Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Suddenly, to my left, a violent rocking began, and my eyes sprang open to see one of the policemen reaching out to catch at a pile of heavy books that were falling from a small colonial table. He missed several, which thudded to the floor, causing the sergeant to swear beneath his breath.

  “Now clean it up,” he said. “And from now on watch your step!”

  Bending, I helped the officer pick up the books, partially to be helpful, partially out of curiosity. But when I tried to read their titles, there was such a clashing of reds, yellows, and blues lingering in my eyes that I couldn’t read. And the whiskey fumes were heavier now, seeming to roll from beneath the door to the other room, and as I stood and looked around, it came to me that anything could happen in such a place. For it seemed that in an atmosphere so heavily saturated with alcohol the very clutter and the clashing of objects of such divergent styles and intention would lead inevitably to some form of violence, to some excess of emotion or assertion of will, and thus to grave physical conflict and, as the presence of the police indicated, to murder. The miracle, I thought, is that it hasn’t happened before.

  The officers were making their way carefully to the door now, and I felt an urgent need to have the victim’s body found so that I could get my story and leave. It was as though a human agent, who could be definitely identified with all the apparently calculated chaos, was called for to remove what I felt as a mounting threat to us all. Nor did it matter that that agent was dead; what was important was the establishment, once and for all, of the fact that the chaos was his and not ours. Especially not mine. And in fact, it might be that his being dead would guarantee that whatever the nature of the force that seemed so threatening, it had been appeased and would strike no more. It was my duty to stay but I felt an urgent need to leave. Because, hell, it was their chaos, the Negroes and the police, not mine….

  “Say,” one of the officers said, inhaling noisily, “there must be a still hidden around here somewhere. There’s enough booze in the air to get a man tight.”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” the sergeant said. “Well, you can forget it; if we find something you’re not to touch it. Now let’s find this stiff.”

  “But Sarge, stills are more interesting than stiffs,” the policeman said.

  “Don’t you worry, the stiff will be still,” the sergeant said. He grinned, pleased with himself. “Come on, let’s have a look. The report said he’d be in the back room.”

  Then, as we reached the door, I could hear the sound of a man’s moaning voice issuing from somewhere in the depths of the room beyond.

  “Hell, Sergeant, there’s somebody alive in there,” one of the officers said.

  “Don’t you think I hear it?” The sergeant tried the door. “Open up in there!” he said.

  The moaning ceased. We waited.

  Silence.

  The sergeant pounded the panels. “Open in the name of the law!”

  Again silence. The officers looked at one another. The moaning resumed, “Aaaaaaaaaah….”

  “Sergeant, that stiff ain’t so stiff after all.”

  He rattled the doorknob. “Mr. Rockmore,” the sergeant called, “open up, we’re the police.”

  The moaning continued, a droning monotone. We waited.

  “See if you can get it open,” the sergeant said. “Hop to it. I’d hoped it would be simple.”

  “Break it in?”

  “Hell, no, pick it. Use your set of keys. Since he’s alive, we don’t want to scare him to death.”

  The officer opened a small black case, and I could hear the rattle of metal.

  “Sergeant,” I said, “did anyone see the attack?”

  “Not now, McIntyre. Not now.”

  “Did they see who the attacker was?”

  “Later, McIntyre …”

  “But what information do you have? How did the question of murder come up?”

  “Please, McIntyre, step aside and let the men get this door open. And you, Lawson, go around to the back and see if any windows are open.”

  I stepped aside, listening as one of the policemen left. As they began to pick the lock the moaning continued. It was slow, tedious work, and while they labored I grew nervous with waiting. Finally, I moved away and tried to make sense of the chaos around me.

  My eyes become partially adjusted to the blaze of light, and the wall before me seems to flicker like an early silent movie, its brightly colored lithographs creating a feeling of vertigo in which I fall back into a swirl of images of earlier times athrob somehow with the pain of neglected memory.

  A vague sense of humiliation came over me now, as though here in this obscure and unexpected part of one of our most historical cities someone had calculated to exhume much of what I knew about our past along with much which I either didn’t know or admitted only to partial recognition as a means of confounding me. Something told me to turn away, to return and watch the policemen pick the lock, but I couldn’t. I was looking straight ahead with squinted eyes when suddenly President Lincoln’s funeral cortege sprang from the glaring wall before me. Flag-draped and crepe-shrouded, it floated past with a creaking of camion and leather, the clink of chains. The lithographs had come sharply alive. General Robert E. Lee galloped past on Traveller, resplendid in broad hat and riding crop.

  John Brown marched past on his way to the gallows at Harpers Ferry, guarded by soldiers, while a slave mother held her baby above the crowd for Brown’s blessing. Brown’s face is sad, his eyes resigned, his bearded chin thrust forward as though baring his throat for the noose.

  A horse race thunders past, a contending of thoroughbreds and black jockeys in vivid silks, who ride with lengthened stirrups, their legs down-thrust in the style of earlier times when such as they rode in races. I read:

  THE FAMOUS PROCTOR KNOTT

  Pick Barnes Up

  Winning the first Futurity, 1888

  Dust stings my nostrils as the horses pound; I hear the spectators cheering from the stands, see the dark riders thrashing left and right with their riding crops as their splendid mounts carry them past me, rising and falling as in a dream.

  Now comes a line of gaudily dressed couples strutting a cakewalk, a flurry of plumed hats, feather boas, whirling ebony canes. White teeth flash in dark faces as the women high-kick in their gleaming shoes, touching agilely the silken top hats which the black beaus flourish above their heads with regal gestures. Wild melodies sound in my ears, evoking scenes of minstrel days:

  If you lak a-me

  Lak I lak a-you …

  Under the bam-

  boo-

  tree …

  They dance on with backwards slant, fading into a scene of two Mississippi riverboats, the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee, plowing past a levee—their smokestacks billowing, side wheels churning, the river white with spume—to the shouts of a crowd of black folk cheering along the levee….

  I turned away, stumbling over an old Edison phonograph with a large morning-glory horn encrusted with dust. A telegraph key, a Leyden jar, a tintype camera, a stereopticon viewer with a stack of early American views—Niagara Falls, Old Faithful, Jamestown, Virginia—lay on the floor. A small drum table held a stack of phonograph records topped by a badly scratched disk of the “Bearmash Blues” …

  Behind me one of the policemen said, “Look, Sarge, can’t we give it the old shoulder treatment?”

  “No, just keep working, you’ll solve it in a minute.”

  “Yes, but whoever’s in there could climb out the window by then.”

  “Don’t worry about it, the place is surrounded,” the sergeant said. “Now snap it up!”

  I moved around. The place was a pack rat’s burrow, an oddball treasure house, and as I inched my way through the narrow passages I was growing dizzier every second. Here was a Franklin stove supporting a huge framed portrait of Teddy Roosevelt attired in Rough Rider’s uniform. A full-length portrait of Senator Stephen A. Douglas looked out from the wall surrounded by a se
ries of escaped-slave notices. A playbill for April 14, 1865, announcing the last performance of OUR AMERICAN COUSIN with Laura Keene at Ford’s Theatre, hung beside it. The attraction for the following day was Miss Jennie Gourlay, and for the evening of April 15, a presentation of Boucicault’s “Great Sensation Drama, THE OCTOROON.”

  I moved on, only to be brought to a shuddering halt by a particularly repulsive example of a traditional cast-iron hitching-post figure in the form of a small blackamoor with dull black face, bright red lips, and popped thyroid eyes. An inverted chamber pot had been placed upon its head at a rakish angle, the handle resting just above one ear, and for a moment the popped eyes held me in what seemed to be a derisive interrogatory gaze; then I broke the spell by taking up the utensil and trying to translate the legends which had been painted upon it in a florid Italianate hand:

  Mange Bene

  Cacca Forte

  Vida Longo!

  UNA FURTIVA LANGRIMA

  which someone had translated in red grease pencil as, “Down her soft cheek here a pearly tear.”

  I returned the vessel to the iron-napped head, wondering if I were still a bit high, or actually seeing what I thought I saw. If not, where were all the fumes coming from—the fireplace? Could all this be as the policeman had suggested, a front for a bootleg operation? Could all this junk, these forgotten and discarded images, be the façade behind which some illegal operation has gone unnoticed, only now to run its opaque path to murder? How did one begin to think about such a place with its collection of things? Why didn’t they hurry and open the door! The fumes annoyed me. Perhaps, I thought, there is a still here with copper coil winding its tedious way between the walls and down to the basement, where drops of illegal distillant were collected—perhaps in a fireplace. Hidden spirits fuming to make a fire. But now, turning to inspect the fireplace behind me, I found an old iron safe bearing the incongruously placed advice: REMEMBER THY FATHER IN THE DAYS OF THY YOUTH in black-and-red-bordered letters of gold.

  The policemen had changed their tactics now and were thudding against the door with little effect as I moved past a series of lithographs and fading photographs of famous American Indians. Black Hawk and Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and Stumickosucks, Chief Joseph and Oceola, Crazy Horse and Little Hand. Here was a ceremonial scene of white men and Indians making the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit; a group of Plains Indians in full regalia posing with impassive dignity for some daguerreotypist of long ago, perhaps even Brady.

  Then came photographs of President Warren Gamaliel Harding and a group of friends—probably holding, as Harding might have alliterated, a “palaver on progress without pretense or prejudice or accent upon personal pronouns and without regard to perennial pronouncement and unperturbed by a people passion-wrought over the loss of promises proposed”—Albert Falls and Harry Daugherty were among them—taken at the time Teapot Dome was about to explode. It was Harding! Harding! Harding!

  Harding in white flannels, silk shirt, bow tie, and panama hat, playing croquet on the South Lawn of the White House; Harding on a balcony with ladies displaying wide hats and generous bosoms, waving to Easter-egg rollers on the lawn below; Harding taking the oath of office, his hand upraised, his face somber beneath neatly parted white hair. And earlier still, Harding in top hat and fur-collared coat smiling suavely as he waved grandly from a limousine to a crowd gathered along Fifth Avenue.

  I had begun to feel a poignant sadness over these reminders of the nation’s palmier days with their doctrine of normalcy, but then I was face to face with Jack Johnson, the notorious heavyweight boxing champion, whom certain sportswriters, and Sam, the waiter at my club, regard as an underground hero. Now he came toward me, broad-shouldered and tall, wearing a suit of giant houndstooth check, white turtleneck sweater, and round, flattopped cap of lion skin, gripping a clublike blackthorn walking stick midway its length, as he jogged along with majestic mein; Johnson stretched on the canvas at Havana, nonchalantly shading his eyes from the sun while the referee counts him out and Jess Willard, the triumphant white hope, moves heavily toward a neutral corner.

  The policemen were cursing loudly now as one of them backed into a pile of junk and set a huge music box to glangling a nostalgic nineteenth-century tune as I inspected a photo of Johnson dressed in a bullfighter’s costume, a “suit of lights,” as he posed with arms around the shoulders of Belmonte and Joselito, the great masters of the Spanish bullring, somewhere in Spain. And now Johnson tall and sinisterly graceful in fighting togs, his shaven, high-domed head bobbing and weaving as he taunts and punishes Jim Jeffries in defense of the championship—And then it was as though Johnson’s fist had burst from the wall and struck me full-face. Before me the hand of God was displayed reaching down in a glowing light from beyond the picture frame and the Holy Family showed forth with the dark skins and features of Negroes.

  The words “It’s heresy,” broke from my lips with the shock of it—but fortunately my voice was lost in the crash of splintering wood. Whirling, I made my way behind the policemen into a scene of such dissonant, brilliant, rowdy, and dream-like disorder as I’d never encountered even in a nightmare.

  Objects in the room seemed to flow, turning in a slow, tumbling motion of time as, behind me, the sound of splintering wood degenerated noisily and my eyes came to focus on a point near the rear of the high-ceilinged and brightly lit room from where, sitting upright in an ornate mahogany coffin which, in turn, rested high on a stout library table, an ancient Negro sat looking down in my direction. I seemed to fly out of my shoes then, rushing back past the lithographs and piles of junk in the room behind us and out through the dark vestibule into the rational dark of the street—but I was still there, staring.

  The front of the coffin pointed toward me at an angle from which I could see the old man’s prominent Adam’s apple exposed by the imperious thrust of his bearded chin. Then my eyes seemed to become detached and floating downward, like two flat wafer-thin rocks falling lazily in limpid water; dropping past the gleaming tips of a winged collar with purple ascot tie displaying the pearl of a stickpin in its folds, then slanting off to brush past the rough texture of an old-fashioned morning coat edged with braid, lingering lightly on a white feathered boutonniere in the shape of a Japanese rose, then falling past a pince-nez with thin-lensed and winglike disks of crystal glass which dangled on a delicate golden chain, to sideslip suddenly and fall like lead upon his ancient hands.

  Bony and long, these rested on the closed section of the coffin lid, which hid the lower part of his body, and held in death one half-empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey and a water glass in which four fingers of amber spirit showed. I was aware of labored breathing behind me as my eyes flew back to the face. And it was as though he had just thundered out against our intrusion in a voice so loud and indignant that I was forced to grasp his meaning from the eloquence of his expression alone. And it was in straining to understand that I suddenly realized that his wide, staring eyes were not focused at me, but through me, past me, and now I became aware of the other man.

  Wearing overalls and sprawling in a high-backed, slipcovered chair which faced the coffin on the left, he was pointing with a wavering arm toward the man sitting above us, his mouth working meaninglessly above a guttural moan.

  I moved then, stepping around to see his face, when one of the policemen gave explosive voice to my own amazement:

  “What the hell,” he yelled. “What’s going on here?” And something frightening and dangerous in his voice spun me around, sending the microphone from my tape recorder slapping sharply into my crotch as it fell from its case, and I grabbed it, flicking it on just as I looked past his shoulder and saw the woman.

  Back across the polished floor and behind the door—which explains how we missed her upon entering—she knelt with her golden hair fanned out across the upholstered seat of an early American Chippendale chair. Her backside greeted us like some reluctantly rising moon—completely bare except for a crude and inadequate ski
rt, which had been threaded together from, of all things, a series of old twenty-dollar gold certificates. These were of the type withdrawn from circulation many years ago, and must have amounted to a small fortune. But there they were, greeting us like a badly wilted sunburst. And our shock and embarrassment held us rigid, as though we were, indeed, watching the death of the sun.

  Suddenly the sergeant whirled around to a cluster of dark faces which were now peering in at the doorway, his face flaming.

  “Tillman,” he yelled, “get these people out of here and hold every one of them, you hear me! Every single damned one of them!”

  Tillman moved off and he turned to the woman then, and with a look of profound distaste and much effort, got her giggling and squirming ticklishly into the chair and covered with his jacket. Whereupon she gave a drunken smile which exploded into a moist hiccup, breaking my enchantment, and I returned my attention to the man in the coffin.

  Approaching him now I saw that the coffin was in an advanced stage of decay; and here, according to the moaning man, lay the beginning of the whole fantastic development. Jessie Rockmore, the man in the coffin, had undergone the loss of his lifelong religious conviction, had fallen into profound disillusionment, because time, life, and termites had reduced his coffin to a hollow shell! Yes! this was the start of a chain of events which had dragged me from my bed. A man lives long enough to outlast the usefulness of his coffin, but instead of rejoicing and taking pride in his longevity, he loses his lifelong faith. Our Negroes are indeed a strange people!

  Nor was the moaning man an exception. When the sergeant began questioning him he had to be reassured that yet another man, a white man (whom no one else had seen), was no longer present in the building. Only then did he try to pull himself together, helped by sips of whiskey which the sergeant sloshed generously into his glass. Then, as we stood in a semicircle between him and the man in the coffin, he looked at each of us with wavering eyes and nodded his head.