Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Now it’s beginning, I thought. Now—
And suddenly he rushed forward. “Mr. Norton, your head!” he cried, a strange grandmotherly concern in his voice. “What happened, sir?”
“It’s nothing.” Mr. Norton’s face was immobile. “A mere scratch.”
Dr. Bledsoe whirled around, his face outraged. “Get the doctor over here,” he said. “Why didn’t you tell me that Mr. Norton had been injured?”
“I’ve already taken care of that, sir,” I said softly, seeing him whirl back.
“Mr. Norton, Mister Norton! I’m so sorry,” he crooned. “I thought I had sent you a boy who was careful, a sensible young man! Why we’ve never had an accident before. Never, not in seventy-five years. I assure you, sir, that he shall be disciplined, severely disciplined!”
“But there was no automobile accident,” Mr. Norton said kindly, “nor was the boy responsible. You may send him away, we won’t need him now.”
My eyes suddenly filled. I felt a wave of gratitude at his words.
“Don’t be kind, sir,” Dr. Bledsoe said. “You can’t be soft with these people. We mustn’t pamper them. An accident to a guest of this college while he is in the charge of a student is without question the student’s fault. That’s one of our strictest rules!” Then to me: “Return to your dormitory and remain there until further notice!”
“But it was out of my control, sir,” I said, “just as Mr. Norton said …”
“I’ll explain, young man,” Mr. Norton said with a half-smile. “Everything will be explained.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said, seeing Dr. Bledsoe looking at me with no change of expression.
“On second thought,” he said, “I want you to be in chapel this evening, understand me, sir?”
“Yes, sir.”
I opened the door with a cold hand, bumping into the girl who had been at the table when we went inside.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Look like you have old Bucket-head kind of mad.”
I said nothing as she walked beside me expectantly. A red sun cast its light upon the campus as I started for my dormitory.
“Will you take a message to my boy friend for me?” she said.
“Who is he?” I said, trying hard to conceal my tension and fear.
“Jack Maston,” she said.
“Okay, he’s in the room next to mine.”
“That’s swell,” she said with a big smile. “The dean put me on duty so I missed him this afternoon. Just tell him that I said the grass is green …”
“What?”
“The grass is green. It’s our secret code, he’ll understand.”
“The grass is green,” I said.
“That’s it. Thank you, lover,” she said.
I felt like cursing as I watched her hurrying back into the building, hearing her flat-heeled shoes crunching the graveled walk. Here she was playing with some silly secret code at the very minute my fate for the rest of my life was being decided. The grass was green and they’d meet and she’d be sent home pregnant, but even so, in less disgrace than I … If only I knew what they were saying about me … Suddenly I had an idea and ran after her, into the building and up the stairs.
In the hall, fine dust played in a shaft of sunlight, stirred by her hurried passing. But she had disappeared. I had thought to ask her to listen at the door and tell me what was said. I gave it up; if she were discovered, I’d have that on my conscience too. Besides, I was ashamed for anyone to know of my predicament, it was too stupid to be believed. Down the long length of the wide hall I heard someone unseen skipping down the stairs singing. A girl’s sweet, hopeful voice. I left quietly and hurried to my dorm.
I lay in my room with my eyes closed, trying to think. The tension gripped my insides. Then I heard someone coming up the hall and stiffened. Had they sent for me already? Nearby a door opened and closed, leaving me as tense as ever. To whom could I turn for help? I could think of no one. No one to whom I could even explain what had happened at the Golden Day. Everything was upset inside me. And Dr. Bledsoe’s attitude toward Mr. Norton was the most confusing of all. I dared not repeat what he’d said, for fear that it would lessen my chances of remaining in school. It just wasn’t true, I had misunderstood. He couldn’t have said what I thought he had said. Hadn’t I seen him approach white visitors too often with his hat in hand, bowing humbly and respectfully? Hadn’t he refused to eat in the dining hall with white guests of the school, entering only after they had finished and then refusing to sit down, but remaining standing, his hat in his hand, while he addressed them eloquently, then leaving with a humble bow? Hadn’t he, hadn’t he? I had seen him too often as I peeped through the door between the dining room and the kitchen, I myself. And wasn’t his favorite spiritual “Live-a-Humble”? And in the chapel on Sunday evenings upon the platform, hadn’t he always taught us to live content in our place in a thousand unambiguous words? He had and I had believed him. I had believed without question his illustrations of the good which came of following the Founder’s path. It was my affirmation of life and they couldn’t send me away for something I didn’t do. They simply couldn’t. But that vet! He was so crazy that he corrupted sane men. He had tried to turn the world inside out, goddamn him! He had made Mr. Norton angry. He had no right to talk to a white man as he had, not with me to take the punishment …
Someone shook me and I recoiled, my legs moist and trembling. It was my roommate.
“What the hell, roomy,” he said. “Let’s go to chow.”
I looked at his confident mug; he was going to be a farmer.
“I don’t have an appetite,” I said with a sigh.
“Okay now,” he said, “you can try to kid me but don’t say I didn’t wake you.”
“No,” I said.
“Who’re you expecting, a broad-butt gal with ball-bearing hips?”
“No,” I said.
“You’d better stop that, roomy,” he grinned. “It’ll ruin your health, make you a moron. You ought to take you a gal and show her how the moon rises over all that green grass on the Founder’s grave, man …”
“Go to hell,” I said.
He left laughing, opening the door to the sound of many footsteps from the hall: supper time. The sound of departing voices. Something of my life seemed to retreat with them into a gray distance, moiling. Then a knock sounded at the door and I sprang up, my heart tense.
A small student wearing a freshman’s cap stuck his head in the door, shouting, “Dr. Bledsoe said he wants to see you down at Rabb Hall.” And then he was gone before I could question him, his footsteps thundering down the hall as he raced to dinner before the last bell sounded.
AT MR. NORTON’S door I stopped with my hand on the knob, mumbling a prayer.
“Come in, young man,” he said to my knock. He was dressed in fresh linen, the light falling upon his white hair as upon silk floss. A small piece of gauze was plastered to his forehead. He was alone.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I apologized, “but I was told that Dr. Bledsoe wanted to see me here …”
“That’s correct,” he said, “but Dr. Bledsoe had to leave. You’ll find him in his office after chapel.”
“Thank you, sir,” I said and turned to go. He cleared his throat behind me. “Young man …”
I turned hopefully.
“Young man, I have explained to Dr. Bledsoe that you were not at fault. I believe he understands.”
I was so relieved that at first I could only look at him, a small silken-haired, white-suited St. Nicholas, seen through misty eyes.
“I certainly do thank you, sir,” I managed finally.
He studied me silently, his eyes slightly narrowed.
“Will you need me this evening, sir?” I asked.
“No, I won’t be needing the machine. Business is taking me away sooner than I expected. I leave late tonight.”
“I could drive you to the station, sir,” I said hopefully.
“Thank you, but Dr. Bledsoe
“Oh,” I said with disappointment. I had hoped that by serving him the rest of the week I could win back his esteem. Now I would not have the opportunity.
“Well, I hope you have a pleasant trip, sir,” I said.
“Thank you,” he said, suddenly smiling.
“And maybe next time you come I’ll be able to answer some of the questions you asked me this afternoon.”
“Questions?” His eyes narrowed.
“Yes, sir, about … about your fate,” I said.
“Ah, yes, yes,” he said.
“And I intend to read Emerson, too …”
“Very good. Self-reliance is a most worthy virtue. I shall look forward with the greatest of interest to learning your contribution to my fate.” He motioned me toward the door. “And don’t forget to see Dr. Bledsoe.”
I left somewhat reassured, but not completely. I still had to face Dr. Bledsoe. And I had to attend chapel.
Chapter five
At the sound of vespers
I moved across the campus with groups of students, walking slowly, their voices soft in the mellow dusk. I remember the yellowed globes of frosted glass making lacy silhouettes on the gravel and the walk of the leaves and branches above us as we moved slow through the dusk so restless with scents of lilac, honeysuckle and verbena, and the feel of spring greenness; and I recall the sudden arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass—gay-welling, far-floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells. Dong! Dong! Dong! Above the decorous walking around me, sounds of footsteps leaving the verandas of far-flung buildings and moving toward the walks and over the walks to the asphalt drives lined with whitewashed stones, those cryptic messages for men and women, boys and girls heading quietly toward where the visitors waited, and we moving not in the mood of worship but of judgment; as though even here in the filtering dusk, here beneath the deep indigo sky, here, alive with looping swifts and darting moths, here in the hereness of the night not yet lighted by the moon that looms blood-red behind the chapel like a fallen sun, its radiance shedding not upon the here-dusk of twittering bats, nor on the there-night of cricket and whippoorwill, but focused short-rayed upon our place of convergence; and we drifting forward with rigid motions, limbs stiff and voices now silent, as though on exhibit even in the dark, and the moon a white man’s bloodshot eye.
And I move more rigid than all the others with a sense of judgment; the vibrations of the chapel bells stirring the depths of my turmoil, moving toward its nexus with a sense of doom. And I remember the chapel with its sweeping eaves, long and low as though risen bloody from the earth like the rising moon; vine-covered and earth-colored as though more earth-sprung than man-sprung. And my mind rushing for relief away from the spring dusk and flower scents, away from the time-scene of the crucifixion to the time-mood of the birth; from spring-dusk and vespers to the high, clear, lucid moon of winter and snow glinting upon the dwarfed pines where instead of the bells, the organ and the trombone choir speak carols to the distances drifted with snow, making of the night air a sea of crystal water lapping the slumbering land to the farthest reaches of sound, for endless miles, bringing the new dispensation even to the Golden Day, even unto the house of madness. But in the hereness of dusk I am moving toward the doomlike bells through the flowered air, beneath the rising moon.
Into the doors and into the soft lights I go, silently, past the rows of puritanical benches straight and torturous, finding that to which I am assigned and bending my body to its agony. There at the head of the platform with its pulpit and rail of polished brass are the banked and pyramided heads of the student choir, faces composed and stolid above uniforms of black and white; and above them, stretching to the ceiling, the organ pipes looming, a gothic hierarchy of dull gilded gold.
Around me the students move with faces frozen in solemn masks, and I seem to hear already the voices mechanically raised in the songs the visitors loved. (Loved? Demanded. Sung? An ultimatum accepted and ritualized, an allegiance recited for the peace it imparted, and for that perhaps loved. Loved as the defeated come to love the symbols of their conquerors. A gesture of acceptance, of terms laid down and reluctantly approved.) And here, sitting rigid, I remember the evenings spent before the sweeping platform in awe and in pleasure, and in the pleasure of awe; remember the short formal sermons intoned from the pulpit there, rendered in smooth articulate tones, with calm assurance purged of that wild emotion of the crude preachers most of us knew in our home towns and of whom we were deeply ashamed, these logical appeals which reached us more like the thrust of a firm and formal design requiring nothing more than the lucidity of uncluttered periods, the lulling movement of multisyllabic words to thrill and console us. And I remember, too, the talks of visiting speakers, all eager to inform us of how fortunate we were to be a part of the “vast” and formal ritual. How fortunate to belong to this family sheltered from those lost in ignorance and darkness.
Here upon this stage the black rite of Horatio Alger was performed to God’s own acting script, with millionaires come down to portray themselves; not merely acting out the myth of their goodness, and wealth and success and power and benevolence and authority in cardboard masks, but themselves, these virtues concretely! Not the wafer and the wine, but the flesh and the blood, vibrant and alive, and vibrant even when stooped, ancient and withered. (And who, in face of this, would not believe? Could even doubt?)
And I remember too, how we confronted chose others, those who had set me here in this Eden, whom we knew though we didn’t know, who were unfamiliar in their familiarity, who trailed their words to us through blood and violence and ridicule and condescension with drawling smiles, and who exhorted and threatened, intimidated with innocent words as they described to us the limitations of our lives and the vast boldness of our aspirations, the staggering folly of our impatience to rise even higher; who, as they talked, aroused furtive visions within me of blood-froth sparkling their chins like their familiar tobacco juice, and upon their lips the curdled milk of a million black slave mammies’ withered dugs, a treacherous and fluid knowledge of our being, imbibed at our source and now regurgitated foul upon us. This was our world, they said as they described it to us, this our horizon and its earth, its seasons and its climate, its spring and its summer, and its fall and harvest some unknown millennium ahead; and these its floods and cyclones and they themselves our thunder and lightning; and this we must accept and love and accept even if we did not love. We must accept—even when those were absent, and the men who made the railroads and ships and towers of stone, were before our eyes, in the flesh, their voices different, unweighted with recognizable danger and their delight in our songs more sincere seeming, their regard for our welfare marked by an almost benign and impersonal indifference. But the words of the others were stronger than the strength of philanthropic dollars, deeper than shafts sunk in the earth for oil and gold, more awe-inspiring than the miracles fabricated in scientific laboratories. For their most innocent words were acts of violence to which we of the campus were hypersensitive though we endured them not.
And there on the platform I too had stridden and debated, a student leader directing my voice at the highest beams and farthest rafters, ringing them, the accents staccato upon the ridgepole and echoing back with a tinkling, like words hurled to the trees of a wilderness, or into a well of slate-gray water; more sound than sense, a play upon the resonances of buildings, an assault upon the temples of the ear:
Ha! to the gray-haired matron in the final row. Ha! Miss Susie, Miss Susie Gresham, back there looking at that co-ed smiling at that he-ed—listen to me, the bungling bugler of words, imitating the trumpet and the trombone’s timbre, playing thematic variations like a baritone horn. Hey! old connoisseur of voice sounds, of voices without messages, of newsless winds, listen to the vowel so