will probably blame me, and her with a boy running wild while she devotes herself to shooting matches.… It’s a crime.… And the Senator moved away.
There was a faint odor of smoke around him now and as the Senator came out upon the steps leading from the building his senses were assaulted by the hushed humid heaviness of the late afternoon air. And then, as at a signal, a silence seemed to move before him and grow like a rolling crescendo of suddenly inverted sound. Sometime earlier a shower had left the atmosphere unbearably hot and although the sky had begun to clear he could see drops of moisture still clinging to the leaves of the trees and the walks glistened with the rain.
Surprisingly, the traffic had disappeared and as far as his eyes could see the traffic signals were blobs of red, shimmering against the moist mistiness of the fading light. Then a movement down at the intersection of the street and the avenue caught his attention and he saw a bent little black-skinned woman moving toward him.
Wearing a blue bandanna head rag and a faded yellow apron over a red housedress, she made her way along in a pair of black high-topped old lady’s shoes which seemed, suddenly, to expand about her ankles and begin creeping up her legs: expanding and contracting violently as they climbed. It was as though they were intent upon engorging her within the bunion-distorted maws of their interiors. Yet she continued painfully forward and as she moved closer the Senator could hear the rhythmical beating of a clanking sound—But then she was no longer there but transported across the avenue where, standing before a building which showed dark against the eerie light of the fading sun, she called out in a senile quaver, “Hey! Heah Ah is, over heah!” and threatened him with an old-fashioned washing stick that she shook with awkward vigor.
“Oh, Ah knows you,” she called. “You old jacklegged, knock-kneed, bow-legged, box-ankled, pigeon-toed, slack-asted piece of peckerwood trash gone to doo-doo! Ah knows you, yas Ah do! Yo’ mammy was yo’ sister and yo’ grandmaw too! Yo’ uncle was yo’ daddy and yo’ brother’s cousin! You a coward and a thief and a snake in the grass! You do the dirty bo-bo and you eats bad meat! Oh Ah knows you, yas Ah does, and I means to git you! I means to tell everybody who you is and put yo’ nasty business in these white folks’ street….”
What on earth is this, the Senator thought; who is this senile old mammy-auntie and what’s she doing up here on the Hill? Where did she come from?
“Ah’ll tell you what you is,” the old woman called. “You ain’t nothing, that’s what you is! You is simply nothing done gone to waste, and if somebody was to plant you in a hill with a rotten piece offish you wouldn’t even raise a measly bush of beans! You think you so high and mighty but you ain’t doodly-squat! You ain’t no eagle, fox or bear! You ain’t a rabbit or a skunk or a wheel-in-a-wheel! You ain’t nothing—neither a mourning dove or a lily of the field! You ain’t a bolt or a nut or a crupper strap. Ah even knows pimps and creepers who’re better’n you….”
Very well, the Senator thought, but you’ll have to admit that if I’m not all that you say I’m at least a walking personification of the negative….
“Shet up! Shet up! You nothing!” the old woman screamed. “SHET UP! Or Ah’ll tell you who you really is!”
Shaking his head, the Senator turned away, amused but filled with a strange foreboding. Never mind, he thought, I know who I am, and for the time being at least, I am a senator.
But now for some reason he recalled a church service of a summer’s evening long past, during which in rapid succession a gust of wind had torn a part of the roof away and a stroke of lightning had plunged the church into darkness. The choir had faltered in its singing and women had begun screaming—when in the noisy confusion and whirling about Hickman had stamped three times upon the pulpit’s hollow floor, shouting, “Sing! Sing!,” startling them and triggering some of the singers into an outburst of ragged, incoherent sound. Frightened by the storm, he himself had been crying, but as the old church creaked and groaned beneath the lashing of wind and rain and the screaming continued, the foot-pounded rhythm had come again, this time accompanied by Hickman’s lining-out of a snatch of a spiritual in hoarse, authoritative recitative. And suddenly the singers were calmed and the screamers were silenced and a disciplined quietness had spread beneath the howling of the storm. Then through a flash of lightning he had seen the singers straining towards Hickman who, with voice raised in melody, was stomping out the rhythm on the floor. And as the singers followed his lead and were joined by the nervous choiring of the congregation, he had heard the blended voices rise up infirm array against the thunder. Up, up the voices had climbed until, surrendering themselves to the old familiar words, they were giving forth so vigorously that before his astonished eyes the pitch-black interior of the church had seemed to brighten and come aglow with a joyful and unearthly radiance generated by the mighty outpouring of passionate song.
He ’rose …
Heroes!
He ’rose …
Heroes!
He ’rose …
Up from the dead!
He ’rose …
Oh, yes!
He ’rose …
Oh, yes!
Heroes …
Up from the dead!
A comfort, the Senator thought.
And moving down the steps and into the familiar scene of the street he felt the images of this long-forgotten incident imposing themselves upon the scene, distorting his vision with teasing fragments of memory long rejected. And now he stumbled along the stone walk with inward-searching eyes, expecting the abrupt tolling of bells, a clash of lightning, a choir of girlish voices lifted in vesperal song….
Across the way the old woman continued to rail, but now he was listening for the baritone timbre and voicelike phrasing of a muted trombone which would proclaim with broadly reverent mockery the lyrics of some ancient hymn; and looking back to the building entrance, he expected to see a crowd rush forth to shout down denunciations upon him, to shower him with stones.… But, like the street, the entrance was empty and the door now closed mysteriously upon the brooding quiet….
Soon, the Senator thought, it will come. They’re beginning to stir, so, as the old trainer said, watch their hands. And as old fighters, he warned, watch hands, feet and head. Yes, they’re moving out into the open and things are beginning to heave and the backwash is beginning. But Hickman here? Unlikely—though who knows who it was who came? Nine owls have squawked out the rules and the hawks will talk, so soon they’ll come marching out of the woodpile and the woodwork—sorehead, sorefoot, right up close, one-butt-shuffling into history but demanding praise and kind treatment for deeds undone, for lessons unlearned. But studying war once more …
Reaching the curb now, the Senator prepared to cross the boulevard when, sensing a rush of movement from his left, he spun instinctively and saw the car.
Long, black and underslung, it seemed to straighten the curving course of the street with the force of its momentum, bearing down upon him so relentlessly that his nerves screamed with tension as his entire body prepared itself for a supreme effort. An effort which, even as his muscles responded to the danger, was already anticipating itself in his reeling mind, projecting a long, curving, backward leaping mo
Only now did his body catch up with his mind, beginning its backward-sailing fling as the car, almost upon him now, veered suddenly and stopped with a night-piercing screaming of brakes. He was on his back then feeling the pain of the impact exploding in his elbows and spine and in the endless, heart-pounding, head-jolting instant the car seemed to leave the roadway and hover above the curb, hanging there like a giant insect; and inside its wide front seat were three men.
Dark-skinned and broad of face behind the murky window, they peered down at him through dark glasses topped by the narrow brims of high-crowned, shaggy-napped white hats, watching him with intense concentration as their mouths stretched wide in expressions of fierce, derisible gaiety. Whereupon the driver reached for a microphone and looking around his companions addressed him through the herald trumpets which lay along either side of the rakish hood.
“Next time you better swing your booty faster, boy,” the voice said, “or by God we go’ lo’ mo’ kick your nasty ass!”
Watching them, the Senator was speechless.
“Don’t be laying there looking at us,” the voice said. “You heard me correctly; we’ll blast you and do everybody some service!”