Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Are you one?

  One what? she answered me, turning her face with her eyes dreaming a smile. What’re you talking about, Mister Man?

  You, I said. Are you a teasing brown?

  She laughed and I could feel her coming to me in waves, heavy around me, soft like hands pressing gently along the small of my back, sounding the column of my spine. I breathed her in, all the ripeness, all the sweetness, all the musky mysterious charm and the green afternoon approving. She smiled, her eyes turned up to mine, her irises soft as scuppernongs in their gentle, bluewhite orbs.

  It must have been some ole blues singer you learned that from, she said.

  Maybe so, you’re probably right, but are you?

  I’m brown, and that’s a plain fact for anybody to see, she said. And the full black eyes were on me, now, softly laughing. But I’m not teasing anybody. I’m the country one, Mister Big-city Man. Mister Moving-picture Man. You teasing me. Don’t you like brown-skinned folks?

  Now just what do you think, I said.

  I think a lot of things, she said, but—

  She smiled again and the whole afternoon seemed to swing around her glossy head. I breathed deeply the blossoms and sunlight and there was a sigh in it. I thought, Here is the place to stay, grow up with the state, take root…. Yes, here. Come, come. She pointed:

  You want to go down yonder under those trees? It looks to me like a fine place to lay the spread.

  Yes, I said, swinging the basket in my hand. Yes, I want to go anywhere you say, Miss Teasing Brown, yes I do. He was trying to break out of my chest. Bliss, fighting me hard. But you’re looking at me, she said. Look down yonder where I mean, she pointed. See, under that tree with the blossoms.

  A fine peach fuzz of hair showed on her leveled arm, almost golden in the sunlight.

  It’s fine, I said. Just the place for a time like this.

  A bee danced by as on a thread. I felt a suspension of time. Standing still, my eyes in the tree of blossoms, I let it move through me. Eden, I thought, Eden is a lie that never was. And Adam, his name was “snake” And Eve’s? An aphrodisiac best served with new fresh oysters on the half shell with a good white wine. The spirit’s there…. She arose she rose she rose up from the waves.

  Mister Man, she said, you sure have a lot of sleep in your voice.

  And her laughter was gay in the afternoon stillness. There, of itself shaping and making the quiet alive. And suddenly I wanted to say, Hey, I’m Bliss! I’m Bliss again, but there’s hell in me. There was no alienation ringing in that laugh, so I joined her, startling the quiet. We laughed and laughed. I picked up a smooth stone and sent it sailing, a blossom bursting as it was kissed by a bee. Dreamer, I said, I’m full of dream—

  And we came through the park-like space, into shade and out again, her cool skin touching mine. Touching and leaving and coming again unselfconsciously, skin-teasing skin in gentle friction. Damn Bliss! And she was a fragrance mixed with the spicy odors of the park-like space broken by light and shadow. My purpose too. And I thought, Turn back now. Now is the time, leave her and go West. You’ve lingered long enough, so leave before complications. So I thought. But Bliss said Come. Come. And I turned turtle and tried to sing. Suddenly she said,

  Look!

  And there beneath a bush I saw a white rabbit, its pink nose testing the air before its alerted, pink-veined ears. It watched us moving by, frozen beneath a flowering shrub.

  That’s somebody’s Easter bunny lost out here in the woods, she said. I hope nothing gets him ‘cause he don’t look like he knows how to take care of himself. There’s foxes and hawks out here. Even evil ole wildcats. Poor little ole thing.

  And I was disturbed with memory. Sister Wilhite had nicknamed Bliss “Bunting,” a bird. But some of the kids had changed it to “Bunny,” a rabbit, and this had led to fights. I had been lost too, in Atlanta—but later. I thought, He’ll be all right, innocence is its own protection—or would be in the snows. Hey, Rev Hickman, gospel truth or pious lie?

  We went on, in the shade now, the light softly filtering the high-branched trees, her shoulder touching my arm and that wave of her enfolding me as cool mist clings to a hot hollow at twilight; my mind saying, No, this is enough; leave now. Leave the moment unbroken in its becoming. Fly before you fall, flee before you fail…. And then I stumbled over the buried stone and heard her saying,

  Watch out there, Mister Movie-man.

  And I felt her hand upon my arm and I could not breathe. Then we moved on and I fought Bliss for my arm to keep in its place against my side, denying that sweet fugitive fulfillment. And somehow there were three of us now, although only two were actually within the trees, Bliss inside me but still I felt the stranger following. Twice I turned but couldn’t see him. I should have run.

  Pink blossoms were thick in the tree, the petals scattered broadside upon the grass, and as I breathed them in the fragrance mixed wildly with her own and that cool touching and going of her peach-brown arm sang in me like passionate words whispered in a dark place. Who spread the petals along our path? my mind asked, who arched this afternoon above our heads? And looking down at her feet twinkling in and out below her long, ankle-length skirt, I said, How beautiful are your feet in shoes, Miss Teasing Brown.

  She stopped and looked at me full face, a question in her dark eyes.

  You’re the tease, she said. I think you’re laughing at me, Movie Man. Though he was part Cherokee my papa wasn’t no prince and you know it. You see, I know where those words come from.

  I looked at her, suddenly cold, and from far back I could hear a voice saying, Reveren’ Bliss, do you preach Job? And I thought, Give Job back his boils, he deserved them as I saw the sparks in her eyes’ black depths. I said,

  No, no, I’m not laughing at all. To me they are beautiful, princess or no princess. And it doesn’t take a Solomon to say how beautiful are thy feet in sandals.

  I don’t know about you, she said, I swear I don’t know about you, Mister Movie-man.

  There’s nothing to know, I said. I come like water and like wind I go—only faster. I laughed, remembering:

  Said a rabbit to a rabbit

  Love ain’t nothing but a habit

  Hello there, Mister Rabbit.

  You’re fast, all right, she said, kneeling and looking up past my head to the sky.

  There’s not a cloud to be seen, she sighed.

  That’s how it was, no clouds, only tall trees filtering the sunlight back across the clear space and the blossoms above. Standing there I watched her remove the cloth from the basket and begin spreading it upon the grass.

  Why don’t you sit down and stay awhile, she said, patting a place for me.

  I sat, watching with my chin resting upon my knees as her hands came and went, removing sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper from the basket, placing them on the cloth.

  These here are chicken, she said, and these ham, and these are Texas hots.

  And there were boiled eggs wrapped in twists of paper like favors for a children’s party; and tomatoes, and a chocolate cake and a thermos of iced tea with mint leaves and lemon slices floating in it. She served with a gentle feminine flair I would have denied her capable of. I was on dangerous ground.

  Do you like a drumstick, she said. Men usually like the drumstick, though we also have the breast.

  I prefer the drumstick, I said. Do you know many men?

  More than we have drumsticks. More than we have breasts too. She broke off. What you mean, do I know many men?

  Thanks, I said. It was crisp and flaky, a nice weight in the fingers. I mean beaux, I said.

  Boy beaux but no men beaux. They all been boy beaux, Mister Movieman, and they don’t really count. Lord, I almost forgot the cole slaw. Here it is in this mayonnaise jar. Let me help your plate to some.

  I watched her, thinking wildly, What would happen to this natural grace under coaching? With a formal veil placed between it and the sharp world and all the lessons learned and carrie
d out with this native graciousness to warm the social skills? Not a light against a screen but for keeps, Newport in July, Antibes with the proper costumes. Saratoga. Could she fly right? With a sari, say, enfolding her girlish charm? What if I taught her to speak and not to speak, to parry in polished tone the innuendoes dropped over cocktail crystal? To master the smile in time that saves lines? With a diamond of a certain size on that slender hand. Or an emerald, its watery green in platinum against that peach-brown skin. Who blushed this peach?… Did the blight I brought begin in fantasy? There was a part in her black hair, her scalp showed clearly through.

  I said, The chicken is wonderful. How’d you get it so flaky?

  I cooked it ‘til it was done, she said. She made a face at me. How’d you learn to make moving pictures?

  Oh, that’s a secret, I said.

  Frying chicken is a secret too, she said.

  I laughed. You baked the bread too, is that a secret?

  Uh huh, sure I did. Most folks do their own baking in this town—only that’s not a secret.

  It’s almost as good as the chicken, I said.

  Thank you, Mister Movie-man. It’s right nice for you to say so. But I won’t believe you unless you eat a lot. There’s plenty and I expect a man to eat like a man.

  And suddenly I had dressed her in a pink sari, swathing her girlish form in Indian silk, a scarlet mark of caste on her forehead, and me in tails and turban of immaculate white observing her with pride as now her head goes back with gay burst of laughter, her throat clean and curved and as alive as a robin’s, following some polished shaft of wit. No, the turban a mistake for me but the sari for her, yes. Gold brings out the blue of blue eyes. A gold turban for me. Walking her along Fifth Avenue with all the eyes reacting and she no flapper but something more formed, more realized, more magically achieved, and the crowds’ imagination whirling like these blossoms tossed in a whirlwind and blown in the million directions of their hopes, hates, fancies, dreams, and we, she and I, become all things to all minds, drawing out their very souls, their potentialities set athrob by the passage of our forms through their atmosphere, sending them ever seeking for some finer thing. Angels and swine and bearers of divers flags and banners becoming more and less than themselves in the vortex of our ambiguity…. Thoughts like these while before me she nibbled a chicken wing undreaming of my wildness. Ah, my fair warrior, my cooing dove, we’ll create possibility out of rags and bones and hanks of hair; out of silks and satins and bits of fur, out of gestures and inflections of voice and scents orchestrated funky sweet; with emphatic nods and elusive sympathies and affirmations and every move to all of them a danced proclamation of “I believe you can, I know you can; we can in faith achieve the purest dream of our most real realities—look upon us two and be your finest possibilities.”

  Why are you looking at me like that, she said.

  And there she was again, before me with her warm, high-cheeked face tilted to one side in question, the fine throat rising out of the white blouse, brown, be-peached, as alive and expressive as any singing bird’s. She wore a small gold watch pinned to her waist and her napkin was tucked there and I said, I was dreaming. Did you realize that you make men dream?

  Her mouth became a firm straight line beneath her smiling eyes.

  You sitting here eating my fried chicken and can tell me you’re dreaming? And her head went back in a girlish pout. You give me back my something-to-eat this very minute!

  But it’s all part of the dream, I said. You and the blossoms and the lunch and the weather. All we need is some cold watermelon or perhaps some peach ice cream.

  She arched her eyebrows and shook her head. Now just listen to him. Sounds like he wants everything. I can’t figure you out, Mister Movie-man, she said.

  What do you mean?

  The way you talk sometimes. Once in a while you sound just like one of us and I can’t tell whether you mean it or just do it to make fun of me.

  But you know I wouldn’t make fun of you. You know I wouldn’t….

  I hope not, she said, but you do sound like us once in a while, especially when you get that dreamy look on your face….

  I haven’t noticed, I said. I just talk as I feel.

  Well, I guess you feel like us—every once in a while, I mean. Can I ask you a question?

  Anything at all, Miss Teasing Brown, I said.

  She smiled and lowered her sandwich. Where’d you come from to here, Mister Movie-man?

  From different places back East, I said.

  Oh, she said, I kinda thought so…. You not from Chicago?

  Never been there, I said. And looking at her nibbling the sandwich, her soft eyes on my face, I thought of some of them. We had had a rough time, coming through all of that cloudburst of rain, having to avoid the towns where I might have been recognized and the unfriendly towns where the oil rigs pounded night and day, making the trip longer and our money shorter and shorter. Getting stuck in the mud here and having engine trouble there, the tires going twice and the top being split by hailstones the size of baseballs and almost losing all of the equipment off a shaky ferry when we crossed a creek in Missouri. Still, there was some luck with us—my luck or maybe Karp’s—I have always honored my luck—and we managed to keep the film and the equipment dry and the patches and the boots held on the tires until we reached her town. But on our way, moving through the Ozarks and the roads steep and rocky and having to push the car out of ruts and Karp complaining of ever having left the East and complaining, as we strained and sweated in the mud, against all the goy world and all our troubles were goy and our journey goy and goy our schemes; complaining all the way of what we did and now several times a millionaire with air immaculate and still complaining only now more pious. But then along the way Donelson goaded him on: Why the hell, Sweet Jesus, did you ever leave Egypt and all those spades? Why didn’t you stay and lay Pharoah’s second best daughter and make another Moses? Put your back into it, Jew boy. Act like a white man for once.

  And having to step between them…. What would she have made of it, the glamour she longed for locked in such grubby circumstance? Driving them as I was driven and some towns suspicious and others without the proper places to work and the people uninterested or the days without sun and the long hot stretches of green green green with no thoughts beyond continuing and little shade—Amen! Then back there in the town where Hickman had taken me long ago, a stop on the endless circuit and Donelson trying to get permission from the warden to shoot scenes (We cain’t use them we’ll sell them to Griffith or Zukor, he said) but getting nowhere. We were lucky they didn’t keep us there, what with that cross-eyed bass drummer recognizing Donelson and dropping his cymbal and yelling Hey Rube! from the bandstand and how were Lefty Louie and Nick the Greek? How do you know them, I said. Lester Donelson said, Places where I’ve been there’s always a Lefty Louie and a Nick the Greek. And in the hotel the whores were all so ladylike, with high style airs and comic bitchery and the bellhops black….

  Except for the fat, baldheaded, full-lipped captain whose pale, milky skin was so dense with freckles that he looked like a white man who’d rusted in the rain three days after drowning. He had our number when we first walked in, though how much of it I couldn’t tell, but when I looked at him the spots seemed to detach themselves before my eyes and move to a tango rhythm across his broad expanse of face—Da de dum dum—and back again. His eyes casing me as though to say, I know and you know that I know, so what are you going to do about it? I slipped him a five we couldn’t afford and I swear those spots returned each to its alloted place—muy pronto.

  Thank you suh! he said. It’s awfully white of you.

  He knew all right, and he knew someone important too, selling white women and bootleg whiskey to the leading white citizens and the drummer trade and to a few not-so-leading black ones who slipped in unctuously wearing starched waiters’ jackets with the buttons missing. Yes, suh! and donating good sums of money to the Afro-American Episcopal Missi
onary Society and to a finishing school for young black upper-class ladies in Baltimore. He had it made all right, with certain complications of adjustment it’s true, but made. He could have taught us all. Should find the bastard, make him a career diplomat. Chief of Protocol. He trained them all to Southern manners. Smarter than most men in the House—any house. I kept away from him while we waited for sun and opportunity in that town in which he appeared to be the only one with a capacity for fantasy. Dominated by those high gray walls and the freedom of both those inside and out seemed to be measured in days marked off on the calendar. I’m number so-and-so and I know my time and knowing my time I know the who-what-why-wherefore of me. No dreams, please. Well, so much the worse for you…. We tried everyone from the Chamber of Commerce to the bootleggers and no one interested in backing us in bringing a little poetry to the town. We almost starved. Broke and cooking beans in our room, patching and pressing with a secret iron borrowed from one of the girls until her pimp threatened Donelson and I was forced to do once more that which I said I’d never do again. But we were hungry and the memory of Eatmore came to the rescue. That was long ago. Grant and forgive us our agos. Amen. We left before dawn, half drunk and unwashed and our bills unpaid, slipping into the damp streets by the baggage entrance, past seven stacks of pulp magazines abandoned by the drummers—Argosy, Blue Book, Ace, and Golden Book being saved by the baggage man for the kids in his neighborhood—agent of cultural baggage, doing what he could to keep them reading, stopping on the outskirts of the town as the light grew and buying cheese and crackers in a lamplit general store where the men on the road gang bought their lunch. That smell of hogshead cheese, that greasy counter, that glass case with trays of dull penny candy. John Deere plows set in neat bull-tongued rows on a side of the porch and the boxes for benches the barrels the drums the baby crib, well used from its yellow pad, a string of pecans strung end to end for a teething toy was dangling; that great crock of lye hominy setting on the counter looking white and sinister and garnished by a single blue-tailed fly yet making me twinge for home—Hickman? There were shelves of prison-made shoes and peg after peg hung with prison-made harness—Donelson, I said, shoot those horse collars hung round the walls, they’re frames for portraits of future Presidents. Yeah, he said, I know a few bastards who’d look pretty natural with their heads stuck through one of those; the mayor, the mine owners, the Chamber-pots-of-Commerce gang. And near Holdenville getting those shots of the motorcycle circling the overflow embankment around the storage tank in the refinery yard, leaning toward the parallel and his eyes like set points of madness behind his goggles, led low close over the handlebars, roaring as though intent upon circling there forever…. movie tycoons visit city was the headline, and there we were looking out from page one, my arms across their shoulders and all three looking dashing, and devil-may-care, each with goggles on forehead and each with an air of potency, mystery. The camera in the foreground. It made it easy and I kept things simple, a pageant dedicated to the founding of the town with all the old-timers parading past the camera on horseback, or in buckboards, then sitting before the courthouse in funeral-parlor chairs and an Indian or two in the background. Shot everything from low angles to make them tall and imposing, and the fire engines I made half a block long. Holdenville, yes, the weather was fine and Holdenville couldn’t hold us. No, but what we made there was lost in Ponca City. Roustabouts, Indians, 1,001 ranch hands, and Wild Bill Tillman in the flesh in a white suit and white Stetson and astride a white horse every hour of every day in the streets. Yes, but in the middle of a roaring circus who has time for silent scenes? Donelson went wild in the town, getting hot on the dice and winning a thousand then losing our stake before they cooled him off. Then when he asked to see the dice they threw him into the street. There was hardly enough money for gas, then Karp to the rescue, found a cousin who helped us on our way. And what a cousin, walking around in a blanket, a bullet-smashed derby, and a necklace of rattlesnake buttons, selling snake oil and mustard plasters. Morris, the Osage Indian Jew, of whom Karp disapproved. Listen, Morris said, here there’s no minyan in fifty miles, so what if I temporarily joined another tribe? And let me tell you something, wise guy: I been scalped like the best of them!