Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “She said, ‘Oh, don’t go to that trouble, doll; I see just the thing I need, right there on the floor.’

  “So there it was. Juiced as she was, she knew what she was after all the time, and in a few minutes she’d done grabbed up some of those goldbacks and strung them on a piece of thread and held it up for Mister Jessie to see. She asked him how he liked it, and he said, ‘Miss Duval, I’ll leave the details to you. If you like it then I’m happy that some use has been found for the stinking stuff. All I’m waiting for is to see you dance.’

  “She told him, ‘Doll, you just wait until I change. The number I do is a killer. I guarantee you won’t be disappointed. Once when I was in the Follies, doll, I was put into a big pie covered with meringue and all done up with cellophane and a big pink ribbon and a bow. And don’t you think those Wall Street aristocrats weren’t surprised when the host cut the crust—he was in the Stock Exchange, doll—and I came stepping out. You should’ve seen me then, doll. I broke out and struck a pose, and every man at that banquet table drank champagne out of my boot. And I must admit, I was lovely, doll. You may ask how do I know I was lovely, but every lovely woman knows that she’s lovely. It’s all part of being lovely. Besides, the men won’t let you forget it. It gives them the glad eyes and the feelie-feelies! The pie was really a Baked Alaska, doll, and I stepped out wearing an ermine chubby and white leather boots with fur tops and an ermine muff. I was a queen, doll, and all those millionaires knew it. I danced slowly down the center of the table, letting them take me all in, and there was a row of waiters dressed in red uniforms with braid and white gloves, like in England, standing back of each of the chairs, popping corks of big magnums of champagne and serving it like water. It sounded like the Fourth of July, doll, and it wasn’t only corks that were popping out either, there were a few eyes popping along with them. I did the shimmy, like this, doll, smiling down, and I tell you I won them all—only I played no favorites, doll, I was there for all to enjoy…’

  “Mister Jessie raised his hand then, looking all straight-faced and solemn, and said, ‘Miss Duval, I’d really appreciate seeing you dance,’ and she said, ‘Sure,’ and struggled out into the other room.

  “She was in there a while while me and Mister Jessie sat here drinking, not saying anything, him up there and me right where I am. I tried to warn him about his money but he wouldn’t let me talk, and then she came back wearing nothing but those goldbacks.

  “Gen’lmens, you’ll have to pardon me for having to say it, but when she came twisting through that door on those high-heeled shoes, she had spread out so much behind and was so hung down up front that I dropped my eyes and they swung right back up again just like the needle in a compass when you turn it fast from south to north. And Mister Jessie—he sat up in that coffin and took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes, and I coughed and almost strangled on a sip of whiskey.

  “Said: ‘Miss Duval, is that you?’ And she said, ‘Yes, doll, the one and only, in the very flesh. Don’t you think my costume’s a darling?’ And Mister Jessie looked at her awhile and shook his head, and then he said real loud, ‘Dance, Miss Duval, dance!’

  “And I could see him break out in a sweat, and I broke out too, because man and boy, up in the country and down in the town, down home and up north, I’d never expected to see anything like that in my whole life.

  “So she started trying to dance and, gen’lmens, it was like what they call a ‘ca’astrofee.’ Juiced as she was and with all those goldbacks hanging around her belly, she was like somebody made out of soft rubber and no bones. She held out her arms and tried to do a waltz step, but she couldn’t make it. Those high heels kinda scrounched on the floor and she skidded, and with that, every pound of her started swinging. Then she held up one arm while she put her other hand on her hip and tried to strut like she was something grand to look at, but she was too juiced to do even that good. Then she started to walk a few steps, and throwing her head back over her shoulder and posing like Miss Theda Bara used to do—only she’s too juiced to hold any of them poses for long, and Mister Jessie was looking down at her all absorbed like a judge listening to a murder trial. And the next thing I know, she’s trying to do a split—and that’s when it happened….”

  McMillen paused then, taking a gulp of whiskey.

  “Will you quit stalling and tell us what happened before the coroner gets here?” the sergeant said.

  “Yes, suh!” McMillen said. “I’m going to tell you. She’d just started to stick out her legs and was sliding down heel and toe when the doorbell rang, and she stopped and tried to come out of it but she was too far down to make it and she plopped on her side, cussing a blue streak and started to turn with her legs in the air, and I heard Mister Jessie yell, ‘McMillen, answer the door.’ And at that, I pulled myself together and wiped my face and went past her out through the other room to see who it was. Then just as I reached the door, it came open and this white man comes in….”

  “What white man?” the sergeant asked.

  “The same one I asked you if he was still here,” McMillen said.

  “And how did he get in?”

  “He walked in. I guess I must have left the door unlocked, or I got up and buzzed, but I swear I don’t recall doing it. But anyway, this white man is here, and late as it is he wants to see Mister Jessie about something he heard that Mister Jessie had bought from some old house down South. I tried to tell him that Mister Jessie was busy and wouldn’t do no business at that time of night, but he pushed past me like he was somebody important, and when he saw that lady over there with her heels in the air and all those goldbacks flapping, it was like somebody had cool-cracked him with an axe handle. He hadn’t seen Mister Jessie yet because he was sitting so high, nor had Mister Jessie seen him, because he was so busy watching Miss Duval. But when he did see him he let out a yell and said, ‘You, sir! What are you doing in my house?’

  “And the man, he said kind of agitated-like, ‘I’m here to make a purchase.’ And Mister Jessie said, ‘Purchase, hell; this is a party, and I don’t want no goddamn yellow Negroes in my house!’ And the man stopped short and turned red, and he said, ‘But I’m not colored.’ And then Mister Jessie reared back in his coffin, and said, ‘So I don’t want no goddamn white folks in my goddamn house—What do you think of that? Now get the hell out!’

  “Then the man saw what Mister Jessie was sitting in, and his eyes got big and he started to sputter, and all at once he said a mighty strange thing….”

  We waited now while McMillen shook his head bemusedly.

  “You all will have to remember that I was pretty juiced by now, but I swear that the man said something like, ‘What are you doing in my coffin!’ ”

  “He said WHAT?”

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” McMillen said, “but that’s what it sounded like to me. And when he said that, Mister Jessie liked to blowed his top. He was looking at the man and his mouth was working and all at once he yelled something about, ‘Now I recognize you—you’re that throat-cutting’ so-and-so, and he called a name; but Mister Jessie was so mad that he just messed it plumb up. He blew a hole straight through it like when you let out a yell with a mouthful of soda crackers. But the man got it just the same, and when Mister Jessie called it I could see that white man step back and turn pale, then he whirled around like he’d been hit by a forty-five and he started for the door.

  “Mister Jessie was cussing and yelling for me to grab the man—which I wasn’t even thinking about doing—when the lady over there, she grabbed the man’s ankle from where she was splitting on the floor, and he dragged her along for a couple of yards like she was on a sled. I don’t think that she was trying to stop the man for Mister Jessie, though; she was just juiced and acting a fool. She said something about, ‘Wait there, good-looking, and watch me do my number,’ and the man was cutting out and Mister Jessie was trying to get out of that coffin like it was on fire.

  “He was yelling, ‘Let’s discuss the issue
s, you jacklegged highbinder! Let’s consult the record!’ and his face was red and those tendons in his neck were all roped out like they were about to bust. Then the man kicked Miss Duval off his ankle and got the door open, and Mister Jessie gave a lunge, trying his level best to get out of the coffin and just then he fell back, still yelling at the man like he had blowed his top. I guess that’s when the stroke hit him, and that was that.”

  “What do you mean, ‘That was that’?”

  “I mean that’s about all I know about what happened.”

  “What did he call the man? Can’t you recall the name?”

  “No, suh, I can’t. I had been holding on to my liquor for so long and trying to protect Mister Jessie’s interests that, by then, with all that hell done broke loose, and with that important-looking white man probably gone to call y’all, I figured I might as well let go my holt. I do remember that later somebody come in and opened the door and let out a scream while I was trying to phone the doctor. And when he didn’t answer, I closed the door to the room and locked it. Then I come back and tried to bring Mister Jessie to, poor fellow, but he was long gone. So I just got myself another drink and sat back down and passed out. I don’t know what you want to do to me now, but I don’t know no more and I can’t tell you any more. And that’s that.”

  The sergeant gave McMillen a long, flabbergasted look, then turned toward the man in the coffin and shook his head, cursing softly under his breath.

  “Aubrey,” he said, “I want you to think back and consider this carefully: What kind of name did your friend call the white man?”

  “He called him a jacklegged highbinder—”

  “No, I mean his surname.”

  McMillen moved his head slowly from left to right, emphatically. “I don’t remember what he called him. He was so mad, he just sputtered like a preacher shouting a sermon. All I know is that it didn’t sound like any ordinary name.”

  “Did it sound foreign? Russian or Chinese?”

  “No, suh, at least I don’t think so.”

  “How do you know? Had you heard it before?”

  “Now that’s what has me puzzled, I have a feeling that I have—Yes, suh, I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard it before, but I figured that I must’ve been hearing through my whiskey, and that’s why I can’t recall it. Because what would a man with an important name be doing coming here to this house at that time of night? Don’t nobody set out to buy anything that Mister Jessie sells at that time of night. And we ain’t got no whores or dope pushers or anybody like that living here. So naturally I figured that I was either drunk or dreaming.”

  Suddenly the door to the outer room came open, and I looked back to see the frowning face of Officer Tillman.

  “Sergeant,” he called, “could you step out here a moment?”

  “Not now,” the sergeant said, “I’m busy.”

  “I understand, but I’ve got a fellow out here who says he’s got a message for someone named McMillen. He claims he’s a minister, but I’ve got a notion that he’s here to buy some booze. I thought you might want to question him—”

  “Who’s that out there looking for me?” McMillen interrupted.

  “I’ll ask the questions!” the sergeant said.

  “Yeah, but that man’s signifying that I’m selling whiskey, and I want to know who it is.”

  “What shall I do with him?” Tillman called.

  “Hold him along with the others, and I’ll have a look at him as soon as I’m finished here. Now close the door!”

  “Booze,” McMillen mumbled. “Somebody is lying on me, and I want to know who it is.”

  He looked at me as the door was closed. I could hear voices but caught no glimpse of the new arrival. Then the sergeant resumed his questioning, and while I listened I found myself staring at Miss Duval.

  Sprawled in the chair with Tillman’s jacket across her lap, she appeared asleep, but I was prepared to see her open her eyes at any moment and say something to send the sergeant into a sputtering rage. How on earth had she come to this state? I wondered. And in what Harlem had she learned to speak that semi-underworld Negro idiom? Had it been through an act of rebellion? Of love? And now, despite a certain fastidiousness of taste, I found myself drawn to Miss Duval, lifted out of myself as it were, fascinated by certain challenges and possibilities of actuality which she seemed by her presence and rowdy disorder to suggest. I felt in the presence of unacceptable mysteries. My face was ablaze, and my imagination plunged into a vortex of vague, unformed emotions and fleeting images: my mother dressed in a white pique dress and floppy hat, cutting long-stemmed roses in the garden on a summer afternoon long ago; Sara Delano Roosevelt wearing a choker of pearls and a great fur piece which rippled luxuriantly in the wind along Pennsylvania Avenue as she passed in a chauffeur-driven car with top back; three bridesmaids in pastel dresses, holding bouquets in a Gilbert and Sullivan “Three little maids from school are we” attitude as they posed for a photographer whose head was far hidden beneath the folds of a black camera cloth; Mae West in a Lillian Russell hat, walking her famous Westian walk….

  I wondered how it would be to know such an experienced woman who had, apparently, abandoned the known and accepted paths of society and come to explore the forbidden places that existed within those realms of chaos which seemed, to all appearances, there in Jessie Rockmore’s strange house, to be boiling and steaming within everything which we regard as solid, stable, and respectable. Under our blaze of lights, perhaps these darknesses steadily explore us, I thought. The deep, the dark, the forbidden seek out our uncertainties when our guards are down….

  And what would McGowan make of Miss Cordelia Duval, and who was the real woman behind that unlikely name? Did McGowan know of the existence of such women, or did his strongly held views prevent him from seeking them, from even recognizing their existence? He held that girlie magazines lead to social disorder because they unmask woman’s mystery, but Miss Duval, sprawled in her goldbacked frill of a skirt, seemed far more mysterious to me than had she been fully clothed. Indeed, she was covered by a texture of mysteries. There was a mystery behind the language she used and behind the account of her past as reported to McMillen. Yes, she was a tangle of fleshy mystery even if McMillen’s story turned out to be a lie. She repelled and attracted, attracted and repelled, and I wondered if the mystery of murder lay somewhere behind her rowdy conduct, her presence here. What if she and McMillen had actually done the old man in and then placed him in the coffin?

  I was in a sweat now, realizing that it was almost morning and that I would have to file my story for the early edition, but drawn to her and finding myself edging over to where she slouched, even as the sergeant’s interrogation resumed behind me.

  She must have felt my presence, for now she looked up.

  “Why in hell don’t you two-bit gumshoes leave Uncle Tom alone?” she said, regarding me through slitted eyes. “The poor bastard’s told you everything there is to know. Why don’t you go and find that stuffed shirt who got Dad over there excited? Everything was going fine. He ruined my number and everything else when it was all going fine. I never knew it to fail, jus’ let me come near a spook and everything comes unraveled….”

  “Miss Duval,” I said, “did you recognize the man?”

  “Hell, no, but it was probably some prowling drunk looking for a spade broad to change his luck, or trying to find his mama masquerading as a coal-shuttle blonde.”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. What’s so strange about that? Luck is luck, and you no-good men all believe in magic.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  She sat up, smiling. “Oh, doll, don’t be so square—Say, did I tell you about the spook I had one time?”

  “No,” I said, “but do you think that you could recognize the man who was here?”

  “Recognize him? I want to forget that bastard. Come here,” she said, beckoning coquettishly. “Jus’ a lil closer, doll …”

/>   I approached her, feeling a mounting confusion.

  “Doll,” she said, “would you believe it, I had a private spook for a while, and I swear, he was the damndest man who ever kicked off a pair of shoes and punished a bed. That spook was simply awful. Not that he didn’t know his business, he did. He spook-handled everything—the cops, the johns, the bellhops, madams, and everything. And he took care of me fine. But that’s not what I mean. My point, Dad, is that the spook didn’t have any rules or laws. That’s what the problem was, doll. Damned spook would do anything just because people said a spook will do anything. ‘N when I say anything, I mean anything! He jived a society broad into setting him up in a penthouse, then he went for her seventy-year-old sister and messed it up. The sister’s husband didn’t like the idea, you see. That spook was a true phenomenon, doll.

  “Why, one day I came home and discovered that he had killed my pet canaries and parakeets because they wouldn’t let him sleep—which although brutal was understandable, doll; but then the spook went on to bake them in a pie with pigtails, sweetbreads, and bell peppers. Doll, that spook was an ee-nig-ma!”

  She yawned, then studied me with a mocking expression. “Know what else he did, doll?”

  “No, Miss Duval.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you; just bend down, doll; with those clowns over there listening, I have to whisper what that crazy spook did.”

  I leaned toward her now, seeing Tillman’s jacket slip as she raised herself and as her face wavered up to mine. I hesitated.

  “Doll, are you a damned faggot or something? You want me to tell you or not? Hell, you act like you’ve never been close to a real woman before.”

  And then, as I bent closer, reaching out to grasp the chair arm, Miss Duval threw her arms around my neck and pulled me toward her. Whereupon a quite unbelievable thing occurred: She kissed me. First my lips and then my eyes, and as I turned my head and tried to get away, she giggled and ran her tongue into my left ear, and I felt the hot, moist shock of it as she released me and fell back into the chair, laughing.