Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “What about the noses?”

  “You mean trunks. They’re about the same.”

  They were strung out like fat boys moving around the ring holding trunk to tail.

  “How about those lions?” I said. The man in the white-and-gold coat and the shiny boots was shooting a pistol in the air and waving an ice-cream-parlor chair at the lions.

  “What do you mean, Bliss?”

  “I mean, where do they come from?”

  “They’re from Africa too, little boy.”

  I looked at the lions, sitting up on some stools with their lips rolled back, snarling. One struck at the air with his paw, like Body trying to shadowbox. The man snapped the whip and he stopped. I said,

  “Why don’t they catch him?”

  Daddy Hickman was bent forward, looking hard.

  “Why don’t they catch him?” I said.

  “They’re mastered, Bliss. He’s scared them. They could destroy him like a cat with a mouse if they weren’t scared. But that’s the test of his act. He can outthink them from the start because he’s a man, but in order to get in there with those animals and master them he has to master his nerves.” He laughed. “Bliss, you can’t tell it from up here, but he’s probably popping his whip and shooting off that pistol at his own legs about as much as he’s doing it at the lions. Because sometimes the trainer makes a mistake and that’s it, the lions take over. But we don’t want that to happen, do we? It’s enough to know it’s a possibility. Is that right, Bliss?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Now the man was popping the whip and making the lions gallop around in a circle, while he stood in the same spot, making them gallop around and around him. I said,

  “Could you do that, Daddy Hickman?”

  He laughed and looked down at me.

  “What’s that, Bliss?”

  “I say could you make those lions do like he’s doing?”

  “No, Bliss, I’m only a man tamer. Lions are not in my line.” He laughed again.

  “Daniel could,” I, Bliss, said.

  “Yes, but Daniel wasn’t a lion tamer either, Bliss. It was the Lord who controlled those lions. What Daniel had to do was to have faith.”

  “But don’t you have faith?”

  “Sure. But if the Lord ever wants to test me with a lion, He’ll do it, Bliss. And He’ll put the lion in my path. I won’t have to go looking for him. I don’t think he intends for me to go bothering with these lions. Would you want to get in there with them?”

  “Uh-uh—No, sir. I’m too little.”

  “What if you were big, Bliss?”

  “Maybe. If I was as big as you I might.”

  “What if they were little lions?”

  “That would be better. I’m not afraid of little ones. How long do you think it took that man to learn to scare them?”

  “I don’t know, Bliss. He probably started when he was your age. Maybe he started with dogs, little puppies or little kittens…. Look yonder, Bliss, here come the clowns. My, my! Now watch this, you’ll like the clowns.”

  He was smiling.

  They came through the tent flap in a burst beneath us, all dressed up in funny clothes. I could see down on top of their heads. Seven clowns, one of them short and black, another tall and skinny in underwear and a fat one wearing a barrel, running to the center of the tent, and they were hitting one another over the head with clubs that exploded and sent flowers and birdcages shooting out of their hats and heads, while the black one runs in and out, holding on to his britches with one hand and hitting at them with the other like a girl, a washerwoman, in and out between their legs. Then the others were turning and hitting him on the head and each time they hit he dropped his britches, showing his short bowed legs and his flour sack drawers with printing on them and a big red star in the center and one of them hits him there with a big paddle and he sounds like a hoarse jackass, hoarse and disrespectful early in the morning, while he skips around trying to pull up his britches and falls and turns a flip and gets up and rolls and skips and runs real fast, still holding on. Then the one with the big red nose pulls out a big mallet and hits him on his head and he squashes down to his knees and a big red rooster flies out and runs squawking around in the ring with the others chasing him over the sawdust and he hits him again and again, real fast, and hams and sides of bacon and cabbage and spurts of flour and eggs start falling out of his clothes and he starts running out of his bloomers and a clown dog drops out and starts barking and chasing him along with the others and him skipping and running and turning double flips and more chickens squashing out and a little pink clown pig with a black ring around one eye and the whole tent is laughing while the big clowns are hitting one another with the eggs and hams and sides of bacon and it sounds like the Fourth of July. He was just my size.

  “Why does he just run, Daddy Hickman?”

  He was laughing. I pulled his sleeve.

  “What’s that, Bliss?” Tears were running down his cheeks from laughing.

  “Why does he always run?”

  “Because that’s his part in the act, Bliss.”

  “But why can’t he hit and see what he can knock out of them?”

  “That would be good, too, Bliss. But he’s acting his part. Don’t you like him? Listen to how all the folks are laughing. These are real fine clowns, Bliss.”

  “I don’t like him,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like him to be hit all the time. It would be better if he hit them. They’re hitting him because he’s the littlest. Are they real people?”

  “Of course, Bliss. What’s wrong with you? I bring you to see the circus and to have a good time so you can see the clowns and you asking if they’re people.”

  “What kind of people are they?”

  “People. Humans.”

  “Like us?”

  “Sure, Bliss. Look at that little dog do his act.”

  He was walking on his front legs.

  “Colored?” I said.

  “Oh—” He gave me a quick look. “No, Bliss, they’re white folks—at least as far as I know. Look at the little dog, Bliss.” He was doing a backflip now.

  “Back there some were Germans,” he said. “Billy Kersands is colored but you haven’t seen him. But they’re supposed to be funny, Bliss. That’s the point. This is all for fun. So when we laugh at them we can laugh at ourselves.”

  I looked at the little one. “Him too?” I said.

  “Sure, he’s just short, a dwarf.”

  “I mean is he white?”

  “Sure, Bliss. Don’t you feel good? You think you want to go to the toilet?”

  “No, sir, not now. Is that little one really white?”

  “Sure, Bliss. Of course that’s not the point. He’s a clown. He’s there to make us laugh just like the rest. That’s burnt cork he’s wearing on his face. Underneath it he’s white.”

  “Is he a grown man like the others?”

  “Of course. Look a-there, he’s turning flips. See, there he goes. Now there’s what you wanted to see. He’s hitting the great big fellow. See, Bliss, he’s hitting him on his feet and the big one is hopping around. Look, look, there’s a stalk of corn growing out of the shoe where he hit him. Oh, oh, the others are chasing him again, look at him go! Right under that elephant!”

  I watched. He, the little one, was running around the circle now, with the little clown pig under his arm, feeding it from a baby bottle.

  The little pig was still after the bottle as they chased him out of the tent and everybody was laughing. Then the band started playing and two horses galloped in with women standing on their backs in very short flip-up skirts and shiny things in their hair, and down at the center of the tent the music was going and I could see the band master swaying in time as he played a short little horn. They were pretty ladies on horseback and they bowed up and down and turned flips in the air and came down still on the backs of the cantering horses, all in time with the music and t
heir little skirts flipped up and down like a bird’s tail or a branch of peach blossoms swaying in the wind. I wanted some ice cream, and started to ask when a man in tights came running in and the music speeded up the horse to a gallop that was like a fast merry-go-round and the man was running beside him and jumping on top along with the lady and they were galloping galloping and then she was standing on top of his shoulders and the horse still galloping along.

  “Daddy Hickman,” I said, “I’m hungry.”

  “What do you want now, Bliss, some popcorn?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What?”

  “Some ice cream.”

  “Do you know how to go to get it and come back without getting lost?”

  “Yes, sir. I can do it. I’m kinda hungry.”

  “Here,” he said, “go get yourself a cone of cream. And hurry right back, you hear?”

  I got a mix, vanilla and strawberry. I didn’t like chocolate. Body did. I’m dark brown, chocolate to the bone, Body liked to brag about everything but I couldn’t, not about that. As I started back, I licked the cone slow to make it last.

  Some ladies were dancing on a platform in front of a tent. Behind them and up high was a picture of a gorilla taking a white lady into the jungle. He had big red eyes and sharp teeth and she was screaming and her clothes were torn and her bubbies were showing. I went on. The next tent had pink lemonade and watermelon on ice. I watched a man throwing baseballs at some wooden milk bottles. He knocked them over the second time and won a Dolly Dimples Kewpie doll. He had three already. Out in front of another tent a man was saying something real fast through a megaphone and pointing to a picture of a two-headed man, and a lot of folks were listening to him. One of the heads was laughing but the other head was crying. I watched the man a while. He waved his arm in a circle in the air like he was doing magic and some of the people were going inside. Then two big white guys came up and pinched me and I said “Oh!” and they laughed and called me Rastus. They knew me. I didn’t cry. I backed away and went behind the tent. It was quiet, the crowd was all out front. I saw the wagons and the ropes and cages for the animals. Some wet clothes were hanging on a line stretched between two of the wagons and I could hear the music coming up from the big tent and I could smell the hamburgers frying. My ice cream was running out so I ate it very slow, but it didn’t last. It was all down in the little end and I bit it off and let the cream run down in my mouth. Then I thought of some fine little-end barbecue ribs and wanted some but nobody was selling any. Pig feet neither. I went on past the back of the tent where the fat lady lived. She looked like a Dolly Dimples too, and I went around and took a look at her. She was holding a handkerchief in her two fingers and her pinkie was crooked like Sister Wilhite’s when she drinks her coffee and her hair was cut short in a bob with a pink ribbon around it. A man said, Hi there, to her and she said, Hello dear, and smiled and winked her eye. She looked just like a big fat Dolly Dimples doll and I wondered if she was made like Body said all the littler women were. She winked at me and smiled.

  I went on. I was still hungry for ice cream but I saw those two big guys again and went behind the tent and over the staked ropes and sawdust. That’s when I saw him. He was sitting on a little barrel looking down at a black and orange felt beanie with a little flowerpot and a paper flower attached to the top and I didn’t know what I was going to do but when I went up to him I could see that we were the same height, then he looked up and said, Hi, kid, and I hit him. I hit him real quick and it glanced off his cheek and I could see the blackness smear away and the white coming through and then I hit him again, hard and solid this time and he yelled, Git outta here, y’little bastard! What’s the matter with you, kid? You nuts? trying to push me away and I hit and hit, trying to make all the blackness go away. He was surprised and his arms were too short to push me far and I was hitting fast with both fists, going as fast as I could go and he was cursing. Then something snatched me up into the air and I was trying to hit and kicking at him until Daddy Hickman shook me hard, saying, Boy, what’s come over you? Don’t you know that that’s a grown man you’re trying to fight? You trying to start a riot? And saying to the little clown, I’m sorry, I’m very sorry; I sent him to get an icecream cone and here I find him trying to fight. Who are you, the little one said. You work for his folks? No, Daddy Hickman said, but I know him; he’s with me. Then you better get him the hell out of here before I forget he’s just a kid. In fact, I should get you instead. What the hell do you mean letting a wild kid like that run around loose? Don’t worry, Daddy Hickman said, we’re leaving and I mean to take care of him. He won’t do it again…. And then he was running with me under his arm, puffing around the tent and across the lot into an alley and someone behind us screaming, “Hey, Rube! Hey, Rube!” and the blackness was all over the back of my hands….

  “… Oh, yes,” Hickman said, fanning the Senator’s perspiring face, “you were giving us a natural fit! All of a sudden you were playing hooky from the services and hiding from everybody—including me. Why, one time you took off and we had about three hundred folks out looking for you. We searched the streets and the alleys and the playgrounds, the candy stores and the parks and we questioned all the children in the neighborhood—but no Bliss. We even searched the steeple of the church where the revival was being held but that only upset the pigeons and caused even more confusion when somebody knocked against the bell and set it ringing as though there had been a fire or the river was flooding.

  “So then we spread out and really started hunting. I had begun to think about going to the police—which we hated to do, considering that they’d probably have made things worse—because, you see, I thought that she, that is, I thought that you might have been kidnapped. In fact, we were already headed along a downtown street when, lo and behold, we look up and see you coming out of a picture house where it was against the law for us to go! Yes, sir, there you were, coming out of there with all those people, blinking your eyes and with your face all screwed up with crying. But, thank God, you were all right. I was so relieved that I couldn’t say a word, and while we stood at the curb watching to see what you would do, Deacon Wilhite turned to me and said, ‘Well, ‘Lonzo—A.Z.—it looks like Reverend Bliss has gone and made himself an outlaw, but at least we can be thankful that he wasn’t stolen into Egypt.’… And that’s when you looked up and saw us and tried to run again. I tell you, Bliss, you were giving us quite a time. Quite a time …”

  Suddenly Hickman’s head fell forward, his voice breaking off; and as he slumped in his chair the Senator stirred behind his eyelids, saying, “What? What?” But except for the soft burr of Hickman’s breathing it was as though a line had gone dead in the course of an important call.

  “What? What?” the Senator said, his face straining toward the huge, shadowy form in the bedside chair. Then came a sudden gasp and Hickman’s voice was back again, soft but moving as though there had been no interruption.

  “And so,” Hickman was saying, “when you started asking me that, I said, ‘Bliss, thy likeness is in the likeness of God, the Father, because, Reverend Bliss, God’s likeness is that of all babes. Now for some folks this fact is like a dose of castor oil as bitter as the world, but it’s the truth. It’s hard and bitter and a compound cathartic to man’s pride—which is as big and violent as the whole wide world. Still, it gives the faint of heart a pattern and a faith to grow by….’

  “And when they ask me, ‘Where shall man look for God, the Father?’ I say, let him who seeks look into his own bed. I say let him look into his own heart. I say, let him search his own loins. And I say that each man’s bedmate is likely to be a Mary—No, don’t ask me that—is most likely a Mary even though she be a Magdalene. That’s another form of the mystery, Bliss, and it challenges our ability to think. There’s always the mystery of the one in the many and the many in one, the you in them and the them in you—Ha! And it mocks your pride, mocks it to the billionth, trillionth power. Yes, Bliss, but it’s al
ways present and it’s a rebuke to the universe of man’s terrible pride and it’s the shape and substance of all human truth….”

  … Listen, listen! Go back, the Senator tried desperately to say. It was Atlanta! On the side of a passing streetcar, in which smiling, sharp-nosed women in summer dresses talked sedately behind the open grillwork and looked out on the passing scene I saw her picture moving past, all serene and soulful in the sunlight, and I was swept along beside the moving car until she got away. Soon I was out of breath, but then I followed the gleaming rails, hurrying through crowded streets, past ice-cream and melon vendors crying their wares above the back of ambling horses and past kids on lawns selling lemonade two cents a glass from frosted pitchers, and on until the lawns and houses gave way to buildings in which fancy dicty dummies dressed in fine new clothes showed behind wide panes of shopwindow glass. Then I was in a crowded Saturday afternoon street sweet with the smell of freshly cooked candy and the odor of perfume drifting from the revolving doors of department stores and fruit stands with piles of yellow delicious apples, bananas, coconuts, and sweet white seedless grapes—and there, in the middle of a block, I saw her once again. The place was all white and pink and gold, trimmed with rows of blinking lights red, white, and blue in the shade; and colored photographs in great metal frames were arranged to either side of a ticket booth with thin square golden bars and all set beneath a canopy encrusted with other glowing lights. The fare was a quarter and I felt in my pocket for a dollar bill, moist to my touch as I pulled it out, but I was too afraid to try. Instead I simply looked on a while as boys and girls arrived and reached up to buy their tickets then disappeared inside. I yearned to enter but was afraid. I wasn’t ready. I hadn’t the nerve. So I moved on past in the crowd. For a while I walked beside a strolling white couple pretending that I was their little boy and that they were taking me to have ice cream before they took me in to see the pictures. They sounded happy and I was enjoying their talk when they turned off and went into a restaurant. It was a large restaurant and through the glass I could see a jolly fat black man cutting slices from a juicy ham. He wore a white chef’s cap and jacket with a cloth around his neck and when he saw me he winked as though he knew me and I turned and ran, dodging through the sauntering crowd, then slowed to a walk, going back to where she smiled from her metal frame. This time I followed behind a big boy pushing a red-and-white-striped bicycle. A small Confederate flag fluttered from each end of the handlebars on which two rearview mirrors showed reflecting my face in the crowd, and two shining horns with red rubber bulbs and a row of red glass reflectors ridged along the curve of the rear fender, throwing a dazzled red diamond light, and the racing seat was hung with dangling coon tails. It was keen and I ran around in front and walked backwards a while, watching him roll it. He looked at me and I looked at him but mainly at his bike. A shiny bull with lowered horns gleamed from the end of the front fender, followed by a screaming eagle with outstretched wings and a toy policeman with big flat hands which turned and whirled its arms in the breeze as he guided it by holding one hand on the handlebar and the other on the seat. And on the fork which held the front wheel there was a siren which let out a low howl whenever he pulled the chain to warn the people he was coming. And as it moved the spokes sparkled bright and handsome in the sun. It was keen. I followed him back up the street until we reached the picture show where I stopped and watched him go on. Then I understood why he didn’t ride: His rear tire had a flat in it. But I was still afraid so I walked up to the drugstore on the corner and listened a while to some Eskimo Pie men in white pants and shoes telling lies about us and the Yankees as they leaned on the handlebars of their carts, before going back to give it another try. This time I made myself go up to the booth and looked up through the golden bars where the blue eyes looked mildly down at me from beneath white cotton candy bangs. I…