Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  (Preach, Bliss. That’s the true Eatmore now. Go get it!)

  I say that Man ran! Ran in his headlong plunge, in hectic heathen flight, stumbling over acres of roasted swans and barbecued turkeys and great geese—yes, Lawd!—great geese that fed on wild butternuts and barley grain—imagine, ignored and lost for centuries now but then there they were, cooked in that uncurbed fire. Yes, and God laughing at the godly joke of prideful, ignorant, limited Man.

  For, Dearly Beloved, Man in his ignorant pride had called for that for which in his Godlike ambition he was unwilling to suffer. So, having asked and received that for which he asked, he fled with ears that heard not and eyes that saw not, ran screaming away from this second Eden of fire, headlong to the highest hill he fled. He leaped out of there like popcorn roasting on a red-hot stove and with his nose dead to all that scrumptious feast God had spread for his enjoyment.

  Now what should he have done? What was Man’s mistake?

  HE SHOULD have asked for WOOD! That’s what he should have asked! Because give a man wood, and he will learn to make his own fire! But manlike he asked for a gift too hot to handle. Yes indeed! So he bolted. He ran. He fled headlong to the highest hill. Yelling, Fire! Fire! Fire, Lawd! Then gradually he realized what had happened and Man yelled Ho! This hot stuff that’s nipping me on my heels, this is fire!

  This wind that’s scorching my shoulder, is fire!

  This heat that’s singeing my head bald is fire!

  Yes! He yelled it so strong that God remembered in His infinite and mysterious mercy that now was not His time to destroy the world by fire and sent down the water from the rocks.

  Yes, brothers and sisters, He sent down the cooling water. He unleashed the soothing spring within the heart of stones that lay where the wild red roses grew. Up there, up yonder, where the bees labored to bright humming music as they stored their golden grub. And He, God the Father, did give Man another chance. Ah, yes.

  For although in his pride Man had sacrificed whole generations of forests and beasts and birds, and though in the terror of his pride he had raised himself up a few inches higher than the animals, he was moved, despite himself he was moved a bit closer, I say, to the image of what God intended him to be. Yes. And though no savior in heathen form had yet come to redeem him, God in His infinite mercy looked down upon His handiwork, looked down at the clouds of smoke, looked down upon the charred vegetation, looked down at the fire-shrunk seas with all that broiled fish, looked down at the bleached bones piled past where Man had fled, looked down upon all that sizzling meat and natural gravy, parched barley, boiled roasting-ears and mustard greens…. Yes, He looked down and said, Even so, My work is good;

  Man knows now that he can’t handle unleashed hell without suffering self-destruction! The time will come to pass when he shall forget it, but now I will give him a few billion years to grow, to shape his hand with toil and to discover a use of his marvelous thumb for other than pushing out the eyes of his fellow-man. After all, I put a heap of work into that thumb of Man. And he’ll learn that the index and second fingers are meant for something other than playing the game of stink finger and pulling his bow. I’ll give him time, time to surrender the ways of the beasts to the beasts, time to raise himself upright and arch his back and swing his legs. I shall give him time to learn to look straight forward and unblinking out of his eyes and to study the movement of the constellations without disrespecting My essential mystery, My prerogatives, My decisions. Yes, it will take him a few billion years before he’ll discover pork chops and perhaps two more for fried chicken. It will take him time and much effort to learn the taste of roast beef and baked yams and those apples he shall name Mack and Tosh.

  Until then he will only know charred flesh and a little accidental beer. And if he ever learns to take the stings along with the sweets, I’ll let him have some of that honey those bees he’s busy slapping at down there are storing up right beside him. He’ll come to love it even as much as the burly bears and long before he learns about bear steaks and kidneys, and he’ll take it from the hollow trees and learn to take his stings and like it. Yes, and I’ll give him a little maize and breadfruit and maybe a squash or two. And it won’t be long before he’ll live in caves and then he’ll start to worshipping me in magic and conjuration and a lot of other ignorant foolishness and confusion. But in time Man will learn to eat like a man and he’ll rule his herds and he’ll move slowly toward the birth of Time.

  Oh Yes, but now Man is but a babe, hardly more than a cub like the children of the bear or the wolf. And like these he soils himself. It will take him a few million years of a few seconds of My time. I shall watch and suffer with him as he goes his arduous way, and meanwhile I shall give him wood and I shall send him down a ray of light, send him a bright prismatic refraction of a drop of crystal dew and then onto a piece of dry wood and Man will in time see the divine spark and have his fire.

  Give a man wood, and he will learn—to make fire. Give him a new land and he will learn to live My way.

  Yes, and it took all that time, brothers and sisters. Man went on starving amid plenty; thirsting in the midst of all that knowledge being spelled out for him by the birds, the beasts, the lilies of the field. But in time the smoke cleared away and it all came to pass….

  The Senator’s voice was silent now, his eyes closed.

  Hickman shook his head and smiled. Amen, Bliss. You haven’t forgot your Eatmore and you haven’t forgot the holy laughter. I like that about the gift of roast pork, though I think Eatmo’ used to throw in some pigs’ feet and lamb chops. Yes, and those luscious chitterlings. And when he did he could make them cry over the sad fact of Man’s missing such good grub out of his proud ignorance. He was a joke to some but a smart wordman just the same. He knew the fundamental fact, that you must speak to the gut as well as to the heart and brain. Then they’ve got to hear you one way or the other. Eatmore did all that, sure, but it’s been a long time and you smoothed up his style a bit. Ole Eatmore had mush in his mouth too, ‘til he worked up to the hollering stage, then it didn’t really matter what he said because by then he was shaking them like the Southern Pacific doing a highball. By the way, you were signifying about that new state, weren’t you?

  Yes, but they were so surprised by the sermon that they forgot they were in a new state.

  Bliss, the old man laughed, that was a pretty mean thing you did, springing Eatmore on those folks. But the last part was true. Even here in this aggravating land God gave Man a new chance. In fact, He gave him forty-eight new chances. And He’s even left enough land for a few more—though I

  think by now the Lord’s disgusted…. Well, don’t let me get started on that;

  but how about Greater Calvary, Bliss, was that you too?

  Ay, it was I, the Senator said. Yes, I was doing what I had to do at that time in that place. I stood there grown tall, but they didn’t recognize me. My elbows rested where my hand couldn’t reach in the old days, and I looked above their heads and into their hopes. They’d managed a stained-glass window divided into four equal parts and the strawberry light caressed their heads. They’d sweated and saved themselves an organ too, and it rose with its pipes behind me. In the floor at my feet, showing between the circular cut in the red carpet, I could see the zinc edge of the baptismal pool. Looking out at them from behind my face I had the sensation of standing on a hangman’s trap, with only the rope missing. And later, I thought of it as the head of a drum because it throbbed beneath me. I made them make it throb…. So yes,

  it was me, do I have to go on?

  I know what you mean by the throbbing, Reverend Hickman said, because I’ve been there myself. I’ve made that whole church throb. The Word is a powerful force. Go on, Bliss, tell me.

  So I knelt down like I’d seen you do when you were about to take over another man’s pulpit, and when he came close to touch me with his hands he was chewing cinnamon to cover the fragrance of his morning’s glass of corn…

  Sudden
ly the Senator struggled upward, his eyes wild as Hickman rose quickly to restrain him. “Bliss, Bliss!”

  “Corn! Corn whiskey and the collection and the pick of the women! And you wouldn’t even allow me ice cream…. In all that darkness, undergoing those countless deaths and resurrections and not even ice cream at the end….”

  Hickman restrained him gently, a look of compassionate surprise shaping his dark face as the Senator repeated as from the depths of a forgotten dream, “Not even ice cream,” then settled back.

  “Steady, Bliss, boy,” Hickman said, studying the face before him. The little boy is still under there, he thought. He never ran way from him. “I guess that must have been my first mistake with you. It wasn’t my teaching you the art of saving souls before you were able to see that it wasn’t just a bag of tricks, or even failing to make you understand that I wasn’t simply teaching you to be another trickster or jackleg conman. No, it was that I refused to let you have a payment. You wanted to be paid. That was probably the first mistake I made. You coulda saved more souls than Peter, but you got it in your mind that you had a right to be paid—which was exactly what you weren’t supposed to have. Even if you were going down into the whale’s belly like Jonah every night. It wasn’t that I begrudged you the ice cream, Bliss. It was just that you wanted it as payment. But that was my first mistake and yours too. Now you take that preacher, he probably took that drink of corn to help him reach up to the glory of the Word, but he took it before he preached, Bliss. And that made it a tool, an aid. It was like the box, or my trombone. But you now, you wanted the ice cream afterwards. Every time you preached you wanted some. If you said ‘Amen,’ you wanted a pint. Which meant that you were trying to go into business with the Lord….

  “I should have explained it to you better, and I sure tried. But, Bliss, you were stubborn. Stubborn as a rusted iron tap, boy. Well, I’m a man and like a man I made my mistakes. I guess you looked at the collection plates and got confused. But, Bliss, that money wasn’t ours. After all these years I’m a poor man. That money went to the church; for the widows and orphans. It went to help support a school down there in Georgia; and for other things. So you went off for ice cream? Is that it? Is that why you left us? Come on now, we might as well talk this out right here because it’s important. Anything you hold in your heart after so long a time is important and this is not time for shame.”

  The Senator was silent for a moment, then he sighed.

  “Meaning grows with the mind, but the shape and form of the act remains. Yes, in those days it was the ice cream, but there was something else….”

  “It had to be, but what?”

  “Maybe it was the weight of the darkness, the tomb in such close juxtaposition with the womb. I was so small that after preaching the sermons you taught me and feeling the yawning of that internal and mysterious power which I could release with my treble pantomime … Oh, you were a wonder, if only in quantitative terms. All the thousands that you touched. Truly a wonder, yes. I guess it was just too much for me. I could set off all that wild exaltation, the rending of veils, the grown women thrown into trances; screaming, tearing their clothing. All that great inarticulate moaning and struggle against what they called the flesh as they walked the floor; up and down those aisles of straining bodies; flinging themselves upon the mourners’ bench, or rolling on the floor calling to their God…. Didn’t you realize that afterwards when they surrounded and lifted me up, the heat was still in them? That I could smell the sweat of male and female mystery?”

  “But Bliss—all small children and animals do that….”

  “Yes, but I had produced it. At least I thought I had. Didn’t you think of what might be happening to me? I was bewitched and repelled by my own effects. I couldn’t understand my creation. Didn’t you realize that you’d trapped me in the dead center between flesh and spirit, and that at my age they were both ridiculous?”

  “You were born in that trap, Bliss, just like everyone was born in it. We all breathe the air at the level that we find it, Bliss.”

  “Yes, but I couldn’t put the two things together. Not even when you explained about the Word. What could I do with such power? I could bring a big man to tears. I could topple him to his knees, make him shout, crack him up with the ease with which shrill whistles split icebergs. Then when they gathered shouting around me, filling the air with the odor of their passion and exertion the other mystery began….”

  “What was it, Bliss? Was it that you wanted the spirit without the sweat of the flesh? The spirit is the flesh, Bliss; just as the flesh is the spirit under the right conditions. They are bound together. At least nobody has yet been able to get at one without the other. Eatmore was right….”

  “Yes, but back there between my sense of power and the puzzling of my nose there were all those unripe years. I was too young to contain it all.”

  “Not your power, Bliss; it was the Master’s. All you had to do was live right and go along with your God-given gift. Besides, it was in the folks as well as in you.”

  “Well, I was in the middle and I was bringing forth results which I couldn’t understand. And those women, their sweet …”

  Hickman was silent, his gaze suddenly turned inward, musing.

  “Bliss, come to think about it, it just dawned on me where you might be heading. Didn’t you misbehave once on the road somewhere?”

  Suddenly the Senator’s expression was that of a small boy caught in some mischief.

  “So you knew all along? Did she tell you?”

  “She told me some, but now I’m asking you.”

  “So she did after all. How old was she, Daddy Hickman?”

  “Well sir, Bliss, I thought you’d forgot you used to call me ‘daddy.’ “Hickman’s eyes were suddenly moist.

  “Everyone did,” the Senator said.

  “Yes, but you gave me the pleasure, Bliss. You made me feel I wasn’t a fraud. Let’s see, she must’ve been thirty or so. But maybe only twenty. One thing is sure, she was a full-grown woman, Bliss. As grown as she’d ever get to be. She was ripe-young, as they used to say.”

  “So. I’ve always wondered. Or at least I did whenever I let myself remember. It was one of your swings around the circuit and she’d taken me to her house afterwards. A tent meeting on that old meeting ground in Alabama.”

  “That’s right.”

  “… That they had been using since slavery days. Thinking about it now, I wonder why they hadn’t taken it away from them and planted it in cotton. I remember it as rich black land.”

  “It wasn’t taken because it was ours, Bliss. It used to be a swamp. The Chocktaws had it before that but the swamp took it back. So then we filled it in and packed it down with our bare feet—at least our folks did—long before we had any shoes. Sure, back in slavery times we buried our dead out around there, and the white folks recognized it as a sacred place. Or maybe just an unpleasant place because of the black dead that was in it. You been on the outside, Bliss, so you ought to know better’n me that they respect some things of ours. Or at least they leave them alone. Maybe not our women or our right to good food and education, but they respect our burying grounds.”

  “Maybe,” the Senator said. “It’s a game of power.”

  “Yes, and maybe they’re scared of black ghosts. But you ought to know after all this time, Bliss, and I hope you’ee tell me sometimes…. Anyway, boy, it was out there. You remember what it was, don’t you?”

  “The occasion? It was another revival, wasn’t it?”

  “Course, it was a revival, Bliss—but it was Juneteenth too. We were celebrating Emancipation and thanking God. Remember, it went on for seven days.”

  “Juneteenth,” the Senator said, “I had forgotten the word.”

  “You’ve forgotten lots of important things from those days, Bliss.”

  “I suppose so, but to learn some of the things I’ve learned I had to forget some others. Do you still call it ‘Juneteenth,’ Revern’ Hickman? Is it
still celebrated?”

  Hickman looked at him with widened eyes, leaning forward as he grasped the arms of the chair.

  “Do we still? Why I should say we do. You don’t think that because you left…. Both, Bliss. Because we haven’t forgot what it means. Even if sometimes folks try to make us believe it never happened or that it was a mistake that it ever did….”

  “Juneteenth,” the Senator said, closing his eyes, his bandaged head resting beneath his hands. “Words of emancipation didn’t arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth.” So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.

  No, the wounded man thought, Oh no! Get back to that: back to a bunch of old-fashioned Negroes celebrating an illusion of emancipation, and getting it mixed up with the Resurrection, minstrel shows, and vaudeville routines? Back to that tent in the clearing surrounded by trees, that bowl-shaped impression in the earth beneath the pines?… Lord, it hurts. Lordless and without loyalty, it hurts. Wordless, it hurts. Here and especially here. Still I see it after all the roving years and flickering scenes: Twin lecterns on opposite ends of the rostrum, behind one of which I stood on a wide box, leaning forward to grasp the lectern’s edge. Back. Daddy Hickman at the other. Back to the first day of that week of celebration. Juneteenth. Hot, dusty. Hot with faces shining with sweat and the hair of the young dudes metallic with grease and straightening irons. Back to that? He was not so heavy then, but big with the quick energy of a fighting bull and still kept the battered silver trombone on top of the piano, where at the climax of a sermon he could reach for it and stand blowing tones that sounded like his own voice amplified: persuading, denouncing, rejoicing—moving beyond words back to the undifferentiated cry. In strange towns and cities the jazz musicians were always around him. Jazz. What was jazz and what religion back there? Ah yes, yes; I loved him. Everyone did, deep down. Like a great, kindly, daddy bear along the streets, my hand lost in his huge paw. Carrying me on his shoulder so that I could touch the leaves of the trees as we passed. The true father, but black, black. Was he a charlatan—am I—or simply as resourceful in my fashion. Did he know himself, or care? Back to the problem of all that. Must I go back to the beginning when only he knows the start?