Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
“But I don’t understand …”
“Shut up and git!”
“But, Mr. Brockway,” I cried, fighting to hold something that was giving way.
“You two-bit, trouble-making union louse!”
“Look, man,” I cried, urgently now, “I don’t belong to any union.”
“If you don’t git outta here, you low-down skunk,” he said, looking wildly about the floor, “I’m liable to kill you. The Lord being my witness, I’LL KILL YOU!”
It was incredible, things were speeding up. “You’ll do what?” I stammered.
“I’LL KILL YOU, THAT’S WHAT!”
He had said it again and something fell away from me, and I seemed to be telling myself in a rush: You were trained to accept the foolishness of such old men as this, even when you thought them clowns and fools; you were trained to pretend that you respected them and acknowledged in them the same quality of authority and power in your world as the whites before whom they bowed and scraped and feared and loved and imitated, and you were even trained to accept it when, angered or spiteful, or drunk with power, they came at you with a stick or strap or cane and you made no effort to strike back, but only to escape unmarked. But this was too much … he was not grandfather or uncle or father, nor preacher or teacher. Something uncoiled in my stomach and I was moving toward him, shouting, more at a black blur that irritated my eyes than at a clearly defined human face, “YOU’LL KILL WHO?”
“YOU, THAT’S WHO!”
“Listen here, you old fool, don’t talk about killing me! Give me a chance to explain. I don’t belong to anything—Go on, pick it up! Go on!” I yelled, seeing his eyes fasten upon a twisted iron bar. “You’re old enough to be my grandfather, but if you touch that bar, I swear I’ll make you eat it!”
“I done tole you, GIT OUTTA MY BASEMENT! You impudent son ’bitch,” he screamed.
I moved forward, seeing him stoop and reach aside for the bar; and I was throwing myself forward, feeling him go over with a grunt, hard against the floor, rolling beneath the force of my lunge. It was as though I had landed upon a wiry rat. He scrambled beneath me, making angry sounds and striking my face as he tried to use the bar. I twisted it from his grasp, feeling a sharp pain stab through my shoulder. He’s using a knife, flashed through my mind and I slashed out with my elbow, sharp against his face, feeling it land solid and seeing his head fly backwards and up and back again as I struck again, hearing something fly free and skitter across the floor, thinking, It’s gone, the knife is gone … and struck again as he tried to choke me, jabbing at his bobbing head, feeling the bar come free and bringing it down at his head, missing, the metal clinking against the floor, and bringing it up for a second try and him yelling, “No, no! You the best, you the best!”
“I’m going to beat your brains out!” I said, my throat dry, “stabbing me …”
“No,” he panted. “I got enough. Ain’t you heard me say I got enough?”
“So when you can’t win you want to stop! Damn you, if you’ve cut me bad, I’ll tear your head off!”
Watching him warily, I got to my feet. I dropped the bar, as a flash of heat swept over me: His face was caved in.
“What’s wrong with you, old man?” I yelled nervously. “Don’t you know better than to attack a man a third your age?”
He blanched at being called old, and I repeated it, adding insults I’d heard my grandfather use. “Why, you old-fashioned, slavery-time, mammy-made, handkerchief-headed bastard, you should know better! What made you think you could threaten my life? You meant nothing to me, I came down here because I was sent. I didn’t know anything about you or the union either. Why’d you start riding me the minute I came in? Are you people crazy? Does this paint go to your head? Are you drinking it?”
He glared, panting tiredly. Great tucks showed in his overalls where the folds were stuck together by the goo with which he was covered, and I thought, Tar Baby, and wanted to blot him out of my sight. But now my anger was flowing fast from action to words.
“I go to get my lunch and they ask me who I work for and when I tell them, they call me a fink. A fink! You people must be out of your minds. No sooner do I get back down here than you start yelling that you’re going to kill me! What’s going on? What have you got against me? What did I do?”
He glowered at me silently, then pointed to the floor.
“Reach and draw back a nub,” I warned.
“Caint a man even git his teeth?” he mumbled, his voice strange.
“TEETH?”
With a shamed frown, he opened his mouth. I saw a blue flash of shrunken gums. The thing that had skittered across the floor was not a knife, but a plate of false teeth. For a fraction of a second I was desperate, feeling some of my justification for wanting to kill him slipping away. My fingers leaped to my shoulder, finding wet cloth but no blood. The old fool had bitten me. A wild flash of laughter struggled to rise from beneath my anger. He had bitten me! I looked on the floor, seeing the smashed mug and the teeth glinting dully across the room.
“Get them,” I said, growing ashamed. Without his teeth, some of the hatefulness seemed to have gone out of him. But I stayed close as he got his teeth and went over to the tap and held them beneath a stream of water. A tooth fell away beneath the pressure of his thumb, and I heard him grumbling as he placed the plate in his mouth. Then, wiggling his chin, he became himself again.
“You was really trying to kill me,” he said. He seemed unable to believe it.
“You started the killing. I don’t go around fighting,” I said. “Why didn’t you let me explain? Is it against the law to belong to the union?”
“That damn union,” he cried, almost in tears. “That damn union! They after my job! I know they after my job! For one of us to join one of them damn unions is like we was to bite the hand of the man who teached us to bathe in a bathtub! I hates it, and I mean to keep on doing all I can to chase it outta the plant. They after my job, the chickenshit bastards!”
Spittle formed at the corners of his mouth; he seemed to boil with hatred.
“But what have I to do with that?” I said, feeling suddenly the older.
. “ ’Cause them young colored fellers up in the lab is trying to join that outfit, that’s what! Here the white man done give ’em jobs,” he wheezed as though pleading a case. “He done give ’em good jobs too, and they so ungrateful they goes and joins up with that backbiting union! I never seen such a no-good ungrateful bunch. All they doing is making things bad for the rest of us!”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know about all that. I came here to take a temporary job and I certainly didn’t intend to get mixed up in any quarrels. But as for us, I’m ready to forget our disagreement—if you are …” I held out my hand, causing my shoulder to pain.
He gave me a gruff look. “You ought to have more self-respect than to fight an old man,” he said. “I got grown boys older than you.”
“I thought you were trying to kill me,” I said, my hand still extended. “I thought you had stabbed me.”
“Well, I don’t like a lot of bickering and confusion myself,” he said, avoiding my eyes. And it was as though the closing of his sticky hand over mine was a signal. I heard a shrill hissing from the boilers behind me and turned, hearing Brockway yell, “I tole you to watch them gauges. Git over to the big valves, quick!”
I dashed for where a series of valve wheels projected from the wall near the crusher, seeing Brockway scrambling away in the other direction, thinking, Where’s he going? as I reached the valves, and hearing him yell, “Turn it! Turn it!”
“Which?” I yelled, reaching.
“The white one, fool, the white one!”
I jumped, catching it and pulling down with all my weight, feeling it give. But this only increased the noise and I seemed to hear Brockway laugh as I looked around to see him scrambling for the stairs, his hands clasping the back of his head, and his neck pulled in close, like a small boy who ha
“Hey you! Hey you!” I yelled. “Hey!” But it was too late. All my movements seemed too slow, ran together. I felt the wheel resisting and tried vainly to reverse it and tried to let go, and it sticking to my palms and my fingers stiff and sticky, and I turned, running now, seeing the needle on one of the gauges swinging madly, like a beacon gone out of control, and trying to think clearly, my eyes darting here and there through the room of tanks and machines and up the stairs so far away and hearing the clear new note arising while I seemed to run swiftly up an incline and shot forward with sudden acceleration into a wet blast of black emptiness that was somehow a bath of whiteness.
It was a fall into space that seemed not a fall but a suspension. Then a great weight landed upon me and I seemed to sprawl in an interval of clarity beneath a pile of broken machinery, my head pressed back against a huge wheel, my body splattered with a stinking goo. Somewhere an engine ground in furious futility, grating loudly until a pain shot around the curve of my head and bounced me off into blackness for a distance, only to strike another pain that lobbed me back. And in that clear instant of consciousness I opened my eyes to a blinding flash.
Holding on grimly, I could hear the sound of someone wading, sloshing, nearby, and an old mans garrulous voice saying, “I tole ’em these here young Nineteen-Hundred boys ain’t no good for the job. They ain’t got the nerves. Naw, sir, they just ain’t got the nerves.”
I tried to speak, to answer, but something heavy moved again, and I was understanding something fully and trying again to answer but seemed to sink to the center of a lake of heavy water and pause, transfixed and numb with the sense that I had lost irrevocably an important victory.
Chapter eleven
I was sitting in a
cold, white rigid chair and a man was looking at me out of a bright third eye that glowed from the center of his forehead. He reached out, touching my skull gingerly, and said something encouraging, as though I were a child. His fingers went away.
“Take this,” he said. “It’s good for you.” I swallowed. Suddenly my skin itched, all over. I had on new overalls, strange white ones. The taste ran bitter through my mouth. My fingers trembled.
A thin voice with a mirror on the end of it said, “How is he?”
“I don’t think it’s anything serious. Merely stunned.”
“Should he be sent home now?”
“No, just to be certain we’ll keep him here a few days. Want to keep him under observation. Then he may leave.”
Now I was lying on a cot, the bright eye still burning into mine, although the man was gone. It was quiet and I was numb. I closed my eyes only to be awakened.
“What is your name?” a voice said.
“My head …” I said.
“Yes, but your name. Address?”
“My head—that burning eye …” I said.
“Eye?”
“Inside,” I said.
“Shoot him up for an X-ray,” another voice said.
“My head …”
“Careful!”
Somewhere a machine began to hum and I distrusted the man and woman above me.
They were holding me firm and it was fiery and above it all I kept hearing the opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth—three short and one long buzz, repeated again and again in varying volume, and I was struggling and breaking through, rising up, to find myself lying on my back with two pink-faced men laughing down.
“Be quiet now,” one of them said firmly. “You’ll be all right.” I raised my eyes, seeing two indefinite young women in white, looking down at me. A third, a desert of heat waves away, sat at a panel arrayed with coils and dials. Where was I? From far below me a barber-chair thumping began and I felt myself rise on the tip of the sound from the floor. A face was now level with mine, looking closely and saying something without meaning. A whirring began that snapped and cracked with static, and suddenly I seemed to be crushed between the floor and ceiling. Two forces tore savagely at my stomach and back. A flash of cold-edged heat enclosed me. I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player’s hands. My lungs were compressed like a bellows and each time my breath returned I yelled, punctuating the rhythmical action of the nodes.
“Hush, goddamit,” one of the faces ordered. “We’re trying to get you started again. Now shut up!”
The voice throbbed with icy authority and I quieted and tried to contain the pain. I discovered now that my head was encircled by a piece of cold metal like the iron cap worn by the occupant of an electric chair. I tried unsuccessfully to struggle, to cry out. But the people were so remote, the pain so immediate. A face moved in and out of the circle of lights, peering for a moment, then disappeared. A freckled, red-haired woman with gold nose-glasses appeared; then a man with a circular mirror attached to his forehead—a doctor. Yes, he was a doctor and the women were nurses; it was coming clear. I was in a hospital. They would care for me. It was all geared toward the easing of pain. I felt thankful.
I tried to remember how I’d gotten here, but nothing came. My mind was blank, as though I had just begun to live. When the next face appeared I saw the eyes behind the thick glasses blinking as though noticing me for the first time.
“You’re all right, boy. You’re okay. You just be patient,” said the voice, hollow with profound detachment.
I seemed to go away; the lights receded like a tail-light racing down a dark country road. I couldn’t follow. A sharp pain stabbed my shoulder. I twisted about on my back, fighting something I couldn’t see. Then after a while my vision cleared.
Now a man sitting with his back to me, manipulating dials on a panel. I wanted to call him, but the Fifth Symphony rhythm racked me, and he seemed too serene and too far away. Bright metal bars were between us and when I strained my neck around I discovered that I was not lying on an operating table but in a kind of glass and nickel box, the lid of which was propped open. Why was I here?
“Doctor! Doctor!” I called.
No answer. Perhaps he hadn’t heard, I thought, calling again and feeling the stabbing pulses of the machine again and feeling myself going under and fighting against it and coming up to hear voices carrying on a conversation behind my head. The static sounds became a quiet drone. Strains of music, a Sunday air, drifted from a distance. With closed eyes, barely breathing, I warded off the pain. The voices droned harmoniously. Was it a radio I heard—a phonograph? The vox humana of a hidden organ? If so, what organ and where? I felt warm. Green hedges, dazzling with red wild roses appeared behind my eyes, stretching with a gentle curving to an infinity empty of objects, a limpid blue space. Scenes of a shaded lawn in summer drifted past; I saw a uniformed military band arrayed decorously in concert, each musician with well-oiled hair, heard a sweet-voiced trumpet rendering “The Holy City” as from an echoing distance, buoyed by a choir of muted horns; and above, the mocking obligato of a mocking bird. I felt giddy. The air seemed to grow thick with fine white gnats, filling my eyes, boiling so thickly that the dark trumpeter breathed them in and expelled them through the bell of his golden horn, a live white cloud mixing with the tones upon the torpid air.
I came back. The voices still droned above me and I disliked them. Why didn’t they go away? Smug ones. Oh, doctor, I thought drowsily, did you ever wade in a brook before breakfast? Ever chew on sugar cane? You know, doc, the same fall day I first saw the hounds chasing black men in stripes and chains my grandmother sat with me and sang with twinkling eyes:
“Godamighty made a monkey
Godamighty made a whale
And Godamighty made a ’gator
With hickeys all over his tail…”
Or you, nurse, did you know that when you strolled in pink organdy and picture hat between the rows of cape jasmine, cooing to your beau in a drawl as thick as sorghum, we little black boys hidden snug in the bushes called out so loud that you daren’t hear:
“Did you eve
Man, she hisses a wonderful stream,
Seventeen miles and a quarter,
Man, and you can’t see her pot for the steam …”
But now the music became a distinct wail of female pain. I opened my eyes. Glass and metal floated above me.
“How are you feeling, boy?” a voice said.
A pair of eyes peered down through lenses as thick as the bottom of a Coca-Cola bottle, eyes protruding, luminous and veined, like an old biology specimen preserved in alcohol.
“I don’t have enough room,” I said angrily.
“Oh, that’s a necessary part of the treatment.”
“But I need more room,” I insisted. “I’m cramped.”
“Don’t worry about it, boy. You’ll get used to it after a while. How is your stomach and head?”
“Stomach?”
“Yes, and your head?”
“I don’t know,” I said, realizing that I could feel nothing beyond the pressure around my head and on the tender surface of my body. Yet my senses seemed to focus sharply.
“I don’t feel it,” I cried, alarmed.
“Aha! You see! My little gadget will solve everything!” he exploded.
“I don’t know,” another voice said. “I think I still prefer surgery. And in this case especially, with this, uh … background, I’m not so sure that I don’t believe in the effectiveness of simple prayer.”
“Nonsense, from now on do your praying to my little machine. I’ll deliver the cure.”
“I don’t know, but I believe it a mistake to assume that solutions—cures, that is—that apply in, uh … primitive instances, are, uh … equally effective when more advanced conditions are in question. Suppose it were a New Englander with a Harvard background?”
“Now you’re arguing politics,” the first voice said banteringly.
“Oh, no, but it is a problem.”
I listened with growing uneasiness to the conversation fuzzing away to a whisper. Their simplest words seemed to refer to something else, as did many of the notions that unfurled through my head. I wasn’t sure whether they were talking about me or someone else. Some of it sounded like a discussion of history …