Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “What do you think I am?”

  “A minister, I suppose. I don’t know.”

  “That’s right, you won’t take my word that I’m a man of God, so you don’t know who and you don’t know what. —But still you think you can just break into this thing and get answers simply by asking a question. Is that how you people who work for newspapers think?”

  Suddenly he dropped his arms to his sides. “Boy, I’m on my bended knees! Don’t that mean anything to you?”

  I nodded. “But there are questions that—”

  “What on earth has your life taught you?” Hickman said. “What has it prepared you to understand, or to respect? You really think that all you have to do is to come at me like I was a book in the public library—when you don’t know the right questions to ask or how to go about asking them? Man, if you don’t have manners, at least use some intelligence!”

  “But it’s not for me,” I said. “I’m neutral—”

  “Like the devil, you are,” he said.

  “I would argue that,” I said, “but the nation must have answers.”

  He got to his feet, towering above me now, his head working slowly up and down. “They’re the same old answers, son: Cain and Abel, the prodigal son and his father, backsliders and blind believers, worshippers of the things of this world and those who thirst and hunger for the things of the spirit. Those who remember and those who forget.”

  He studied me from far away.

  “Now,” he said, “you’re a Northern boy, and you look intelligent, but here you’re acting as squareheaded as that clown who was up here a few minutes ago calling me ‘Doctor’!”

  I watched him sit, bending toward me, his arms hanging floorward as he thrust out his legs. “You people,” he said, “oh, you confounded people!”

  And suddenly he sat up, his eyes holding me in a red blaze of fire; then, heaving himself around in the chair, he said, “Boy, get out of my face!” and moved, rolled in the other direction.

  As I crouched there, a scene flashed through my mind of a witness trapped in perjurious testimony before a hostile Senate investigating committee, the network microphones with identifying call letters arrayed before him, the audience bending forward listening intensely. Then I pulled erect, looking at Hickman’s broad back and thinking, Boy, he called me boy! as he turned facing me with a sad expression.

  “No,” he said, “I’m sorry. You don’t understand. You’re like a youngster who has grabbed his instrument and jumped on a bandstand full of strange musicians right in the middle of a complicated number and insists on trying to play without even knowing the riffs, the chords, and barely the melody. That’s the way it is. You don’t mean any harm. No, you’re just young; uninitiated. I should have seen that. But you have to understand that at a time like this it’s awfully hard for a man like me to put up with some of the conditions and attitudes that I’ve had to live with. But things like this shooting change the rules. It’s like a cyclone or hurricane, a break on the levee, or the time the Mississippi River ran backwards in its bed for miles and miles. So I apologize. I beg your pardon. But the fact is, you’ll still have to wait. Now I oughtn’t have to tell you that, but it’s not in my hands, son. I’m an outsider here and I’m waiting too. Besides, everybody waits when the Mahster is deciding. So in the meantime, if you believe in prayer—pray.”

  He reached out then, touching me lightly on the shoulder, “This is an awful event, but don’t forget,” he said, “we’ll all be reborn someday,” and I arose and backed up the corridor. I could see him watching me kindly from the shadows as I rested my back against the cool white wall. Farther along, the security men, prominent in the light at the turn of the corridor, regarded us with remote curiosity.

  I felt embarrassed. He had rebuked me and, worse, he had allowed me to see a force more withering than raw violence looking out at me from behind the dark face of his ludicrous and inexplicable grief. I had been allowed to hear the voice of a mysterious authority, the existence of which I was completely unaware; an authority that rested on no form of power that I understood or respected and which, in all probability, had been limited until now to such as his followers.

  And suddenly the growing sense of threat which I’d felt since the shooting became intensified. For the fact that the old man now dared assert this force over me seemed to imply a disorder in the society that was far more extensive, and potentially more destructive, than was indicated even by the shooting of the Senator.

  Not only had he called me “boy,” he had dismissed me as though all I represented—the press, the public, everything—were no more than an invasion of his privacy and were superfluous before his mysterious grief. Yes, the rules had been changed all right, but how? At what point and by whom, I didn’t know. I only knew that I felt stripped and disoriented. For with but the slightest change of expression, the barest inflection of phrase and modulation of voice, Hickman had allowed me the most fleeting revelation of the commanding arrogance that laced a humility which McGowan considered traditional, and girdled my shoulders with a treacherous and invisible yoke. And now, despite the sad expression which shaped his shadowed features, I felt that he was laughing at me.

  Who does the old clown think he is? I asked myself. I was accustomed to having my questions ignored; Americans are expert at that, but there he sits defying the entire intricate structure of the nation’s power, blocking its right to essential information affecting its destiny. It was unbelievable. With such a crime having been committed in the U.S. Senate, how could one old white-headed Negro who certainly knew some of the facts be allowed to frustrate millions of anxious citizens? Why were the FBI agents taking so much time? Why weren’t they interrogating the old buzzard? And when I considered that Senator Sunraider was responsible for his being in the hospital, I wanted to scream.

  Looking across at Hickman, I felt that my wires had been hopelessly snarled, that twenty years of hard-earned but relatively tranquil “adjustment to life” had been shattered into a million jangling pieces. Now this old Negro could speak to me of rebirth! Who the hell was Hickman, anyway? Watching him, I decided by way of relieving my mind to retrace the action of the day, but I didn’t know where to begin. Events from the day before, stories to which I had been assigned joined with the incident into which I had stumbled that morning and clanged in my mind with hints of covert connections which would never have occurred to me before the shooting.

  I knew, for instance, that there was no rational link between at least three of the incidents which now assaulted my mind: the arrival of M. Vannec’s letter, my inattention during the shooting, and the bet which I had made the night before with McGowan and a few friends at our club.

  The letter had arrived as the result of an incident that had occurred in France more than a decade before….

  The betting had come about in a spirit of fun released by our reaction to LeeWillie Minifees’ outrageous reply to a joke which the Senator had made shortly before. And while it was true that our betting expressed our annoyance over certain of the Senator’s attitudes, it was not malicious, and it certainly had done nothing to bring about the shooting….

  And as for my reading the letter at the time the shooting began, it was my way of avoiding a boring speech. Therefore, if the various events had chosen to collide at that particular moment, it was, rationally, a matter of accident—like the unforeseen combustibility of the sports car at Le Mans, which, leapfrogging another machine, struck a wall, ignited its magnesium body and, rocketing its heavier parts through the crowd, killed some eighty people. This accident, by the way, still fills me with an unfathomable pity and terror—for who could have anticipated that magnesium would burn? Similarly, the shooting couldn’t have occurred in the Senate as the result of a sudden whim. It had either to have been plotted or emerged as the end product of some miscalculation, an oversight, a failure of somebody’s vision occurring long ago—or the result of some malice-breeding act of arrogance suddenly come to fruition
in a boil-burst of bullets and blood. I wasn’t sure how old Hickman fitted into it, but if his presence meant anything it was probably that the shooting had been preceded by vicious events hidden in darkness.

  But here I was blocked, for while many diverse things may be joined under a cloak of blackness, the slightest ray of light reveals their separateness. Thus, my every effort toward insight succeeded only in highlighting a mare’s-nest, jumble-riot of loose ends. I was growing weary and increasingly nervous, and my need to discover links between all the things which had occurred struck me as evidence of a hopeless subjectivity. I recognized danger here, but it was as though I had been shackled to the bench, manacled to old Hickman: I couldn’t let go. Indeed, I was so roiled and shaken that it was as though a younger, more uncertain, idealistic, and guilty self which I had discarded following the war was being painfully resuscitated. It was like having a long-knitted bone broken afresh at the old point of fracture—blood vessels, marrow, nerves, and memory were all a-scream.

  Let’s be calm about this, McIntyre, I told myself. Try to be objective, which has been your training. Despite your inattention during the moments leading up to the shooting, perhaps your guilt, your upset, is neither strange, unique, or even personal. What if it’s merely the foreshadowing of a general mood which is already seizing millions of citizens as the news that a senator has been shot spreads throughout the nation? Perhaps identical symptoms would have appeared (and in epidemic proportions) had someone been rash enough to have given the works to the late and most unlamented Theodore Bilbo. So don’t allow the impertinence of an old, upset Negro to get to you; he’s probably mad, but you have the responsibility of remaining calm.

  But this didn’t help, because I knew that old Hickman wasn’t mad; he was arrogant, devious, and something else at the moment undefinable, but definitely not mad. And so my mind surged on.

  Couldn’t it be, McIntyre, that everyone in this country harbors a deeply repressed compulsion to shoot senators—no, wait—because wouldn’t this be the simplest explanation of the gunman’s unaccountable action? And if not, isn’t it at least possible that everyone wishes, in his most secret heart, that someone else, some proxy, some utterly detached, resigned, and self-alienated individualist with nothing to lose, would perform the job in his stead?

  It’s a horrible idea, McIntyre, but hasn’t it been said that at some point each and every son wills his father’s death? And isn’t a nation a larger, more intricate form of the family, and thus, like most families, thronged with dark, mysterious yearnings? Taunted by envious second sons, even Smerdyakovs full of dark passion? What would Freud say about this? And who, by the way, was the mother of our country? Yes, and how does old Hickman fit into this family pattern?

  Oh, yes, my mind was leading me into dark and treacherous territory! I realized it, but I was powerless to resist.

  Suddenly I was tired of standing, and the hospital odors and heat were becoming depressing. Slowly I moved farther up the corridor to a bench beside the elevator shaft from where I could keep an eye on Hickman. He sat bent over now, his head resting wearily on his crossed arms and knees; while far beyond him, at the point around which the Senator would appear—if he survived to appear—I could see the security man at his post. Dressed in a blue tropical worsted suit, he seemed tuned to a fine alertness and prepared to deal with any familiar form of disorder. But against my growing sense of the enormity of what had happened, his presence only accelerated my mind in its subversive gropings. It ran and stumbled, grasping desperately at the dark objects of my thoughts.

  I asked myself again: Could there be within the mind of each and every citizen an undiscussed but widely recognized urge toward assassination which functions to lend a certain depth, density, and ambiguity to our political life? An urge which provides the lonely citizen in his weakness a psychic linkage to such powerful figures as Sprott, Fullbore, Joplin, and Sunraider? An urge closely related to the widely noted phenomenon that almost everyone in a democracy seems compelled to make speeches? Perhaps herein lies the meaning of old Hickman’s outburst in the Senate: Observing a powerful figure tumbled into the dust, he simply couldn’t resist the compulsion to have his say. This by no means explains his presence in the hospital or the Senator’s motive in having him there, but it must have had something to do with his strange conduct.

  Yes, perhaps that was it; at the sound of the shots a powerful underground urge burst forth, and with the normal barriers down he was compelled to give voice, to let out a howl—although he didn’t know whether to sing or pray, celebrate or mourn. Yes, it was possible. His outburst anticipated and gave expression to a nationwide recoil to the chaos which spills forth from the side of the body politic, as it were, whenever there is an attack on the life of a sacrosanct personage. Think of our dead so slain, of President Lincoln.

  No, don’t think of him. Sunraider couldn’t light a torch to Abe Lincoln, even during the darkest night of the nation’s soul. And anyway, I told myself, these notions are unsound, the results of excitement, frustration, and loss of sleep during recent nights and days. Yet my mind lunged wearily on, challenged by my traumatic awareness of the heavy cloak of mystery surrounding these great figures, our senators.

  We love them, yes. And we hate them—I hadn’t thought about this contradiction before. We admire them and we envy them. This at least is sound. It’s true; they determine our fate and that of our children for generations to come, and yet most of us live out our entire lives without ever being in the presence of a single one of them. Think about it, McIntyre. We speak of them in the possessive mode, but we know very well that it is they who possess us. All we possess is the right to confer power upon them. Which is very much like the right of one-hundred-and-seventy-five-pounders like myself to donate blood to heavyweight wrestling champions. Once transfused, our blood becomes part of a power system which could easily crush us should we become so foolish as to press some special claim. For aren’t our senators really, when we think calmly of actualities, the “kings” of this sprawling, many-regioned, diversified land? Masked kings, if you will, who wear democratic felt and straw on their powerful heads, but kings nevertheless. And far more powerful than any ancient king or Renaissance prince. What would Lorenzo the Magnificent be to Sunraider the Ruthless; the Duke of Urbino to Fitzgerald of the Graceful Flair; or Machiavelli to Fullbore the Baleful? Think about that, McIntyre, and think of those who’ve parlayed one six-year term into a rule of countless decades. These are kingly reigns, McIntyre, this is quite plain; it’s a matter of terminology.

  Thus, doesn’t it follow that our senators are the natural targets of all manner of intense and ambivalent emotions?

  And shouldn’t it be expected that, figuratively, lions and tigers, chimpanzees and jackals—chimeras even—should prowl the atmosphere around them, very much as pimps and gamblers, thugs and confidence men swagger in the train of prizefight champions and successful jockeys? No doubt about it, and no product of overheated fancy, either. Men like Fullbore, Joplin, Plummer, Towbitt, and Sunraider move in an electric atmosphere, breathe a different air than that we breathe. And it doesn’t matter that we create that atmosphere of our mixed attitudes, because once they breathe power they are truly free of us. There’s nothing we can do about it, either, even though we put them in their positions. They can be amused by us and even contemptuous, as Fullbore and Sunraider are contemptuous (each in his respective way) of most everyone. We put them on their thrones, as it were, but once there they follow their own desires, not ours—even to the point of causing immeasurable confusion by standing most of the national values on their heads. Only their fellow senators can unseat them, really, and it’s been years since a single one has been caned or had a carload of constituents descend upon him to express their wills, dissents, or what have you, with horsewhips, clubs, or loaded handbags. Times have changed, McIntyre. We’ve descended like worms in winter, far below the grass roots of the land, while they have taken off into the most rarified ai
r.

  Yes, but just the same, I thought, each and every one of them, even the most charming, statesmanlike, and endearing—even that lovable Senator Barkley, everybody’s uncle, is probably somebody’s secret candidate for a blasting.

  There came a sound of opening doors, and a slender young nurse, graceful in her white uniform, stepped from the elevator carrying a tray covered with a towel and went past me with averted eyes. She moved with a lilting walk of clicking heels, her white-capped golden head erect, and I could hear the gentle swishing of her garments fade as she went past old Hickman, who was nodding. I watched her until she reached the security man and moved on into the light beyond. Then, I saw vividly in my mind’s eye the runner that flawed the right silk hose of her shapely calf. Sweet angel of mercy, thou art fair, I thought. Thou art gentle, too, I hope. Then my mind resumed its musings: Blasting? You mean that symbolically, don’t you?

  Perhaps, but I’m not too sure….

  Well, while it’s true that we are terribly excitable, we are nevertheless a very peaceful people. Perhaps this is the true form of our national courage, since we have more than most to irritate us.

  Yes, that’s true. And though dedicated to the democratic dream of our fathers, we know pragmatically that some must possess more democracy than others. For instance, that old Negro down there punishing that chair has certain built-in disadvantages.

  Yes, there’s no denying it. I faced that fact twenty years ago—or at least I tried for a while.

  And you realize too, and without bearing a grudge, that our forefathers’ accomplishment was not so much a break with the power that went with kingship as the achievement of a multiplication of the number of possible kinds, and a transformation and multiplication of kingly styles.

  Do you mean that you consider Sunraider the possessor of a “kingly” style?

  Hell, no!

  Fullbore?

  He would like to think so, but with him it’s a matter of having been corrupted by reading Sir Walter Scott during his senior year in college … a year in England … his realization that he’ll never be President.