Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “Please, Welborn, don’t leave,” Laura called. “Not this way. Don’t let her do this to us. Don’t go in this way that’ll leave you, oh, so ashamed later on. Welborn, please, Wel—born!”

  I left, trying to shut out the sound of her tears. I was unable to look back to Laura even to make an affirmation with my eyes as I went out and down through the fishy air and out into the cold blast of the street. I felt wet and limp, a sharp odor issued from within the upturned collar of my overcoat.

  I started for the subway, walking blindly, but found that I couldn’t return downtown. How strange it all was. On my way uptown I would have felt lucky with the prospect of such an easy solution to my problem—even though I believed that I would have rejected it, but now, trudging along in the falling snow, there was no satisfaction within me. No satisfaction and no sorrow, only a deep emptiness, a feeling of defeat and rejection. I felt suddenly older and that I had learned a harsh wisdom not only as to the cost of love but of some precious but untenable vision of life. And, yes, I thought, as I considered the poor people hurrying past me through the streaking snow, I’ve suffered a defeat of hope. Our love had meant to help them, and now it was broken. But more confounding, I had been defeated not by my own family ties, or by the codes of my own social background, as I’d feared, but by an outraged, ignorant black woman who wanted no one like me, no one who even looked like me, in her family. And what I couldn’t have allowed myself to believe but which she insisted that I secretly hoped: She preferred to have her daughter bear the burden of white bastardy rather than accept me as a son-in-law.

  CHAPTER 10

  I STUMBLED THROUGH THE snow-curtained streets like a man carving a snowbank with a white-hot iron attached to his brow. Everything I thought I had known melted into a hot, scalding contradiction that froze immediately into a chiller form. I walked blindly and so found myself back in her block, approaching her building again, but there I stopped. I hadn’t the heart to face Mrs. Johnson again. Nor was it the shotgun which stopped me but the dread of an ever more final rejection. For a while I stood on the stoop, hoping that Laura would appear, but in vain.

  Soon I began to attract attention. Dark faces appeared at the windows, peering out at me. I walked to the corner and southward, then moved east to find myself on Lenox Avenue. People hurried past bundled in their overcoats. Far ahead the streetcars clanged along on 125th Street, rocking slowly across the avenue, a mask of yellow swiftly disappearing from view. The snow fell wetly. There was a strong smell of barbecue in the air, then as I passed an apartment building a gust of wind blew a cloud of sulfurous smoke into the street, and I stood there in the slanting snow, shaken with a fit of coughing that brought tears to my eyes. I cried and cried. Finally it passed and I walked on.

  (It’s all still so vivid, after all the years of repression.) Near a corner, standing before a storefront window painted with a garish red-and-green scene of the Crucifixion, a blind man wearing a drab olive-green stocking cap, a frayed soldier’s overcoat, and knitted gloves with missing fingertips, sang sadly as he strummed a battered twelve-string guitar. Flakes of snow sparkled in his moustache as he sang with uplifted head, and I could see the harsh scene of snow, grinding cars, and hurrying people reduced and vividly reflected in the dark lenses of his steel-rimmed glasses. Damn it all, I thought. Damn it all! Then, walking close, I dropped a quarter into the dented tin cup attached to the neck of his guitar.

  He paused. “Thank you, brother,” he said. “For a while there, I thought I was singing to an empty-hearted world.”

  I was silent.

  “You still there, aren’t you, brother?”

  “Still here,” I said with anguished tongue, “and thanks for the song.”

  “The pleasure is all mine, brother.”

  “It’s getting much colder,” I said. “Don’t you think you should get out of it?”

  “Not yet awhile,” he said. “Got to get my cornmeal made.”

  “How is it going?”

  “Bad, brother. It’s going bad—for the time being, that is. I been working along here for about two hours, and I made all of forty cents, including what you just paid me. And two cents of the rest come from some little kids. Still, the way I see it, a man has to stay on the job and take his chances.”

  “Sure, but it’s getting much colder,” I said, “too cold for me, so I must leave. But before I go here’s an advance for the next time we meet.” Listening to the thump of the coin falling into the cup, I walked away.

  “Hey there, brother,” he called. “Come back a second. I got something to tell you….”

  “Take care,” I called, moving on. What could he have to say?

  As I passed a bar the door opened and I could hear voices raised in argument and thought of Laura and Mrs. Johnson, and the image of the bright red and pale green poinsettias glowed in my eyes like a suddenly illuminated neon sign. Back up the street behind me I could hear the blind man’s voice rising once more in strong, clear song:

  Every shut eye ain’t sleeping, baby,

  And every goodby don’t mean gone,

  So you’re bound to think about me, baby,

  When those hard, hard times come ‘long…

  How strange, I thought, that the song could sound so sad, yet when he’d talked his voice had seemed somehow quite gay.

  I went into a bar and ordered a bourbon. Down at the other end of the counter three men were telling tales of Dutch Schultz and someone named “Pompey.” A stuffed owl and the head of a twelve-point buck were fixed to the wall above the back bar. A photograph collection of black prizefighters in pugilistic poses showed in the mirror frame, along with a sign in red letters asking, “WHERE HAVE ALL THE WHITE HOPES GONE?” I drank up, paid, and went out into the cold.

  It was still snowing. I walked along, looking into the faces of the people and into shop windows displaying cheap goods. Statuettes of Malvina Hoffman, African warriors, Jesus Christ, and straightening combs; Kewpie dolls stood in a Gethsemane of. At the corner I saw people boarding a streetcar headed west and followed them on. It didn’t matter where it would take me, only that it wasn’t downtown. Perhaps it would turn up Amsterdam Avenue and rumble north to Fort Tryon and then I could walk up to the Cloisters. I would watch the broad vista of the Hudson. As it rumbled westward my mind floated; passengers got off and on; a woman carrying a kerosene stove came on; then the motorman was calling back to me, “Hey, fellow—you going cross on the ferry?”

  “Ferry?” I said, “Why, no, I thought you were going north.”

  “No,” he said, “That’s the next car. We go back and forth, just back and forth. From here you cross the river.”

  For a moment I hesitated, thinking, Why not cross the ferry? But then I got off and walked east again, slowly against the wind. I had lost track of time. At a fork in the wide street a car traveling furiously east skidded on the ice, cutting a broad figure eight and came to a rattling stop beside me. And as I waited, a black man wearing a derby stuck his head out of the window, laughing uproariously. (Hickman was looking at me curiously now, but I still couldn’t move.)

  “Wheeee, goddamn!” the man yelled. “Man, man, as you are my witness, I’m driving the hell out of this sonofabitch this evening!” Then he was shifting gears and roaring away, gone. I hadn’t noticed the dark, but the streetlights were coming on and yellowish lights were blooming in apartment windows. The cold had begun to numb me. I continued east, still unable to go down into the subway.

  Noticing a brightly lit movie entrance, I bought a ticket and went in, but dropped off to sleep before the film came on. I dreamed fitfully of my mother, of a wild ride down a snowy hill on a red sled, of a cloud of stinging bees. Then someone was shaking my shoulder and I looked into a blaze of lights, out of which the face of a man wearing a porter’s cap suddenly appeared.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said, “it’s time to go unless you aim to find you a home in here.”

  “What? Oh, I guess I fell asleep,” I said.
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  “Oh, you been sleeping all right. You been doing some of the damndest sleeping I ever seen. You been trucking and pecking in your sleep, and that’s no lie. What’s more, I’ve had to chase two hard-hustling chippies, a couple of kids with rubber bands and bent pins, and a lousy amateur pickpocket with a razor blade—all off of you, and you ain’t even blinked an eye. You a detective or something?”

  “Why, no, why do you ask?”

  “Because I figure that only a detective that’s trying to catch him somebody special would play it as cool as you have.”

  “Well, I’m not a detective,” I said.

  “You were really asleep?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Well, you better take care of yourself, because sleeping the way you been doing in a place like this is just begging for trouble.”

  I stood up. “Thanks for protecting me,” I said, feeling for my wallet. It was still there. I offered him a dollar bill.

  He shook his head. “Oh, no, man; that’s okay. I was just doing my damn job. You just keep your eyes glued back.”

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  When I went out a crew of men were changing the signs on the marquee to one announcing “The Lost World Returns” and the street was almost empty.

  Again I walked westward toward the subway, and now, although I had been consciously aware that I was refusing to think about Laura, the anguish overtook me. I ached to see her and my mind kept anticipating the outcome of our affair, screaming to me of the paradox that although ended, cut off, severed, it could never end. What would happen to her and to the child, or that which was swiftly becoming a child? What would become of that part of me that would be taken south to grow up in a lowly and alien section of the land? Would any trace of me remain to find existence there; my voice, my face? And what lay ahead? Would I encounter in some future time and place, perhaps along such a street as this, a dark youth bearing my father’s features, moving with reflections of my mother’s grace—a black boy with a brown face in a black crowd reminding me of my grandfather’s patrician presence, his cast of features, his flair of phrase? I felt utterly heartbroken, walking desperately through a slum of heartbreak which seemed, like the blind man’s song, to have evaded ultimate defeat. And yet I was myself defeated.

  I was walking westward slowly, and sweating in spite of the cold. If only I had been more careful! More thoughtful! I could feel the guilty consequences (was it guilt? guilty so soon!) growing in secret darkness, nourished and warm yet bomblike, a fertile seed in metamorphic change extending itself into the distant future, completely out of control; toiling beyond my capacity for action, responsibility, or understanding. I wanted desperately to stop it, to cast it out before it could further extend its physical dimension and my guilt. How was it done? It’s dishonorable and a crime, I thought. Then hurriedly, abstractly: But man is obligated to exercise control over nature, to make his own destiny. Change the course of rivers, protect his heritage, perform appendectomies, hysterectomies, lobotomies. This is no abstract matter unfolding within a rigid frame; flexibility is demanded; yes, and the assertion of will against chaos…. There are physicians expert in such matters. But who? Where do I find them? Surely there are black ones for that black art. Yes….

  But I knew even as my mind turned to such desperate measures that Laura would never accept such a solution. Nor would her mother. They would rather punish me. Of course, that’s what they’re doing, I thought. The mother’s vicious, uncivilized. Civilization is the acceptance of the implicit violence necessary to social stability with the maximum consciousness and grace, I formalized. Man has to say no, he even has to kill. Life is death, capital punishment. Live with his acts. But something was wrong with this, I didn’t like it. I left it like a breath of fog in the cold air.

  I walked along, my mind in a fever as I cursed the state of things. I thought of lying in wait for Laura, in a hired car, to take her away to a nearby state to marry her. I would hire a private detective to find her. But then a part of my mind argued passionately, even there in the icy air, that this would mean to give in to the harrassments and intimidations of society and to the tyranny of the future, and to use force—when Laura and I had agreed that the only proper motive for marriage was love. Why had it come to this? Why had it turned out like this, when I had meant so well, when I had come up to—

  Suddenly I was startled by a shrill whirring sound. From an optometrist’s window on my right, a clock in the shape of a huge glowing eye stared at me from a darkness of black velvet. Slanted black Roman numerals stood out around the dingy and bloodshot white like a heavy fringe of lashes or thickly applied mascara, and the hands were attached to the dilated pupil of the blue-black iris of the eye. And now I realized that the sound, high-pitched and irritating even through the thick glass, was coming from its quivering red second hand.

  Racing with a frantic circling—a sign of time out of synch with time—it was spinning as though some electronic instrument had been released and then taken over by an energy more powerful than its cogs and gears, its condensers and resistors, its rectifiers and negative feedback systems, could ever contain. A sound of nerve-scraping anguish, it caused a feeling of the uncanny to sweep swiftly over me and evoked a scene which I had observed on an empty winter street of a night long ago: The walks were glassy beneath my feet, snow drifted in the gutters, and the trees of crystal snapped and swayed in a wind that howled, raw and searching. I had been returning from a party, and, in passing a lighted department-store window, my eye had been caught by a tableau of the Nativity, a crèche, in which all of the familiar figures of that Bethlehem stable scene were charmingly displayed—with the Babe in the manger and the Holy Family, sad and sweet in their ancient clothes, looking down with rapt adoration upon the Babe, and all surrounded in a gentle light by sloe-eyed cattle and the patient donkey; with the kneeling shepherds’ worn, worshipful faces transformed by the living miracle of the spirit incarnate in the infant boy, their god and promise of a new dispensation. And above the stable, the hovering, long-pointing star beneath which on a long and winding road, the Three Wise Men, the Magi, magnificently dressed with their regal gifts on camelback, seeking out the Babe, with sad hopes for future joy and willingly suspending their ancient beliefs for a world announced in the Infant’s cry, the future certified and showing forth in a radiant Boy in a filthy stable…. And I had been carried away then as I had now been carried away by memory before the anguished eye in the darkness….

  But then, in the whirl of artificial snow which surrounded the remote and transcendent scene in the stable, I saw a tiny mouse racing hysterically about as though in a blizzard, a true storm of whiteness. Around and around and around it darted and probed in that swirl of snow, blown by a hidden electric fan, trying in vain to find an escape into its own quiet hole of darkness. And I had stood transfixed, there in the cold before the scene, hoping for its success—until a policeman had come up and ordered me along home….

  Now all this recurred in the split second it took that screaming hand to negotiate its ambiguous eye, and then a wave of anguish had racked me and, “Ah, Laura, forgive me,” I cried—and the man stepped out of the darkness of the optometrist’s deep doorway.

  He stood pale and brutalized in the light of a passing car as he brushed at his clothes and stretched and yawned, and I could see a red scar which started at the corner of his left eye and moved in a livid welt down his cheek to disappear beneath his chin. Wearing, incongruously, a filthy maroon turban and no overcoat, he stared at me from beneath heavily drooping lids.

  “Look a-here, buddy,” he said, with a wave of his hand, and in my shock I blurted out that which was on my mind.

  “Look,” I said, “I came up here to do the proper thing, the manly thing. Her mother was the one who stopped me. It was her fault.”

  He looked at me, wavering, chuckling, shaking his head. “I dig you, man. Uh-huh, I dig you; I know. These here bitches is out to get us all. You don�
��t believe it, you just take a good look at me. Nine months ago, man, I had me five thousand dollars and a baby grand, fifteen suits of clothes, and an Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight with brand-new rubber, then I met a bitch who dropped me smack-dab in the middle of trouble like a yolk, man; I can tell you all about these whores. But look here now, can you spare a nickel for a cup of coffee? I ain’t et since way this morning, and out here it’s cold as a bitch’s cast-iron heart.”

  I took out some coins and watched him take them with trembling hands, flinching inwardly at the touch of his filthy long-nailed fingers.

  “Thanks, man. You’re a friend in need—I mean a friend indeed.”

  “It’s nothing,” I said.

  He looked at me, wavering languidly in the wind.

  “What did you say was the name of that bitch who done you in? It wasn’t Agnes, was it? Agnes Jenny Jenkins? ‘Cause if it was, you lucky you got away in such good condition. That’s a bad bitch, man, with zippers on everything, including her funky drawers. It wasn’t Agnes Jenny Jenkins, was it?”

  I shook my head, breathing the foulness of him despite the cold.

  “Well, don’t let her get you down, man, whoever she was. Go get you another one as quick as you can, and forget it. Go to another town and git you a young one that ain’t been broke in yet. Yeah, that’s what you got to do.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then scratched his arm, shivered. “Damn, but this is a cold night. I better go git that coffee. I be seeing you now.”

  I watched him move away, his arms stiff to his sides, walking back on his heels and staggering slightly, then bending forward; a thin figure in a summer suit, he headed into the wind.

  Reaching the entrance of the subway again, I remembered an after-hours nightclub located a few blocks north where I’d once gone with Laura and some friends, and was suddenly taken with the hot certainty that if I went there I would see her. She would be trying to forget. Perhaps she hoped I’d remember and go there too….