Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Well, that is what the baby boy became and there’s no denying. Poor fellow, poor Bliss lost. He’s lying there twitching and groaning and I can only talk and sit and wait. We’re with you, Bliss. We arrived just as we said we would, way back there when you put us down. I don’t know, Hickman, maybe the real one, the true Bliss got lost and this is somebody else. Because during all that time we could never ask if he really were the true son even though we knew in our heart he ought to be. Maybe we’ve been following the wrong man all this time. Naw, Hickman, you’re tired, this was Bliss. There’s no doubt about that. It’s him and there lies the nation on its groaning bed. Those Georgia politicians knew it twenty years or so ago, when they tried to make me admit our ties. Sure, and I lied and denied so he could climb higher into the hills of power hoping that he’d find security and in his security and power he’d find his memory and with memory use his power for the good of everyone. Oh yes, he’s the one, Hickman, you won’t get out of it that easy. You can’t stop now by calling it all foolishness. Those politicians didn’t threaten you for being foolish, they were playing for keeps. That’s why they threatened to run you out of town. Well, I had been run out of better towns by then, sometimes with little Bliss with me, and always my sanctuary was the Word. Anyway, there was nothing to lose as there’s nothing to lose now and the sheer amazement of God’s way is a wonder and well worth it. Let me laugh, I see the links in the chain. Bliss had to bribe and deny and deny and bribe somebody to get in the position he’s in. They know it and I know it, only they don’t know all I know. Just like I know that I had nothing to lose when they threatened me and that they probably made a deal back there, because Bliss did turn into this, there. Rest, boy. Lord, I wish I could reach him. That doctor ought to be coming in to look at him pretty soon. Janey. After all those long years, Janey writing me that something was brewing:

  Dear Brother Alonzo, a young man I know about is come hereabouts from far away and after a long time. You will know who I mean. So I think you ought to know that he’s stirring up old ashes and turning over old stones and he is taking down true names and asking questions. I know you will want to know about this because I am too old now to put him off for much longer. I mean he’s pressing me too hard. I have dreaded it but it had to come. I always knowed it would. Brother Alonzo I’m not strong like I used to be and I have trouble keeping quiet. I betrayed him once a long time past and now I think my time is closing down. So I hope everything is all right with you and I know you will do what you can. May the good Lord be with you and all our old friends. May he rest you and keep you and them in faith. Tell them that I’m still praying on my bended knees. Tell them I’m remembering them all in my prayers. Your sister in Christ, Janey Mason….

  I had to think about that one. I remember Janey from way back there in my heathen days, long before Bliss came. Riding out of the bottoms during that springtime flood on a dripping horse with five little children rowed behind her and holding on to her nightgown and to each other while she swam that horse out of the swift water and her bare heels against his belly barrel ‘til he came on up to higher ground. Talking comfort to those children with weeds in her hair. Saved all of ‘em too. Walnut Grove. That was a woman. Oh yes. She roused me then too, up there looking, standing on the bank of mud and silt. Oh yes, in that wet nightgown she roused me. It wasn’t long before Bliss either, though I didn’t know it. I was on the verge of change—Oh, how odd of God to choose—yet playing Cotch and Georgia Skin or Tonk every night I wasn’t gigging or playing dances in that hall overlooking the railroad tracks, blowing out my strength and passion against those east-and westbound trains. No little Bliss then, but a lot of easy living in that frontier town. This I could tell him, since he wandered there years later. A lot of half-Indian Negroes, those “Natives,” they called them, and a bunch of hustlers and good-time gals. What times; what hard, young, wasteful living. Used to put a number two washtub full of corn on the table and drink your fill for a dime a dipperful. And there was Ferguson’s barbecued ribs with that good hot sauce, yes; and Pulhams. “Gimme a breast of Guinea hen,” I’d say, “And make the hot sauce sizzling.” All that old foolishness. Ha! Me a strapping young horn-blowing fool with an appetite like a bear and trying to blow all life through the bell of a brass trombone. Belly-rubbing, dancing, and a-stomping off the numbers and everybody trying to give the music a drive like those express trains. Shaking the bandstand with my big feet, and the boys romping by midnight and jelly-jelly-jelly in the crowd until the whole house rocked. I should tell him about those times, maybe it was the self-denial that turned him away. Maybe he should have known all the wildness we had to bring to heel. Surely the Lord makes an allowance for all that, when you’re in the heat of youth. He gave it to me, didn’t he, and it was the new country which he gave us, the Indian Nation and the Territory then, and everything wide open and hopeful. You have to scream once maybe so you can know what it means to forbear screaming. That Choc beer, how I exulted in that; rich and fruity mellow. A communion there, back there in that life. Its own communion and fellowship. That Texas white boy who was always hanging around ‘til he was like one of us, he knew it. Tex, why you always out here hanging around with us all the time? You could be President, you know.

  Yeah, but what’s the White House got that’s better than what’s right here?

  Maybe Bliss could tell him. Old Tex. Heard he struck oil in his daddy’s cotton patch but I hope he’s still a witness for the good times we had. Forget the name of that State Negro with the Indian face … a schoolteacher, tall man, always smoking Granger Rough Cut in his pipe and talking politics and the Constitution? From Tennessee, walked all the way from Gallatin leading a whole party of relatives and friends and no preacher either. That scar on my skull to this day from going to the polls with axe handles and pistols, some whites and Indians with us, and battling for the right. Long back, now Oklahoma’s just a song, but they don’t sing about that. Naw, and why not, since that’s what they want to forget. Run up a skyscraper and forget about the foundation, just hope there’s oil waiting to get into the water pipes. Yeah, but we got it all in the music. They listen but hear not, they feel its call, but they act not. Drink of the Waters of Life, He said. And I drank until He sent the child and I realized that I had to change. Then I drank again of the true water, I had to change so the sound of life, the life I felt in me and in the others could become words and it’s still too complicated for definition. But like the Lord Himself, I loved those sinners and I’ll not deny even one. They had the juice of deep life in them, and I learned to praise it to the transcending heat. Who knows, His ways are strange ways, Hickman. Maybe it was all His plan, you had to be what you were then in order to lead his flock. It took all of that to come to this, and little Bliss was the father to the man and the man was also me….

  PART II

  INTRODUCTION TO RALPH ELLISON’S COMPUTER SEQUENCES

  IN 1982 RALPH ELLISON shifted composition of his novel-in-progress from typewriter to computer and continued to create and save files until late December 1993. Word processing was his primary means of writing during those years, not simply for the second novel but for essays, lectures, and personal correspondence. Ellison was among the first prominent authors to recognize the computer’s utility for the craft of fiction. The thousands of pages in hundreds of files constitute something unprecedented in American literature: an intricate if unfinished textual puzzle for the digital age.

  During the decade, using three computers, Ellison amassed over 3,000 pages in 469 files on 83 disks.* The files range in length from a single paragraph to dozens of pages. Ellison named each by character or some other distinguishing aspect of scene, grouping some episodically on disk but leaving many dispersed in no discernible order throughout the archive. As in the earlier typescripts from the 1960s and 1970s, he left no comprehensive table of contents, though several partial ones provide incomplete but essential clues to narrative sequence. The Ralph Ellison Papers at the Library of
Congress include among many holdings Ellison’s own computer printouts from the novel, some with significant handwritten edits, the vast majority undated. The computers and disks themselves have been retained by the Ellison estate.

  Without scholarly intervention, what Ellison wrote on the computer would remain practically inaccessible. Only the practiced eye can distinguish among many of the variants for a given episode. Numerous files, some differing from one another by a handful of words or even a single keystroke, others by substantial alterations to tone or incident, compete for precedence, unmediated by clear authorial design. A given episode might have more than a dozen complete and partial variants, displaying subtle differences in phrasing and sentence structure. One is sometimes tempted to believe that Ellison simply produced a continuous stream of variations on the same material with no apparent sense of urgency to fashion them into a whole. This, however, overlooks other evidence that in the last years of his life, he was attempting to revise his novel toward completion.

  Ellison appears to have put his computer material through several concentrated periods of revision, resulting in three related but distinct narrative sequences. Without the benefit of his chapter breaks or section titles, we have chosen to identify these sequences simply by character and setting: “Hickman in Washington, D.C.;” “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma;” and “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s.” Ellison completely revised and saved to disk the sixteen files of “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” in July 1993. For the twenty-five files of “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma,” he revised all but three of the Oklahoma files between May and September of 1992; the rest of Oklahoma and all of Georgia are dated between 1988 and 1991. He revised all but one of the five files of “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s” during the final months of 1993; the remaining file is dated May 1993. Although he left some suggestions both within the text itself and in notes saved to disk indicating how he might connect the three parts, Ellison does not seem to have composed the textual bridges required to achieve such unity.

  In assembling the three sequences we have followed whenever available Ellison’s own multiple tables of contents. On the occasions when no such tables exist, we have employed a combination of methods to discern the order: matching up, when possible, Ellison’s pagination; seeking textual evidence to support connections among files; studying Ellison’s numerous handwritten and computerized notes; and referring to older printed and paginated sequences (some amended in Ellison’s hand) found at the Library of Congress.

  Ellison’s computer files are expansive, yet so incomplete that they render moot any discussion of final authorial intention. The multiplicity of variants and the ambiguity of Ellison’s plans for the novel make it impossible to designate an “authoritative” text. Using a computer enabled him to make such frequent changes and save so many versions of a given file that distinguishing the most authoritative hardly applies without the accompanying authorial instructions, which Ellison failed to leave behind.

  This edition presents full versions of Ellison’s three computer sequences. Rather than providing every step and misstep in Ellison’s composition, we have chosen to publish only the latest sequences. We do this not simply because they are the last files he modified, but also because they form part of a cluster of files saved during revision. The versions published here represent Ellison’s last best efforts to master his fiction on the computer.

  In editing this edition, we compared the latest textual sequences from Ellison’s computer against the hundreds of Ellison’s own edited printouts now housed in the Library of Congress. In many instances, we found that the latest files from his computer already incorporated the handwritten changes found on the documents from the archive. On a handful of occasions, however, we identified edited versions of the latest files in which Ellison had yet to add his changes to the computer files. Therefore, the three textual sequences that follow are drawn from two distinct sources: digital “text”—that is, word-processed files Ellison saved to computer disks—and printed text, or those computer files that Ellison printed out himself and amended by hand. Both “Hickman in Washington, D.C.” and “McIntyre at Jessie Rockmore’s” are made up entirely of digital text because the latest identifiable continuous sequences were found only on disk, not in printed form at the Library of Congress. However, “Hickman in Georgia & Oklahoma” consists of both digital and printed text. Ellison’s own revisions of 14 of the 30 files were found among his papers; these almost certainly represent his latest versions of the files. We have elected to include Ellison’s editorial changes to his drafts made on printouts of the latest files from the disks.

  Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Ellison’s computer archive is that for all the files he saved over the decade, the complete narrative action of the three sequences is contained in only 46 files. The remaining 423 files are almost entirely superannuated drafts of episodes revised in the three sequences presented here. Others, however, are notable for their differences from the files in the sequence, either for offering alternative renderings of a scene, or for introducing new details.

  We are mindful of the intrinsic value of this material, particularly to scholars wishing to study Ellison’s compositional method. However, presenting all the variants in a print edition would be impractical. Our goal with the present volume is to reproduce a series of manuscripts for scholars and general readers alike. For a novelist of Ellison’s democratic cast of mind it is particularly important that his work be accessible to the widest possible audience. Therefore, those interested in considering the multiple variants of Ellison’s computer drafts are encouraged to consult the full archive at the Library of Congress.

  The computer left an indelible mark on Ellison’s novel; few works of fiction have been so shaped by their means of composition. Since Invisible Man in the 1940s and 1950s (and also with his earlier unfinished, unpublished apprentice novel, Slick), Ellison had written by episode. Even with a means of composition as intractable as a typewriter, Ellison put each scene through numerous revisions. Using a computer, he could move entire passages and change individual words throughout a text with a keystroke, or otherwise manipulate his prose in ways unattainable through conventional typography. With the computer Ellison had a compositional tool that matched his episodic method and near-obsessive attention to detail.*

  The second novel as it takes shape in the computer files is at once familiar yet distinct from that which came before it in the typescripts. Although many of the characters, episodes, and even entire passages remain unchanged from Books I and II and earlier typewritten drafts dating back to the 1950s, what Ellison produced on the computer nonetheless comprises a separate body of work. These computer drafts lay bare Ellison’s process of composition in the last decade of his life, and his shifting vision of the novel.

  For all the freedoms the computer afforded Ellison, it seems not to have facilitated the novel’s completion. Rather than simply revising the typescripts of Books I and II, he instead chose to reopen previously settled matters of form and sequence. Ellison never saw any portion of his computer material to publication, so we can only speculate as to how near his last revisions came to meeting his exacting standards and intentions. What is certain is that, despite his efforts, he seems not to have resolved conclusively certain basic issues that might have unified the parts into a whole. Many of these textual issues extend as far back as the novel’s conception. Ellison’s notes over a forty-year period return to a handful of key questions: Should the novel begin, as Ellison long planned, with Hickman arriving in D.C., or should it commence instead with LeeWillie Minifees burning his car on Senator Sunraider’s lawn, or McIntyre interviewing Love New, or Hickman receiving Janey Glover’s letter, or Hickman recalling the young Bliss? Should he weave together the D.C. material with Georgia and Oklahoma through flashback or some other means? How might he fuse the first-person McIntyre narrative with the third-person Hickman narrative? Should McIntyre or Hickman visit Oklahoma? If Hickman, should he do
it before or after the shooting?

  Ellison’s numerous notes over the decades show him laboring exhaustively with plotting and sequence. In an undated note, perhaps from the late 1960s or early 1970s, Ellison offers this potential sequence (Library of Congress, 139/4):