Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  I said: Why Bob? You’ve been knowing me from when we were children, but you didn’t know him from Adam’s off ox….

  But it wasn’t him. I didn’t wish to hurt him. Nor anyone. Can’t you understand that, Alonzo Hickman? You have to try. He just didn’t exist for me. He was just a name; just a name which by saying I could protect someone more precious to me than myself or mother and father, or anything he and I might have together. But I wanted only to protect my own. Not to destroy anybody. It was fate. Please, is there a woman here? There’s very little time….

  A woman? Won’t I be enough for you this time? Do you have to have another woman as well as another man? Don’t you know that what you did has killed the only woman of this house, my mother?

  Yes, I heard. You don’t have to remind me. I’m here. I’ve put myself in your hands but it’s still beyond the two of us. Still I tell you, if you don’t hurry and shoot you’d better hurry and get a woman because you’re going to have too much on your hands for any man….

  And even in the hard cold center of my anger I was confounded. I simply couldn’t link all that death back to life. No, I couldn’t fit the links into a chain. Said:

  Another woman for what? To lay out our bodies? You want a woman for that? Don’t worry about it, because I’m putting a hot bullet through that oil lamp sitting right there on the table. We won’t need her. Besides, we’ll both be in hell watching the confusion long before she could even get here.

  Oh, I was already feasting on revenge and sacrifice, telling myself: Those eyes for Bob’s eyes; that skin for Bob’s flayed skin; those teeth for Bob’s knocked-out teeth; those fingers for his dismembered hands. And remembering what they had done with their knives I asked myself, but what can I take that can replace his wasted seed and all that’s now a barbaric souvenir floating in a fruit jar of alcohol and being shown off in their barbershops and lodge halls and in the judge’s chambers down at the courthouse? And then beginning to really see, my own eyes betraying my aim and my understanding growing and making me say:

  Bob’s, You know damned well it can’t be Bob’s.

  I tell you I didn’t know him, she said. Can’t you get a woman?

  I said, whose is it, then?

  All I can tell you is that it wasn’t your brother. It’s cost too much my trying not to tell to tell it now. But not his. He had nothing to do with it….

  Just like that. So Hickman, maybe that’s when you started to change. It was like seeing all of a sudden the air falling apart so that you could recognize the separate gasses and molecules that made up its substance and which you’d have to see gather quick and mix together again if you meant to continue breathing. She had been protecting her secret and her man. That’s all it was for her—all of that destruction just to deny that little growing bit of truth. Gone and set fire to the whole house just to hide where she’d spilled a little grease on the rug. Talk about all those lives ground up to build the pyramids, she’d have destroyed the nation just to protect her pride and reputation in that little old town. Slop the juice and cause a flood. Fire is more like it. So naturally she couldn’t go to a doctor for help and in confidence. Not after screaming Robert’s name, because then everybody would have yelled Bliss’s question even before he could draw his first living breath. Just as surely as Mary had a baby, King Herod had him a daughter; thousands of ‘em.

  Where could she go? So not to her doctor, or to her pastor, both those ministering roles were scratched from the book and denied. Neither to her mother, nor to her father; nor to her sister or to any friends or kinfolks. Neither could she go to any maidservant, to no black cook or washerwoman, nor to any of our preachers, teachers, or doctors. The blind man could stand on the corner and cry, and folks would drop money in his cup so they could ignore his pain, but she bred and spread muteness and blindness and deafness. That poor girl had cut herself loose from both sides. She must have thought about each and every grown person in the whole town, like someone turning over each and every pebble on a mile-square stretch of seashore, hoping to find just one that would give her relief from that terrible loneliness. Misery doesn’t just love company, it reaches out for its own through all the man-erected walls and then claims its own.

  So I had to be the one. Me, the least likely, the anyone-else-but and she finally sifted the grains down to me. Oh, she could be wilful and blot Bob out without ever bothering to think that there was a body attached to his name and life in that body, and she could do it and be beyond the consequences. But now her own belly said Let the disgusting, foul-aired truth come clean, and it turned her wrong side out. Or maybe right side, because she must have had to have more than simple arrogant nerve to come there that night.

  But to who else could she go, Hickman? Who but to the one who had suffered deep down to the bottom of the hole, down where there’s nothing to do but come floating up lifting you in his own arms into the air, or die? Oh, John the Baptist was a diver into those lonely depths, I do believe. I do believe….

  In all that frenzied agitated searching she must have been like a man being chased west so hard and fast that he stumbles and falls into the ocean and has either got to swim or sink. Don’t tell me a human don’t live by instinct when he reaches bottom, because when he’s just about to go to pieces his instinct tries to guide him to where he can save himself. That’s when God shows you his face. That’s when in a split second you’re about to be nothing and you have a flash of a chance to be something. She must have been sore desperate, like backed into the corner of a red-hot oven. Hickman, that was when your heart stopped beating like a run-down clock. Oh, yes; and that’s when you got your first peep through the crack in the wall of life and saw hell laughing like a gang of drunk farmers watching a dogfight on a country road. All at once you were standing there smelling her sour, feverish, white woman’s breath mixed up with that sweet soap they used to use and you were hearing the hellish yelling and tearing around and about of a million or so crazy folks. Ha, yes! That’s when the alphabet in your poor brain was so shaken up that the letters started to fall out and spell “hope,” “faith,” and “charity”—it would take time for them to fall all the way into place, so you could recognize it, but it was beginning to happen. Yes, it was happening even while you were saying:

  So now you come to me. Out of all the rest you come to me. I guess you think that old lady who died doesn’t mean anything to me because she was only a black man’s old worn-out mother who was soon to die anyway. I guess I’m supposed to forget about her. So now here you come to me after all that to demand that I get you aid to perpetuate all that you have done without even thinking. So I’m to stand here on the spot and switch over from the animal you consider me to be to the human you’ve decided I could never be, so that I can be understanding and forgiving—woman, do you think I’m Jesus Christ? Do you think a man like me is even interested in the idea of trying to be Christlike? Hell, my papa was a preacher while I’m a horn-blowing gambler. Do you think that after being the son of a black preacher in this swamp of a country I’d let you put me in the position of trying to act like Christ? Make it easy for you to destroy mine and me without even the need to remember, and humiliate mine and me and, dam’ you, expect me to understand and forgive you and then minister to your needs? Destroy me and mine so that you can cast me down into corruption and the grave and then dig me up next week so that I can serve you? Tell me, what kind of endless, bottomless, blind store of forgiveness and understanding am I supposed to have? Just tell me where I’m supposed to carry it. What kind of meat and bread am I supposed to eat in order to nourish it?

  Hickman, you didn’t know it at the time but when you started talking she had shifted out of your hands and put you into hers. She really had you then. You were talking so fast you were foaming at the mouth, but that instinct and life inside her had reached out and tagged you and you were “it.” A pair of purple smears sagging shuteyed in my hands and me standing there holding her and unable to let her fall. If we ever
learn to feel real revulsion of the flesh—any flesh—that’s when hell will truly erupt down here and the whole unhappy history become an insane waste; if we ever learn to hate the mere rind in the same way we ignore the spirit and the heart and the hopeful possibility underneath…. And there I stood—me, cursing her for using a woman’s weakness as a club to kill me there and to deny me anger and hate because I was my mother’s boy child and my father’s son who they had brought up on the ideas and standards that made any human beings bearable one to the other…. That woman, coming there using my very black manhood to deny me grief and to deny me love and to deny me thirst and hunger and weakness and hope and joy—denying me even denial and rejection and contempt and vindictiveness against any claim her kind had upon mine … denying me even the need for anger or life. There she’d been feeding two for all those months and now sagging in my hands like the shadow of some little ole frightened bird about to take off and fly.

  And then it really started, and me still cursing but helpless before the rhythm of those pains that started pulsing from him to her to me, as though some coked-up drummer was beating his snares inside her belly and I was being forced against my will to play or dance, and dance or play, even if I had nothing left but bleeding stumps for arms and legs. Me, a full-grown man crying, “Mama, Mama,” with tears running down my face, while I was getting her to bed. Me, crying helpless at a time like that, as though my body had somehow to register a protest against what I was being forced to do, and getting her into Mama’s bed and starting to uncover all that that Bob had died for not even thinking about uncovering: white and blue-veined and bulging like that boa constrictor I saw back there during my days with the circus band, after it had swallowed a lamb. Yes, and went about dressing her just the same in one of Mama’s gowns. Then going on to tear up Mama’s sheets, and pouring the water I’d heated for my own last bath in case the men had come…. Yes, almost convinced that I was in a dream. Too mad and out-raged now to be afraid that she had been followed and still determined to make small-town history in blood. Determined after letting out the life that bulged her belly to let out the life that had drained me dry of love.

  Oh, ashamed too; shamed and too outraged with myself to call a woman to come do the midwife’s work. Asking myself, Man, where’s your dignity, where’s your pride? Where, at what point is my hate spilling out between my hands and my determination? What do you call this situation? Who’s doing this to me? Who’s got me hypnotized? And all the while doing the whole thing myself in spite of myself: Holding the damp cloth to her brow and placing the pillow beneath her quivering backside to ease and aid the flesh in its quaking and quickening and holding firm to her weaving hands while she gave birth to that bawling, boiled-red and glistening baby flesh. Watching my own big black hands going in and out of those forbidden places, ha! into the rushing fluids and despising it all. No mercy in my heart, Lord, no! Only the choking strangulation of some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood, hate, or heartbreak. And stopped from killing the two of us only by the third that was coming screaming in all his innocent-evil bewilderment into that deathhouse…. Ho! if anyone passing in the night had heard him cry…. They had me battling against myself, but I went all the way, I suppose by then to prove to myself, even to the Lord, that I was mean enough to play the cards that life had dealt me and still stick to my will. They say a doctor is a butcher underneath; it’s a wonder I didn’t try to use those pistol barrels for forceps. No, but I took Papa’s old straight-edged razor and boiled the blade to sterilize it and divided the fruit from the tree. Yes, and tied up his navel cord with Mama’s embroidery thread, fixed his first belly band. Him, Bliss. Wiped his unseeing eyes and anointed his body with oil. You, Bliss. I wrapped you in the sheet around and placed you in the crook of her sleeping arm and saw her try after all of that to smile. Her face all beaded over with sweat and I wiped that too away; then sat way back in Mama’s rocking chair, just looking at them dazed and defiant.

  I was too tired to sleep or rest and my mind wouldn’t stop. There she was, relieved of her burden and sleeping like a peaceful child, and him beside her with his little fists already balled up for the fight of life. I couldn’t look at him too steady either. There was that one bright drop of blood on the white sheet and I watched it growing dark, thinking: Now there’s two, one to accuse me and the other to hang me; one to point the finger and the other to rise up and shoot me down, or pull the rope to break my neck. Yes, and because of these there is no one of my own to come cut me down. There they are in Mama’s own bed, outraged and outrageous. I started thinking about those old Hebrew soldiers who use to leave their prisoners castrated on the battlefield—but for what Jehovah could I even play Abraham to that little Isaac? Lord, my eyes must’ve been bloodshot with my thoughts and frustrations. And there Bliss was, puckered up and so new he looked like if you were to drop him he would bounce like a rubber ball….

  How long did I sit there? Nobody would come to mark the passage of time and I had long ago drawn the shades and let the clock run down and she’d made me a pariah even to my own. Pariah and midwife too, and raped me of my will and my manhood. Dehumanized my human needs. Told myself, it won’t stop here. When she gets her strength she’ll scream again. Yes, but now the life is out of there and she’d beat me with a little child…. Hickman, you were crazy. Yes, but I was sane too; because what I thought there was true, though it took time to learn it in. She had torn me out of my heathen freedom so she could save herself, that was the truth. And all with that baby. With just that little seven-pound rabbit. Not even a few minutes of pleasure or relief either. Which was the last thing I would have thought about. She wasn’t even good-looking, with that thin nose and high forehead; with just that ugly-sounding way of talking through her lips and nostrils. I knew her before her skirts went down, gangle-legging along the street like a newborn foal, trying to walk with class. And him not even brown so that I could have made some sensible meaning out of her coming here to me; just nothing definite, just baby-mouse-red and wrinkled up like a monkey with a strawberry rash. And me such a slave to what a human is suppose to be that I couldn’t refuse to help him into the world. Helped him when I should, according to the way I felt then, have left him stranded and choking with the cord wrapped around his neck when her mammy-waters burst.

  Now she’s sleeping, I thought. Now she’s in her woman’s exhaustion, resting out of time like a stranger to both good and evil—while here I am, tired and feeling with no relief or rest inside me or outside me. She, resting up so she can scream again and they’ll hear it all the way to the State House. Yes, but now the life is out I’m going to put us all to sleep. I mean to clear the earth of just this one bit of corruption. Which is all one can do, just clean up his own mess or that which is dumped on top of him when he has the chance…. Just look at them sleeping there, fruit of all this old cancerous wrong. Why isn’t he brown or black or kinky, so that I could see some logic in her coming here? At least allow me to see the logic of a mare neighing help from a groom who happened to be passing her stall during her foaling time. Oh no, but coming here to me … Easy, Hickman, don’t fight old battles. Maybe it was the way the sacred decided to show Himself. Would you at this age still criticize God?

  Lord, oh Lord, you must have been preparing me all those twenty-six years for that ordeal; giving me this great tub of guts and muscle and deep, windy lungs and this big keg-sized head and all that animal strength I used to have and which I thought was simply meant for holding all the food and drink I loved so well and to contain all the wind necessary to blow my horn and to sing all night long, sure; and for the enjoyment of women and the pleasures of sin…. Ah, but right then and there I learned that you had really given me all that simply so I could contain and survive all I was to feel sitting there through those awful hours. Just sitting there and hating. Just sitting there looking at the two generations of them in the ease of their sleeping, and thinking back three generations more of my people’s tribulations a
nd trying to solve the puzzle of that long-drawn-out continuation of abuse. That and why the three of us were thrown together in my house of shame and sorrow. It was a brain-breaker and a caustic in the naked eye all right, and the longer I sat there the stranger it seemed. I guess it couldn’t have been stranger than if one of Job’s boils had started addressing him, saying, “Look here now, Job; this here is your head-chief boil speaking to you. You just tell me my name and I’ll jump off of your neck and take all the rest of the boils along with me.” Yes, and ole Job so used to trouble and straitjacketed in misery by then to even be surprised to learn that a boil could talk—even one of his boils—only wondering why his skin or hair or toenails or something didn’t speak up and tell the boil to be silent in the presence of the Lord. Because, Master, you must have been there with me at the time and probably with a sad smile on your face. Even after Mama and Robert it was like waking up on mornings in some Territory town like Guthrie in the old days and discovering that my trombone mouthpiece had grown to my lips and my good right arm changed into a slide, but with no bell anywhere to let out the sound … Hickman, you were in a fix. You and those two strangers in the most unlikely place in the world and you the strangest of all.

  Yes, with the baby mewling and raising the dickens and me having to put him to that thin, white, blue-veined tit to suck. Yes, having to guide his red little gums to that blighted raspberry of a nipple so I wouldn’t have to listen to him crying for a while. And my having to be gentle, not like a nursemaid who loves a child enough to give it a good hard pinch in the side when it vexes her too much, but just because of the murder in my heart having to be gentlest of the gentle. Just because he was a baby and me a man full of hate; and gentle with her because aside from everything else, she was a mother lying in the bed where my own mother had once lain. It was like the Lord had said, “Hickman, I’m starting you out right here—with the flesh and with Eden and Christmas squeezed together. Never mind the spirit and justice and right and wrong—or time—just now you’re outside all that because this is a beginning. So, starting right here, what will you do about the flesh? That’s what you have to wrestle with.” He had called me and I had nothing in the hole and was in too far to pass and still couldn’t take the trick by using the baby’s life as my ace, no matter whether he were dealt in spades or in hearts.