Invisible Man

by Ralph Ellison

  “It’s early to go in for the next session,” he said. “Suppose you just drive. Anywhere you like.”

  “Have you seen all the campus, sir?”

  “Yes, I think so. I was one of the original founders, you know.”

  “Gee! I didn’t know that, sir. Then I’ll have to try some of the roads.”

  Of course I knew he was a founder, but I knew also that it was advantageous to flatter rich white folks. Perhaps he’d give me a large tip, or a suit, or a scholarship next year.

  “Anywhere else you like. The campus is part of my life and I know my life rather well.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He was still smiling.

  In a moment the green campus with its vine-covered buildings was behind us. The car bounded over the road. How was the campus part of his life, I wondered. And how did one learn his life “rather well”?

  “Young man, you’re part of a wonderful institution. It is a great dream become reality …”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I feel as lucky to be connected with it as you no doubt do yourself. I came here years ago, when all your beautiful campus was barren ground. There were no trees, no flowers, no fertile farmland. That was years ago before you were born …”

  I listened with fascination, my eyes glued to the white line dividing the highway as my thoughts attempted to sweep back to the times of which he spoke.

  “Even your parents were young. Slavery was just recently past. Your people did not know in what direction to turn and, I must confess, many of mine didn’t know in what direction they should turn either. But your great Founder did. He was my friend and I believed in his vision. So much so, that sometimes I don’t know whether it was his vision or mine …”

  He chuckled softly, wrinkles forming at the corners of his eyes.

  “But of course it was his; I only assisted. I came down with him to see the barren land and did what I could to render assistance. And it has been my pleasant fate to return each spring and observe the changes that the years have wrought. That has been more pleasant and satisfying to me than my own work. It has been a pleasant fate, indeed.”

  His voice was mellow and loaded with more meaning than I could fathom. As I drove, faded and yellowed pictures of the school’s early days displayed in the library flashed across the screen of my mind, coming fitfully and fragmentarily to life—photographs of men and women in wagons drawn by mule teams and oxen, dressed in black, dusty clothing, people who seemed almost without individuality, a black mob that seemed to be waiting, looking with blank faces, and among them the inevitable collection of white men and women in smiles, clear of features, striking, elegant and confident. Until now, and although I could recognize the Founder and Dr. Bledsoe among them, the figures in the photographs had never seemed actually to have been alive, but were more like signs or symbols one found on the last pages of the dictionary … But now I felt that I was sharing in a great work and, with the car leaping leisurely beneath the pressure of my foot, I identified myself with the rich man reminiscing on the rear seat …

  “A pleasant fate,” he repeated, “and I hope yours will be as pleasant.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” I said, pleased that he wished something pleasant for me.

  But at the same time I was puzzled: How could anyone’s fate be pleasant? I had always thought of it as something painful. No one I knew spoke of it as pleasant—not even Woodridge, who made us read Greek plays.

  We were beyond the farthest extension of the school-owned lands now and I suddenly decided to turn off the highway, down a road that seemed unfamiliar. There were no trees and the air was brilliant. Far down the road the sun glared cruelly against a tin sign nailed to a barn. A lone figure bending over a hoe on the hillside raised up wearily and waved, more a shadow against the skyline than a man.

  “How far have we come?” I heard over my shoulder.

  “Just about a mile, sir.”

  “I don’t remember this section,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. I was thinking of the first person who’d mentioned anything like fate in my presence, my grandfather. There had been nothing pleasant about it and I had tried to forget it. Now, riding here in the powerful car with this white man who was so pleased with what he called his fate, I felt a sense of dread. My grandfather would have called this treachery and I could not understand in just what way it was. Suddenly I grew guilty at the realization that the white man might have thought so too. What would he have thought? Did he know that Negroes like my grandfather had been freed during those days just before the college had been founded?

  As we came to a side road I saw a team of oxen hitched to a broken-down wagon, the ragged driver dozing on the seat beneath the shade of a clump of trees.

  “Did you see that, sir?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “What was it?”

  “The ox team, sir.”

  “Oh! No, I can’t see it for the trees,” he said looking back. “It’s good timber.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. Shall I turn back?”

  “No, it isn’t much,” he said. “Go on.”

  I drove on, remembering the lean, hungry face of the sleeping man. He was the kind of white man I feared. The brown fields swept out to the horizon. A flock of birds dipped down, circled, swung up and out as though linked by invisible strings. Waves of heat danced above the engine hood. The tires sang over the highway. Finally I overcame my timidity and asked him:

  “Sir, why did you become interested in the school?”

  “I think,” he said, thoughtfully, raising his voice, “it was because I felt even as a young man that your people were somehow closely connected with my destiny. Do you understand?”

  “Not so clearly, sir,” I said, ashamed to admit it.

  “You have studied Emerson, haven’t you?”

  “Emerson, sir?”

  “Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

  I was embarrassed because I hadn’t. “Not yet, sir. We haven’t come to him yet.”

  “No?” he said with a note of surprise. “Well, never mind. I am a New Englander, like Emerson. You must learn about him, for he was important to your people. He had a hand in your destiny. Yes, perhaps that is what I mean. I had a feeling that your people were somehow connected with my destiny. That what happened to you was connected with what would happen to me …”

  I slowed the car, trying to understand. Through the glass I saw him gazing at the long ash of his cigar, holding it delicately in his slender, manicured fingers.

  “Yes, you are my fate, young man. Only you can tell me what it really is. Do you understand?”

  “I think I do, sir.”

  “I mean that upon you depends the outcome of the years I have spent in helping your school. That has been my real life’s work, not my banking or my researches, but my firsthand organizing of human life.”

  I saw him now, leaning toward the front seat, speaking with an intensity which had not been there before. It was hard not to turn my eyes from the highway and face him.

  “There is another reason, a reason more important, more passionate and yes, even more sacred than all the others,” he said, no longer seeming to see me, but speaking to himself alone. “Yes, even more sacred than all the others. A girl, my daughter. She was a being more rare, more beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. I could never believe her to be my own flesh and blood. Her beauty was a well-spring of purest water-of-life, and to look upon her was to drink and drink and drink again … She was rare, a perfect creation, a work of purest art. A delicate flower that bloomed in the liquid light of the moon. A nature not of this world, a personality like that of some biblical maiden, gracious and queenly. I found it difficult to believe her my own …”

  Suddenly he fumbled in his vest pocket and thrust something over the back of the seat, surprising me.

  “Here, young man, you owe much of your good fortune in attending such a school to her.”

&n
bsp; I looked upon the tinted miniature framed in engraved platinum. I almost dropped it. A young woman of delicate, dreamy features looked up at me. She was very beautiful, I thought at the time, so beautiful that I did not know whether I should express admiration to the extent I felt it or merely act polite. And yet I seemed to remember her, or someone like her, in the past. I know now that it was the flowing costume of soft, flimsy material that made for the effect; today, dressed in one of the smart, well-tailored, angular, sterile, streamlined, engine-turned, air-conditioned modern outfits you see in the women’s magazines, she would appear as ordinary as an expensive piece of machine-tooled jewelry and just as lifeless. Then, however, I shared something of his enthusiasm.

  “She was too pure for life,” he said sadly; “too pure and too good and too beautiful. We were sailing together, touring the world, just she and I, when she became ill in Italy. I thought little of it at the time and we continued across the Alps. When we reached Munich she was already fading away. While we were attending an embassy party she collapsed. The best medical science in the world could not save her. It was a lonely return, a bitter voyage. I have never recovered. I have never forgiven myself. Everything I’ve done since her passing has been a monument to her memory.”

  He became silent, looking with his blue eyes far beyond the field stretching away in the sun. I returned the miniature, wondering what in the world had made him open his heart to me. That was something I never did; it was dangerous. First, it was dangerous if you felt like that about anything, because then you’d never get it or something or someone would take it away from you; then it was dangerous because nobody would understand you and they’d only laugh and think you were crazy.

  “So you see, young man, you are involved in my life quite intimately, even though you’ve never seen me before. You are bound to a great dream and to a beautiful monument. If you become a good farmer, a chef, a preacher, doctor, singer, mechanic—whatever you become, and even if you fail, you are my fate. And you must write me and tell me the outcome.”

  I was relieved to see him smiling through the mirror. My feelings were mixed. Was he kidding me? Was he talking to me like someone in a book just to see how I would take it? Or could it be, I was almost afraid to think, that this rich man was just the tiniest bit crazy? How could I tell him his fate? He raised his head and our eyes met for an instant in the glass, then I lowered mine to the blazing white line that divided the highway.

  The trees along the road were thick and tall. We took a curve. Flocks of quail sailed up and over a field, brown, brown, sailing down, blending.

  “Will you promise to tell me my fate?” I heard.

  “Sir?”

  “Will you?”

  “Right now, sir?” I asked with embarrassment.

  “It is up to you. Now, if you like.”

  I was silent. His voice was serious, demanding. I could think of no reply. The motor purred. An insect crushed itself against the windshield, leaving a yellow, mucous smear.

  “I don’t know now, sir. This is only my junior year …”

  “But you’ll tell me when you know?”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  “Good.”

  When I took a quick glance into the mirror he was smiling again. I wanted to ask him if being rich and famous and helping to direct the school to become what it was, wasn’t enough; but I was afraid.

  “What do you think of my idea, young man?” he said.

  “I don’t know, sir. I only think that you have what you’re looking for. Because if I fail or leave school, it doesn’t seem to me it would be your fault. Because you helped make the school what it is.”

  “And you think that enough?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s what the president tells us. You have yours, and you got it yourself, and we have to lift ourselves up the same way.”

  “But that’s only part of it, young man. I have wealth and a reputation and prestige—all that is true. But your great Founder had more than that, he had tens of thousands of lives dependent upon his ideas and upon his actions. What he did affected your whole race. In a way, he had the power of a king, or in a sense, of a god. That, I’ve come to believe, is more important than my own work, because more depends upon you. You are important because if you fail I have failed by one individual, one defective cog; it didn’t matter so much before, but now I’m growing old and it has become very important …”

  But you don’t even know my name, I thought, wondering what it was all about.

  “… I suppose it is difficult for you to understand how this concerns me. But as you develop you must remember that I am dependent upon you to learn my fate. Through you and your fellow students I become, let us say, three hundred teachers, seven hundred trained mechanics, eight hundred skilled farmers, and so on. That way I can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested. I also construct a living memorial to my daughter. Understand? I can see the fruits produced by the land that your great Founder has transformed from barren clay to fertile soil.”

  His voice ceased and I saw the strands of pale blue smoke drifting across the mirror and heard the electric lighter snap back on its cable into place behind the back of the seat.

  “I think I understand you better, now, sir,” I said.

  “Very good, my boy.”

  “Shall I continue in this direction, sir?”

  “By all means,” he said, looking out at the countryside. “I’ve never seen this section before. It’s new territory for me.”

  Half-consciously I followed the white line as I drove, thinking about what he had said. Then as we took a hill we were swept by a wave of scorching air and it was as though we were approaching a desert. It almost took my breath away and I leaned over and switched on the fan, hearing its sudden whirr.

  “Thank you,” he said as a slight breeze filled the car.

  We were passing a collection of shacks and log cabins now, bleached white and warped by the weather. Sun-tortured shingles lay on the roofs like decks of water-soaked cards spread out to dry. The houses consisted of two square rooms joined together by a common floor and roof with a porch in between. As we passed we could look through to the fields beyond. I stopped the car at his excited command in front of a house set off from the rest.

  “Is that a log cabin?”

  It was an old cabin with its chinks filled with chalk-white clay, with bright new shingles patching its roof. Suddenly I was sorry that I had blundered down this road. I recognized the place as soon as I saw the group of children in stiff new overalls who played near a rickety fence.

  “Yes, sir. It is a log cabin,” I said.

  It was the cabin of Jim Trueblood, a sharecropper who had brought disgrace upon the black community. Several months before he had caused quite a bit of outrage up at the school, and now his name was never mentioned above a whisper. Even before that he had seldom come near the campus but had been well liked as a hard worker who took good care of his family’s needs, and as one who told the old stories with a sense of humor and a magic that made them come alive. He was also a good tenor singer, and sometimes when special white guests visited the school he was brought up along with the members of a country quartet to sing what the officials called “their primitive spirituals” when we assembled in the chapel on Sunday evenings. We were embarrassed by the earthy harmonies they sang, but since the visitors were awed we dared not laugh at the crude, high, plaintively animal sounds Jim Trueblood made as he led the quartet. That had all passed now with his disgrace, and what on the part of the school officials had been an attitude of contempt blunted by tolerance, had now become a contempt sharpened by hate. I didn’t understand in those pre-invisible days that their hate, and mine too, was charged with fear. How all of us at the college hated the black-belt people, the “peasants,” during those days! We were trying to lift them up and they, like Trueblood, did everything it seemed to pull us down.

  “It appears
quite old,” Mr. Norton said, looking across the bare, hard stretch of yard where two women dressed in new blue-and-white checked ginghams were washing clothes in an iron pot. The pot was soot-black and the feeble flames that licked its sides showed pale pink and bordered with black, like flames in mourning. Both women moved with the weary, full-fronted motions of far-gone pregnancy.

  “It is, sir,” I said. “That one and the other two like it were built during slavery times.”

  “You don’t say! I would never have believed that they were so enduring. Since slavery times!”

  “That’s true, sir. And the white family that owned the land when it was a big plantation still lives in town.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I know that many of the old families still survive. And individuals too, the human stock goes on, even though it degenerates. But these cabins!” He seemed surprised and confounded.

  “Do you suppose those women know anything about the age and history of the place? The older one looks as though she might.”

  “I doubt it, sir. They—they don’t seem very bright.”

  “Bright?” he said, removing his cigar. “You mean that they wouldn’t talk with me?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Yes, sir. That’s it.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t want to explain. It made me feel ashamed, but he sensed that I knew something and pressed me.

  “It’s not very nice, sir. But I don’t think those women would talk to us.”

  “We can explain that we’re from the school. Surely they’ll talk then. You may tell them who I am.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, “but they hate us up at the school. They never come there …”

  “What!”

  “No, sir.”

  “And those children along the fence down there?”

  “They don’t either, sir.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t really know, sir. Quite a few folks out this way don’t, though. I guess they’re too ignorant. They’re not interested.”

  “But I can’t believe it.”

  The children had stopped playing and now looked silently at the car, their arms behind their backs and their new oversized overalls pulled tight over their little pot bellies as though they too were pregnant.