Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Obviously, I thought, he used it as a means of controlling aggression: perhaps a device of sublimation. A mechanical compensation for powerlessness of a kind….

  “Yes, sir,” he said, “if Sunraider hadn’t driven me into a corner, I’d still be rolling away from things that drag me.”

  I said, “Mr. Minifees, in his speech the Senator referred to the design of American automobiles. He felt they were excellent; would you have anything to say along that line?”

  “Well, there are some I wouldn’t use to haul hogs in, but that Cadillac was different. You have to give it to those people, when they say they make a fine automobile, then by God they make a fine automobile. Anyway, that Caddy of mine gave me pleasure whenever I looked at her because I knew that she was something that had been put together, as fine music written by a fine composer for fine musicians. Looking at her could work on me the same way as watching a speckled puppy playing with an India-rubber ball, or a young colt racing across a field of Kentucky bluegrass.”

  “Very interestingly put,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “Yes, to me that Cadillac was to other cars what good jazz is to noise. And to my own music she was what a curly-haired brown-skinned woman wearing gold earrings, red patent-leather sandals, and a blue gingham apron with a big bow tied behind is to the groovy blues. You know, they kind of naturally go together….”

  “It was really quite important to you,” I said, “an aesthetic as well as a utilitarian value….”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Minifees said. “It was all of that, but now it’s gone and I’m free.”

  Free, I thought, free! What would M. Vannec think of that? Minifees was too much for me. He’d allowed himself to destroy something precious in reaction to a deranged old woman and an irreverent and reckless senator, and now, sitting in a cell, he could speak in this darkness of freedom! I yearned to see his expression, wished that he’d turn on the light. Somehow he had rearranged reality in his mind in such a way that he could believe that Sunraider’s insult had set him free, and he was not complaining of the cost. I didn’t know how to continue the interview, for standing there, I felt in the presence of one taken over by the lucidity of madness. One who by a strange dislocation of values had come to see things, events, with an unreal clarity of vision. What would he do now? Where could he go, and what would happen to his music—or did his “far-out” jazz, as Charleston called it, actually foreshadow his present state of mind? I couldn’t stand it. I wasn’t prepared for it and wouldn’t have been even if I hadn’t been exhausted by all of the wild events which had exploded since he burned his Cadillac.

  Nor was I helped when, now from across the room, I heard him sit up and say quite loudly, “Oh, Lord, there goes my boy Clyde again!”

  I heard it then and turned, staring toward the door. From somewhere beyond the corridor a high, piercing tenor voice had begun to quaver of all things, the ballad of John Henry:

  Oh, the hammer that John Hen-nery swung

  It weighed over nine cold pound’

  John Hen-nery broke a rib in his left-hand side

  And his guts fell on the ground, Lord, Lord!

  So they took John Hen-nery to the White House,

  And they buried him in the sand

  And every locomotive that comes roaring by,

  Says there lays that steel-driving man,

  Lord, Lord!

  Says there lays that steel-driving man!

  It was a mocking, hallucinated voice which made the hair stand up on the back of my neck, and I knew that in a matter of minutes it would bring nurses and attendants to the floor and I’d be caught in Minifees’ cell.

  “Man, you’d better cut out of here,” Minifees said, moving forward. Then the door was opening, and I was relieved to see the silhouette of Charleston standing before me.

  “Goddamn, McIntyre,” he said, “I thought you’d be through in here and gone! Are you and LeeWillie trying to lose me my job?”

  “No, I was just leaving,” I said, brushing past and hearing the voice clearly now as it sang,

  Oh, I’ll tell you the story of Chickenshack Ernie

  He painted a rooster on his Cadillac car

  Was a grand entrepreneur, this Chickenshack Ernie,

  Whose chicken fried, was praised near and far….

  “Git, man,” Charleston said behind me. “And you’d better hit those stairs before that singing fool does it for you! Besides, things have begun to happen downstairs. Sunrainder has come to and is trying to make them bring that big fellow who was sleeping into his room. Who is that sonofabitch, anyway?”

  “That,” I called over my shoulder as I ran down the corridor, “is Alonzo Hickman.”

  “Hickman? HICKMAN!” he said. “Well, I’ll be damn!”

  I ran for the stairs and plunged down three steps at a time, passing a startled nurse as I reached the floor below, and moving as fast as I could go, I made for the next floor, only to fall, knocking myself senseless for a moment, then, getting to my feet, hurtled down the next—only to arrive just in time to see Hickman’s broad shoulders disappearing inside the Senator’s room.

  Cursing myself, Charleston, Minifees, and fat, I watched the door come to, then slumped on the bench again, exhausted. For all I’d learned, I might have spent the time trying to interview the gunman’s body in the morgue. Now I’d simply have to wait. But at least the Senator was still alive….

  BOOK II

  EDITORS’ NOTE TO BOOK II

  Book II is the most thoroughly worked over and revised section of Ellison’s unfinished second novel. A partial draft of 185 pages survives in which the manuscript breaks off halfway down the last page in the middle of an episode—indeed, in mid-paragraph, with a line hastily scribbled in the writer’s hand: “trying to make the blackness go all away.” This typescript is quite likely the same manuscript from which Ellison edited all but the first two scenes of “And Hickman Arrives” in 1959 for the first issue of Saul Bellow’s The Noble Savage (1960), the first selection he published from the then novel-in-progress.

  That partial typescript tracks and anticipates much of what Ellison went on to accomplish with Book II. In its four-page version of the book’s beginning, the long speech Senator Sunraider gives on the Senate floor in subsequent drafts is merely alluded to as Ellison cuts quickly to the assassination. In later versions Ellison includes the Senator’s speech, expanding the opening scene first to eleven pages and then, in the most recent surviving typescript, which was much revised, to some twenty-four pages. (Both the four-and eleven-page versions are included in Part III of Three Days.) Published here, the longest version is evidence of Ellison’s revision and expansion of Book II from the early sixties until at least 1986, when, according to Mrs. Ellison’s handwritten note, her husband took the latest, most complete typescript to their rebuilt summer home in Plainfield, Massachusetts.

  Published in the present volume, this 355- page typescript is the longest version of Book II as well as the most recent. That being said, pages 319 to 352 (pages starting here and ending here in this volume) appear considerably less revised and polished—less settled on—than pages 1 to 319; also, the text has handwritten pagination and a handwritten notation by Ellison (“follows Book II”) in the top right corner. Interestingly, Ellison filled out this episode from Book II in the computer-generated narrative “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” There are also other partial surviving typescripts of certain episodes from Book II, in particular the visit to the Lincoln Memorial by Reverend Hickman and his congregation before the assassination of Senator Sunraider.

  Publication of Book II, both in Juneteenth and in this volume, was informed by the fact that Ellison made extensive revisions in pencil on his carbon copy of pages 1 through 284 of the latest, most complete typescript as well as some—fewer, but still some—revisions on the original manuscript. In some cases there is reworking of the same passage. In these instances our editorial judgment has had to do due diligence for a definiti
ve reading of Ellison’s intention since neither the original typescript nor its carbon are dated, and since there is no clear evidence of the order in which Ellison penciled in his changes or even whether he revised either manuscript completely before turning to the other. Finally, we would note that no original manuscript survives of pages 285 through 355; on these pages Ellison’s revisions were made to the carbon. Like the two excerpts from Book I published in Ellison’s lifetime, we have published the four selections he published from Book II in an appendix, presenting those episodes in the present volume as they appear in his last surviving typescript of Book II.

  With respect to Book II and Juneteenth, it should be noted that the chapter breaks of Juneteenth are space breaks in Book II, that pages starting here and ending here of Book II, as published here, are not included in the Juneteenth narrative, and that the narrative sequence of Book II was shifted at several points during the editing of Juneteenth.

  Book II shows Ellison working with the voices and perspectives of Reverend Hickman and Bliss/Sunraider in an antiphonal call-and-response form common to the black church. He also renders each man’s inner life in silent interior monologues reminiscent of Faulkner, Joyce, and other high modernists. More than Book I or any of the computer sequences, Book II tells the story of the two protagonists in what becomes a call-and-response between action and brooding interiority. The two men often keep in silent touch with each other “on the lower frequencies” of memories triggered by connections in the present, connections one man pursues and the other tries unsuccessfully to evade. Finally, though, even with the end seemingly in sight, Ellison does not bring the story told in Book II to closure any more than he did those stories he began so bravely in the other sequences of the second novel.

  … SUDDENLY, through the sonorous lilt and tear of his projecting voice, the Senator was distracted. Grasping the dimly lit lectern and concentrating on the faces of colleagues seated below him behind circular, history-stained desks, his eyes had been attracted by a turbulence centering around the rich emblazonry of the Great Seal. High across the chamber and affixed midpoint the curving sweep of the distant visitors’ gallery, the national coat of arms had ripped from its moorings and was hurtling down toward him with the transparent unsubstantiality of a cinematic image that had somehow gone out of control.

  Increasing alarmingly in size while maintaining the martial posture of tradition, the heraldic eagle with which the Great Seal was charged seemed to fly free of its base, zooming forward and flaring luminously as it halted, oscillating a few arm’s lengths before the Senator’s confounded head. There, pulsating with the hallucinatory vividness of an eidetic image, the rampant eagle aroused swift olfactory memories of dried blood and dusty feathers and stirred within him, as by the motion of swift silent wings, fragmentary images of warfare tinged with conflicting details of heroism and betrayal….

  Stepping instinctively backwards and fighting down an impulse to duck, the Senator managed by benefit of long practice to continue the smoothly resonant flow of his address, but before what appeared to be the product of an insidious practical joke contrived to test his equanimity a cascading weakening of muscular control. For now, armed of beak and claw, the barred inescutcheon shielding its breast and the golden ribbon bearing the mystic motto of national purpose violently aflutter, the emblematic bird quivered above him on widely erected wings—while the symbolic constellation of thirteen cloud-encircled stars whirled furiously against a spot of intense blue which flashed like cold lightning above its snow-white head.

  Shutting his eyes in a desperate effort to exorcise the vision, the Senator projected his voice with increased vigor and was aware of distorting the shape of what he had conceived as a perfect rhetorical period. But when he looked again the eagle was not only still there, but become more alarming.

  For at first, clutching in its talons the ambiguous arms of olive branch and sheaf of arrows, the eagle’s exposed eye had looked in profile toward the traditional right, but now it shuddered with mysterious purpose, turning its head with sinister smoothness leftward—until with a barely perceptible flick of feathers two sphinx-like eyes bored in upon him with piercing frontal gaze. For a breathless interval they held him savagely in mute interrogation, causing the Senator to squint and toss his head; then, with the stroke of a scimitar the curved beak carved the air. And with its wingspread thrusting upward and the feathers of its white-tipped tail flexed fanlike between feathery, wide-spread thighs, the eagle was no longer scrutinizing his face but staring blandly in the direction indicated by its taloned clutch of sharp-pointed arrows.

  Alarmed by the image’s stubborn persistence, the Senator felt imprisoned in an airless space from which he viewed the placid scene of the chamber as through the semi-transparent scrim of a theatrical stage. A scrim against which the heraldic symbols in whose name he served flashed and flickered in wild enigmatic disarray. And even as he forced himself to continue his address, he was aware that his voice was no longer reaching him through the venerable chamber’s acoustics but now, sounding muted, metallic, and stridently strange, through the taut vibrations of his laboring throat. Leaning forward and controlling himself by grasping the lectern, he recalled the famous cartoon which presented a man struggling desperately to prevent a huge octopus from dragging him into a manhole while a crowd thronged past unnoticing. For despite the disorder within his vision, the chamber appeared quite normal. Listening attentively, his audience was apparently unaware of his distress.

  In whose name and under what stress do they think I’m speaking? the Senator thought. For whose hidden interests and by what manipulation of experience and principle would they hang the bird on me?… But now upon a flash of movement from above the eagle appeared to leap aloft, reducing the rich emblazonment of the Seal to an exploding chaos of red, white, blue, and gold, through which the Senator’s attention flashed to the distant gallery—where with the amplified roar of his echoing voice he became aware of a collectivity of obscure faces, staring down….

  Anonymous, orderly, and grave, they loomed high across the chamber, receding upward and away in serried tiers, their heads protruding slightly forward in the tense attitude of viewers bemused by some puzzling action unfolding on a distant screen which they were observing from the tortured angle provided by a segregated theater’s peanut gallery. And as his words sped out across the chamber’s solemn air the faces appeared to shimmer in rapt and disembodied suspension, as though in expectation of some crucial and long-awaited revelation which, by affording them physical completion, would make them whole. A revelation apparently even now unfolding through the accelerating rhythms, the bounce and boom of images sent flighting across the domed and lucid space from the flex and play of his own tongue, throat, and diaphragm….

  The effect upon the Senator was electric. Reassured and pleasurably challenged by their anonymous engrossment, he experienced a surge of that gaiety, anguished yet wildly free, which frequently seized him during an oration, and now, as with a smooth shifting of emotional gears, he felt himself carried swiftly beyond either a concern with the meaning of the mysterious vision or the rhetorical fitness of his words onto that plane of verbal exhilaration for which he was notorious. And thereupon, in the gay and reckless capriciousness of his virtuosity, he found himself attempting to match that feat, long glorified in senatorial legend, whereby through a single flourish of his projected voice the orator raises his audience to fever pitch and shatters the chamber’s windowpanes.

  Do that, the Senator thought, and without a single dissenting Heh-ell-naw! the gentleman from Little Rock will call for changing the outlandish name—of Arkansaw!

  Stifling an upsurge of laughter, the Senator plunged ahead, tensing his diaphragm to release the full resonance of his voice. But as he did so it was as though his hearing had been thrown out of phase. Resounding through the acoustics of the chamber it was as though it was being controlled by the stop-and-go fluctuations of a hypersensitive time-delay switch, forcin
g him to monitor his words seconds after they were uttered and feeding them back to him with a hollow, decaying echo. More puzzling, he became aware that between the physical sensation of statement and the delayed return, his voice was giving expression to ideas the like of which he had never articulated, not even in the most ambiguous of rhetorical situations. Words, ideas, phrases, were jetting from some chaotic region deep within him, and as he strived to regain control it was as though he had been taken over by some mocking ventriloquistic orator of opposing views, a trickster of corny philosophical ambition.

  “But … but … but … now … now … now …,” he heard, “let let us consider consider consider, the broader broader implication … cations of of our our current state. In this land it is our fate to be interrogated not by our allies or enemies but by our conduct and by our lives. Our … ours … ours is the arduous burden burden … den privilege of self-regulation and self limitation. We are of a nation born in blood, fire, and sacrifice, thus we are judged, questioned, weighed—by the revolutionary ideals and events which marked the founding of our great country. It is these transcendent ideals which interrogate us, judge us, pursue us, in terms of that which we do or do not do. They accuse us ceaselessly and their interrogation is ruthless, scathing, seldom charitable. For the demands they make of us are limitless. Under the relentless pressure of their accusation we seek to escape the intricate game-work of our enterprises. We make for the territory. We plunge into the Edenic landscape of our natural resources. We seek out the warm seacoasts of leisure, the quiet cool caverns of forgetfulness—all made possible by the very success of our mind-jolting revolution and the undeniable accomplishments of our labor and dedication. In our beginning our forefathers summoned up the will to break with the past. They questioned the past and condemned it and severed themselves from its entangling tentacles. They plunged into the future accepting its dangers and its glories. Thus with us it is instinctive to evaluate ourselves against the examples of those, humble and illustrious alike, who preceded us upon this glorious stage and passed on. We are a people of joy and anguish. Our joy made poignant by our anguish. Of us is demanded great daring, great courage, great insight, prudence, and even greater self-discipline.