Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  No, I thought with relief, it doesn’t sound like Severen’s style.

  They were still laughing when I went out and returned to the ship.

  I kept a lookout for my shipmate throughout the night, but he failed to appear, and when I saw him at mess the following morning, he appeared tired and excited but offered me no explanation of our adventure. By now, however, being both resentful and respectful of his privacy, I had decided not to question him.

  In another two days the ship was unloaded, and we made our way down the Seine past Le Havre, where we joined our convoy, then moved on to Milford Haven from whence our flotilla of merchant ships, baby flattops, and cruisers set sail for the U.S. But I had no further opportunity to question Severen. He avoided me, and I, having decided that he was probably connected with some government agency, the OSS or the like, thought it best to leave him with his secrets. In fact, acting on the premise that some knowledge might be quite inconvenient to one of my background—if not highly dangerous—I quit the ship in New York. Two trips later I was drafted and assigned to the ETO, and I quickly allowed the strange young man and the night’s incident to slip from my mind.

  The war went on until the fall of that year, and upon its conclusion I returned to the States and became so busy picking up some of the threads of my life (while avoiding others) that I thought little of the war except in terms of the interruption it had caused me. I forgot both Severen and the mysterious figure in the cathedral until some time later, when I thought of writing a novel about the war. At the time, books about the recent conflict were quite popular, and I thought to do something more romantic than the works then being offered by the contenders in the field, but I found it more than a notion. I discovered that I possessed little talent for invention, and my experience gave me so little to go on, so little to feed my rather limited imagination, and, although I was taking courses in sociology on the GI Bill at the time, the prospect of serving up yet another set of case histories as fiction repelled me. So I began with a street fight among Americans along the bank of the Seine during a night of war, followed by a trip which the hero made as the barely tolerated companion of a mysterious American student turned merchant seaman to contact a group of armed members of the French Underground in a bomb-and fire-gutted cathedral. But I got no further. I couldn’t plot it, couldn’t extend these bare details into a significant action. I knew none of the related facts, and my discipline, such as it was, had been geared to the searching out and weighing of facts, not to imaginative speculation. So I forgot it—we Americans are great forgetters. Yes, we are as competent at forgetting things which confuse us as we are at begetting confusion (and often it is our attempt to forget which causes the confusion in the first place). Whatever. I next made an attempt at writing a philosophical novel of wartime adventure—with political overtones—and discovered that I was as ill-equipped for this as for the first project, so reluctantly I put it aside. I told myself that the idea wasn’t in the American mode anyway and convinced myself that I, at least, possessed few ideas worth troubling the reader’s mind.

  So Severen and the mysterious maquis were not to cross my mind again until sometime later when, through my work in Washington, I became interested in Europe again. This was probably a holdover from the thirties of my eager youth, but I now wished to see what Europe was like during the tumult of the postwar years. I wanted to retrace my steps, as it were. For now I was sharply aware that much of my youth had been left there, and that the war had been no mere incident, no mere interruption but involved the only living I had done during those violent years. It was, except for my concern over Spain, the one great fact of my youth and my youth’s true end. I was by now too wise to think that I could recapture those lost years and certainly not so isolationist in my thinking as to believe that I had been robbed of them by Europe in the interest of goals that were not my own, or at least not our own. Nowadays, few Americans cling to that illusion and most have made peace with the fact that the world is of a sad, complex whole.

  So I wished to see the place again, to regard once more the people and the old ancestral earth. I wished to see some of what had been so telescoped and explosive and accelerated and youth-consuming with my older, more sober—and conservative—eyes. For all my suspicions and discouragements, I wished to understand, to glean just what had actually happened during that time when my sense of the ideal, my yearning for perfect political solutions for all human problems, rejected that which my sense of patriotic duty had made an act of irrational faith—for I believed in our allies and had gone to sea long before I had been called up by the draft. So now, as I say, I wanted to view the land as one returns to view an old movie years after it no longer possesses such immediate power to guide one’s actions and perceptions, when its spell can no longer deaccelerate one’s breathing or expand one’s sense of wonder. It was with this in mind that I took a quick trip to London, Paris, Salzburg, and Rome, and on my return put great energy into trying to obtain an extended assignment in Europe. It was during this effort that I saw the Frenchman for a second time. I was assigned to cover a press interview at the French Embassy which he had granted, and it was then that the incident in the cathedral returned once more to mind.

  For it was only when I confronted M. Vannec from my place in the ring of photographers and reporters that I realized that the legendary artist, activist, and French dignitary before me and the mysterious man in the dark cathedral were one and the same. I was both startled and relieved, for there had been many times during the latter days of the war when I had wondered if I might not have aided the contact between two enemy agents, and now at last I felt reassured. M. Vannec appeared not to have noticed my shock of recognition, and as I observed him handle questions I congratulated myself that I’d had enough self-control not to make myself known to him. Observing his answering my colleagues’ questions, I even congratulated myself that I possessed a certain advantage, since I recognized him while he was unaware that I had participated in what might have been for him a significant historical encounter. I felt proud that I had dropped into that underground—if only briefly—out of which M. Vannec was to emerge after the war to take his place of importance in the world’s affairs; that I had touched, even this slightly, the fluid center wherein postwar Europe was being reorganized—a matter which brought me then and there, and most ironically, the most meaningful sense of what had happened to my war-spent youth.

  I say “ironically” because I recognized my pride as a reflection of that helpless, American, most democratic yearning which seeks ever to effect some sense of personal connection between the self and historical events, our need to write, as did so many GIs on the backsides of statues of Italian saints “Kilroy Was Here” if only on the backside of history. Involved here, I knew, was the driving desire to be “in the know,” to step behind the scene, which arises, perhaps, out of the fluid, shifting center of power and the absence of ancient hierarchical structure which is native to our form of government.

  So, standing before him, I was filled with a kind of joy, as though watching a skillful act of impersonation. For my work in Washington had made me aware that behind the political parties and the public gestures of public figures there is usually in progress a game of hide-and-seek. Ofttimes relatively obscure men write the political speeches which affect our destiny, and much too often disreputable machine politicians, a holdover from more rambunctious days, formulate policies (and ofttimes wise policies) that are proclaimed publicly by respectable public servants who are themselves little more than masks, the true mouthpieces and figureheads of the nation. Not always, fortunately, for some public figures are indeed what they profess to be. They do their own thinking, their own speaking, and their own dirty work—much as our prewar gang leaders were wont to do. They make no pretense that politics can ever be pure and unambiguous, and they recognize that no politician is ever free of the murky mysteries handed down to them from tribal chieftains through medicine men, publicity experts to mini
sters of state. Yet, even this makes for more mystery and speculation rather than less. It is still difficult to distinguish real man from mask, true voice from recording, real leader from actor.

  I had left the interview without putting a single question; it wasn’t necessary. M. Vannec was highly competent, and he led the line of questioning with such skill that each of us was satisfied with the information received and the analysis of events presented. I was pleased to know that for once, unexpectedly, I had left my boring work on shipboard to glimpse behind the European scene. I had peeped into chaos and encountered a hero, and now I could see some of the results. It pleased me that for all the relative stability attributed to prewar European class lines, M. Vannec, who comes from the upper class, and who had an established identity as an artist before the Spanish outbreak, exhibited some of that same mobility of identity and shifting of purpose which my work in Washington led me to believe was so common to our own society. I had known of his legend as reported in our press, but the brief personal identification made during the war rendered it all the more meaningful to me. I speculated as to the transformations, or, to use a favorite term of one of the more intriguing French writers, the metamorphosis, the process, by which he had transformed himself. Certainly transformations of identity were necessary under the Nazi occupation, but, on the whole, the concrete conditions in France were too much for me. I had to settle for the small, silent satisfaction of having recognized him in an earlier role, while he had been completely unaware.

  Then, when his letter arrived on the morning of the shooting, I realized that the laugh had been on me. M. Vannec had indeed picked me out of the crowd and had been no less poker-faced than I. When I first read his letter, this had delighted me, but now, sitting in the hospital corridor in my shaken state, my response was vastly more questioning. I felt that he had subjected me to an insidious inquisition. Insanity, I am told, is a coincidental state. Correspondences flutter ever before the victim’s eyes. Faces appear in rocks, clouds, streams, and fireplaces. Everything and anything becomes imbued with personal significance, and in Auden’s words “Time remembered becomes one with time required.” Dreams cling, gongs make waves of deep silence, ten-ton trucks glide past like trout plying the sandy, pebble-strewn bottom of a stream; artificial flies come alive and curve around to attack the artful fisherman. It happens to each of us at some point, I’m sure. And what is the recommended cure? A “plunge into reality,” that is the recommended cure. A plunge into life’s “well of facts.” So with old Hickman and the FBI man before me to mark my boundaries of speculation, the one a symbol of authority and the other of some nameless chaos, I tried to reread the letter carefully and coolly—and only succeeded in increasing my agitation.

  CHAPTER 8

  AFTER BLANDLY INTRODUCING HIMSELF and recalling our encounter in Rouen and at the press conference, M. Vannec’s letter was one question after another.

  Prior to my visit of last year, I hadn’t seen your country since 1937, during the crisis of the Spanish Civil War…. I see American journals and newspapers, of course, but so much has happened since my first visit that I now find myself confused whenever I compare the “factual data” of the United States with the ideas which I’ve formed at this distance. Thus, if you would be so kind, I should like to have the private unofficial opinions of one so well informed as yourself. In other words, the opinions of an informed citizen who sees his country from the inside, one who sees, shall we say, with the warm mystique and intuition of the heart as well as with the intellect…. I am confused, for instance, when I read the statement of one of your leading men of letters who says that he no longer recognizes as his own the country which is presented photographically by one of our leading journals. What do you make of this statement?

  Looking down the corridor at old Hickman I thought, How blinding is flattery! Why on earth had I kept reading the first time? And why on earth didn’t M. Vannec write to our so-called leading man of letters, who, perhaps, would have been overjoyed to convey his national and most unoriginal disgust to one so distinguished. And why did M. Vannec consider me privy to our superior leading man of letters’ opinions, perceptions, insights, out-sights, hindsights, around-sights, or lack of such? Me, a mere reporter and taxpayer. And what did that bored old party expect from his complaints, when he should know very well that in this country a man is exceptionally lucky if he is able to recognize the child he rears as his own. Hadn’t he noticed, I thought, that besides the normal factors that have always made family life a cuckoo’s delight—the culture, environment, whatever it is—is in such a constant and cyclonic whirl that our children not only grow like weeds, but they grab such strange nourishment out of the air that their mothers might well chuck the traditional concern with getting their brats to wash their hands and faces, and see to it that whenever they come in off the street they washed their brains? Our leading man of letters should consider a Boston child of proper background whom I know, who spoke with a South Carolina Geechee lilt after brief contact with the Negro maid who worked next door on Williamsburg Square. Within two weeks he was referring to his father, a Harvard professor of distinguished attainments, as “de buckra.”

  Oh de burrhead and de buckra

  Dey de same in de dark, ainty?

  I heard him sing. What would Vannec’s leading man of letters, that matinee idol of the word, that latter-day Francis X. Bushman of prose, make of this? How does this child fit into his America? His America indeed! Where does he keep it, in what safe-deposit box? And is his America old Hickman’s America or that of the FBI man?

  And when did this country ever slow down long enough for him to stake out his claim? Perhaps the deed his grandfather filed expired long ago, or perhaps his father, armed with Civil War plunder, was too busy pushing to establish himself with his betters to keep up with the changes. Why on earth should Vannec think that I should give my attention to such a haughty gentleman? My job is reporting the facts, and change is implicit in the fact—or isn’t it?

  M. Vannec, I thought angrily, is like many Europeans whom I’ve met; he expects us to be familiar with all of their proprieties but fails absolutely to recognize the few we have of our own. The first shot out of the bottle and he’s revealed himself as the type of European who delights in telling you endless stories illustrating American materialism, vulgarity, uncouthness, pushiness, ignorance, etc., while observing your reaction with eager and calculating eyes. But why should he ask a favor of me—if it was a favor—and then go on to inquire: “This Senator Sunraider of yours, how is he able to function in your section of the country?”

  Vannec really got to me now. This question had aroused no reaction when I first read the letter, but now with the Senator shot and in surgery it brought a chill. Here was the shadow no bigger than a man’s hand which announced the storm, and I had ignored it. Once, Europeans slapped us in the face with Joseph McCarthy, and now that McCarthy has had it, they are beginning to express their superiority by hitting us over the head with Sunraider. But it was what came in the very next line that made my hair stand on end.

  “What, by the way, has happened to our young friend Severen?” he wrote—a question which had appeared innocent enough on first reading. But now I realized that the very circumstances of my first contact with Vannec should have made it plain that I was no friend of Severen’s, and had no idea of what he and Vannec had been up to. Hadn’t they sent me packing the moment they exchanged passwords? And what frightened and infuriated me now was having such a question put to me at a time when the whole country seemed on the verge of collapsing under the weight of a fantastic practical joke. It struck me, in other words, that M. Vannec’s questions were not only exceedingly malicious and calculating, but the product of some special, inside knowledge of our national affairs.

  When I was a child, … I thought as a child:

  but when I became a man,

  I put away childish things.

  So saith the Scriptures, and so ‘til now I had
thought of myself. And so, too, my sober mind told me, I should think of M. Vannec. For not only did charity require it, but my desperate sense of hope—which is a will to sanity if nothing more—demanded it. But with the shooting and with old Hickman waiting, I no longer knew where one drew the line between the childish and the mature matters of this world. What is play and what sheer desperate thrashing to keep a foothold on the whirling sphere? What are the uses of sober reflection, and what the role of “infantile regression and passionate irrationality”?

  I asked myself quite seriously: Is Vannec playing with you, McIntyre? Plotting against you out of some godlike sense of humor? Or has he involved you in some deadly serious political game? Has he fed you into some rare and elaborate machinery of historical spite, a machine geared to his European desire for revenge against the brash and self-assured upstarts living across the seas?

  And suddenly, just as the nurse left the elevator and hurried down the corridor, it occurred to me that it was even possible that old Hickman might very well know M. Vannec, even as he appeared to know the Senator. It was highly unlikely, I knew, but now anything seemed possible. Hickman appeared to be nodding, and when I hurried down to him I could hear the slight buzz of his breathing.

  “Mr. Hickman, sir,” I said, “excuse me, but I’m burning with curiosity….”

  He looked up suddenly, saying, “What?” and I could see a thin blue circle rimming each brown eye. He sat up, looking toward the sound of the retreating nurse.