Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
“You’re nuts. I’m a dynamo of energy. I come to charge my batteries,” one of the vets insisted.
“I’m a student of history, sir,” another interrupted with dramatic gestures. “The world moves in a circle like a roulette wheel. In the beginning, black is on top, in the middle epochs, white holds the odds, but soon Ethiopia shall stretch forth her noble wings! Then place your money on the black!” His voice throbbed with emotion. “Until then, the sun holds no heat, there’s ice in the heart of the earth. Two years from now and I’ll be old enough to give my mulatto mother a bath, the half-white bitch!” he added, beginning to leap up and down in an explosion of glassy-eyed fury.
Mr. Norton blinked his eyes and straightened up.
“I’m a physician, may I take your pulse?” Burnside said, seizing Mr. Norton’s wrist.
“Don’t pay him no mind, mister. He ain’t been no doctor in ten years. They caught him trying to change some blood into money.”
“I did too!” the man screamed. “I discovered it and John D. Rockefeller stole the formula from me.”
“Mr. Rockefeller did you say?” Mr. Norton said. “I’m sure you must be mistaken.”
“WHAT’S GOING ON DOWN THERE?” a voice shouted from the balcony. Everyone turned. I saw a huge black giant of a man, dressed only in white shorts, swaying on the stairs. It was Supercargo, the attendant. I hardly recognized him without his hard-starched white uniform. Usually he walked around threatening the men with a strait jacket which he always carried over his arm, and usually they were quiet and submissive in his presence. But now they seemed not to recognize him and began shouting curses.
“How you gon keep order in the place if you gon git drunk?” Halley shouted. “Charlene! Charlene!”
“Yeah?” a woman’s voice, startling in its carrying power, answered sulkily from a room off the balcony.
“I want you to git that stool-pigeoning, joy-killing, nut-crushing bum back in there with you and sober him up. Then git him in his white suit and down here to keep order. We got white folks in the house.”
A woman appeared on the balcony, drawing a woolly pink robe about her. “Now you lissen here, Halley,” she drawled, “I’m a woman. If you want him dressed, you can do it yourself. I don’t put on but one man’s clothes and he’s in N’Orleans.”
“Never mind all that. Git that stool pigeon sober!”
“I want order down there,” Supercargo boomed, “and if there’s white folks down there, I wan’s double order.”
Suddenly there was an angry roar from the men back near the bar and I saw them rush the stairs.
“Get him!”
“Let’s give him some order!”
“Out of my way.”
Five men charged the stairs. I saw the giant bend and clutch the posts at the top of the stairs with both hands, bracing himself, his body gleaming bare in his white shorts. The little man who had slapped Mr. Norton was in front, and, as he sprang up the long flight, I saw the attendant set himself and kick, catching the little man just as he reached the top, hard in the chest, sending him backwards in a curving dive into the midst of the men behind him. Supercargo got set to swing his leg again. It was a narrow stair and only one man could get up at a time. As fast as they rushed up, the giant kicked them back. He swung his leg, kicking them down like a fungo-hitter batting out flies. Watching him, I forgot Mr. Norton. The Golden Day was in an uproar. Half-dressed women appeared from the rooms off the balcony. Men hooted and yelled as at a football game.
“I WANT ORDER!” the giant shouted as he sent a man flying down the flight of stairs.
“THEY THROWING BOTTLES OF LIQUOR!” a woman screamed. “REAL LIQUOR!”
“That’s a order he don’t want,” someone said.
A shower of bottles and glasses splashing whiskey crashed against the balcony. I saw Supercargo snap suddenly erect and grab his forehead, his face bathed in whiskey. “Eeeee!” he cried, “Eeeee!” Then I saw him wave, rigid from his ankles upward. For a moment the men on the stairs were motionless, watching him. Then they sprang forward.
Supercargo grabbed wildly at the balustrade as they snatched his feet from beneath him and started down. His head bounced against the steps making a sound like a series of gunshots as they ran dragging him by his ankles, like volunteer firemen running with a hose. The crowd surged forward. Halley yelled near my ear. I saw the man being dragged toward the center of the room.
“Give the bastard some order!”
“Here I’m forty-five and he’s been acting like he’s my old man!”
“So you like to kick, huh?” a tall man said, aiming a shoe at the attendant’s head. The flesh above his right eye jumped out as though it had been inflated.
Then I heard Mr. Norton beside me shouting, “No, no! Not when he’s down!”
“Lissen at the white folks,” someone said.
“He’s the white folks’ man!”
Men were jumping upon Supercargo with both feet now and I felt such an excitement that I wanted to join them. Even the girls were yelling, “Give it to him good!” “He never pays me!” “Kill him!”
“Please, y’all, not in here! Not in my place!”
“You can’t speak your mind when he’s on duty!”
“Hell, no!”
Somehow I got pushed away from Mr. Norton and found myself beside the man called Sylvester.
“Watch this, school-boy,” he said. “See there, where his ribs are bleeding?”
I nodded my head.
“Now don’t move your eyes.”
I watched the spot as though compelled, just beneath the lower rib and above the hip-bone, as Sylvester measured carefully with his toe and kicked as though he were punting a football. Supercargo let out a groan like an injured horse.
“Try it, school-boy, it feels so good. It gives you relief,” Sylvester said. “Sometimes I get so afraid of him I feel that he’s inside my head. There!” he said, giving Supercargo another kick.
As I watched, a man sprang on Supercargo’s chest with both feet and he lost consciousness. They began throwing cold beer on him, reviving him, only to kick him unconscious again. Soon he was drenched in blood and beer.
“The bastard’s out cold.”
“Throw him out.”
“Naw, wait a minute. Give me a hand somebody.”
They threw him upon the bar, stretching him out with his arms folded across his chest like a corpse.
“Now, let’s have a drink!”
Halley was slow in getting behind the bar and they cursed him.
“Get back there and serve us, you big sack of fat!”
“Gimme a rye!”
“Up here, funk-buster!”
“Shake them sloppy hips!”
“Okay, okay, take it easy,” Halley said, rushing to pour them drinks. “Just put y’all’s money where your mouth is.”
With Supercargo lying helpless upon the bar, the men whirled about like maniacs. The excitement seemed to have tilted some of the more delicately balanced ones too far. Some made hostile speeches at the top of their voices against the hospital, the state and the universe. The one who called himself a composer was banging away the one wild piece he seemed to know on the out-of-tune piano, striking the keyboard with fists and elbows and filling in other effects in a bass voice that moaned like a bear in agony. One of the most educated ones touched my arm. He was a former chemist who was never seen without his shining Phi Beta Kappa key.
“The men have lost control,” he said through the uproar. “I think you’d better leave.”
“I’m trying to,” I said, “as soon as I can get over to Mr. Norton.”
Mr. Norton was gone from where I had left him. I rushed here and there through the noisy men, calling his name.
When I found him he was under the stairs. Somehow he had been pushed there by the scuffling, reeling men and he lay sprawled in the chair like an aged doll. In the dim light his features were sharp and white and his closed eyes well-defined lin
“Stop screaming!” a voice commanded, and I felt myself pulled away. It was the short fat man.
I clamped my mouth shut, aware for the first time that the shrill sound was coming from my own throat. I saw the man’s face relax as he gave me a wry smile.
“That’s better,” he shouted into my ear. “He’s only a man. Remember that. He’s only a man!”
I wanted to tell him that Mr. Norton was much more than that, that he was a rich white man and in my charge; but the very idea that I was responsible for him was too much for me to put into words.
“Let us take him to the balcony,” the man said, pushing me toward Mr. Norton’s feet. I moved automatically, grasping the thin ankles as he raised the white man by the armpits and backed from beneath the stairs. Mr. Norton’s head lolled upon his chest as though he were drunk or dead.
The vet started up the steps still smiling, climbing backwards a step at a time. I had begun to worry about him, whether he was drunk like the rest, when I saw three of the girls who had been leaning over the balustrade watching the brawl come down to help us carry Mr. Norton up.
“Looks like pops couldn’t take it,” one of them shouted.
“He’s high as a Georgia pine.”
“Yeah, I tell you this stuff Halley got out here is too strong for white folks to drink.”
“Not drunk, ill!” the fat man said. “Go find a bed that’s not being used so he can stretch out awhile.”
“Sho, daddy. Is there any other little favors I can do for you?”
“That’ll be enough,” he said.
One of the girls ran up ahead. “Mine’s just been changed. Bring him down here,” she said.
In a few minutes Mr. Norton was lying upon a three-quarter bed, faintly breathing. I watched the fat man bend over him very professionally and feel for his pulse.
“You a doctor?” a girl asked.
“Not now, I’m a patient. But I have a certain knowledge.”
Another one, I thought, pushing him quickly aside. “He’ll be all right. Let him come to so I can get him out of here.”
“You needn’t worry, I’m not like those down there, young fellow,” he said. “I really was a doctor. I won’t hurt him. He’s had a mild shock of some kind.”
We watched him bend over Mr. Norton again, feeling his pulse, pulling back his eyelid.
“It’s a mild shock,” he repeated.
“This here Golden Day is enough to shock anybody,” a girl said, smoothing her apron over the smooth sensuous roll of her stomach.
Another brushed Mr. Norton’s white hair away from his forehead and stroked it, smiling vacantly. “He’s kinda cute,” she said. “Just like a little white baby.”
“What kinda ole baby?” the small skinny girl asked.
“That’s the kind, an ole baby.”
“You just like white men, Edna. That’s all,” the skinny one said.
Edna shook her head and smiled as though amused at herself. “I sho do. I just love ’em. Now this one, old as he is, he could put his shoes under my bed any night.”
“Shucks, me I’d kill an old man like that.”
“Kill him nothing,” Edna said. “Girl, don’t you know that all these rich ole white men got monkey glands and billy goat balls? These old bastards don’t never git enough. They want to have the whole world.”
The doctor looked at me and smiled. “See, now you’re learning all about endocrinology,” he said. “I was wrong when I told you that he was only a man; it seems now that he’s either part goat or part ape. Maybe he’s both.”
“It’s the truth,” Edna said. “I used to have me one in Chicago—”
“Now you ain’t never been to no Chicago, gal,” the other one interrupted.
“How you know I ain’t? Two years ago … Shucks, you don’t know nothing. That ole white man right there might have him a coupla jackass balls!”
The fat man raised up with a quick grin. “As a scientist and a physician I’m forced to discount that,” he said. “That is one operation that has yet to be performed.” Then he managed to get the girls out of the room.
“If he should come around and hear that conversation,” the vet said, “it would be enough to send him off again. Besides, their scientific curiosity might lead them to investigate whether he really does have a monkey gland. And that, I’m afraid, would be a bit obscene.”
“I’ve got to get him back to the school,” I said.
“All right,” he said, “I’ll do what I can to help you. Go see if you can find some ice. And don’t worry.”
I went out on the balcony, seeing the tops of their heads. They were still milling around, the juke box baying, the piano thumping, and over at the end of the room, drenched with beer, Supercargo lay like a spent horse upon the bar.
Starting down, I noticed a large piece of ice glinting in the remains of an abandoned drink and seized its coldness in my hot hand and hurried back to the room.
The vet sat staring at Mr. Norton, who now breathed with a slightly irregular sound.
“You were quick,” the man said, as he stood and reached for the ice. “Swift with the speed of anxiety,” he added, as if to himself. “Hand me that clean towel—there, from beside the basin.”
I handed him one, seeing him fold the ice inside it and apply it to Mr. Norton’s face.
“Is he all right?” I said.
“He will be in a few minutes. What happened to him?”
“I took him for a drive,” I said.
“Did you have an accident or something?”
“No,” I said. “He just talked to a farmer and the heat knocked him out … Then we got caught in the mob downstairs.”
“How old is he?”
“I don’t know, but he’s one of the trustees …”
“One of the very first, no doubt,” he said, dabbing at the blue-veined eyes. “A trustee of consciousness.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“Nothing … There now, he’s coming out of it.”
I had an impulse to run out of the room. I feared what Mr. Norton would say to me, the expression that might come into his eyes. And yet, I was afraid to leave. My eyes could not leave the face with its flickering lids. The head moved from side to side in the pale glow of the light bulb, as though denying some insistent voice which I could not hear. Then the lids opened, revealing pale pools of blue vagueness that finally solidified into points that froze upon the vet, who looked down unsmilingly.
Men like us did not look at a man like Mr. Norton in that manner, and I stepped hurriedly forward.
“He’s a real doctor, sir,” I said.
“I’ll explain,” the vet said. “Get a glass of water.”
I hesitated. He looked at me firmly. “Get the water,” he said, turning to help Mr. Norton to sit up.
Outside I asked Edna for a glass of water and she led me down the hall to a small kitchen, drawing it for me from a green old-fashioned cooler.
“I got some good liquor, baby, if you want to give him a drink,” she said.
“This will do,” I said. My hands trembled so that the water spilled. When I returned, Mr. Norton was sitting up unaided, carrying on a conversation with the vet.
“Here’s some water, sir,” I said, extending the glass.
He took it. “Thank you,” he said.
“Not too muc
“Your diagnosis is exactly that of my specialist,” Mr. Norton said, “and I went to several fine physicians before one could diagnose it. How did you know?”
“I too was a specialist,” the vet said.
“But how? Only a few men in the whole country possess the knowledge—”
“Then one of them is an inmate of a semi-madhouse,” the vet said. “But there’s nothing mysterious about it. I escaped for awhile—I went to France with the Army Medical Corps and remained there after the Armistice to study and practice.”
“Oh yes, and how long were you in France?” Mr. Norton asked.
“Long enough,” he said. “Long enough to forget some fundamentals which I should never have forgotten.”
“What fundamentals?” Mr. Norton said. “What do you mean?”
The vet smiled and cocked his head. “Things about life. Such things as most peasants and folk peoples almost always know through experience, though seldom through conscious thought …”
“Pardon me, sir,” I said to Mr. Norton, “but now that you feel better, shouldn’t we go?”
“Not just yet,” he said. Then to the doctor, “I’m very interested. What happened to you?” A drop of water caught in one of his eyebrows glittered like a chip of active diamond. I went over and sat on a chair. Damn this vet to hell!
“Are you sure you would like to hear?” the vet asked.
“Why, of course.”
“Then perhaps the young fellow should go downstairs and wait …”
The sound of shouting and destruction welled up from below as I opened the door.
“No, perhaps you should stay,” the fat man said. “Perhaps had I overheard some of what I’m about to tell you when I was a student up there on the hill, I wouldn’t be the casualty that I am.”
“Sit down, young man,” Mr. Norton ordered. “So you were a student at the college,” he said to the vet.
I sat down again, worrying about Dr. Bledsoe as the fat man told Mr. Norton of his attending college, then becoming a physician and going to France during the World War.
“Were you a successful physician?” Mr. Norton said.