Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Well, with that (and to everyone’s surprise and relief) the young man broke into tears and allowed his newfound friend to guide him out of the kitchen and into an unused dining room, where Sippy forced him to drink a concoction which left him pale, watery eyed, limp-legged, and sober. This incident, which has long since become local barbershop legend, was the start of the young man’s relationship with Sippy. And from there he went on to psych the poor man out of his mind and beyond all rational belief. Sippy worked more changes on that poor rich boy than those African masks worked on Picasso! What’s more, he seems to have worked a major change in the young man’s life and values. And what a backflip of a change that had to be!

  For I was told that after attending an expensive prep school, Sippy’s boss had graduated from Harvard, where he played football, and that at the time of the incident he was enrolled in a divinity school where he was said to have been a top student and an excellent classical pianist; a gift which Sippy, a self-taught piano man, embellished by teaching him ragtime and stride. Then, by way of making him more aggressive, Sippy taught him boxing. Because, thanks to a pious but domineering father and despite having a pile of money inherited from his mother’s father, the young millionaire was somewhat depressed and inhibited. During your jazz experience you must have encountered hundreds of the type; who for all their whiteness remind me of nothing so much as those Negroes who wear their hair defiantly long and bushy but then walk around with hangdog expressions. But be that as it may, in Sippy’s eyes his young employer’s timidity was the result of a misdirected upbringing and sexual immaturity, so he seized these as an opportunity for taking his boss in charge and improving his character.

  This feat Sippy accomplished with the enthusiastic cooperation of a couple of his women friends, a teasing brown and towhead blonde respectively, who were paid far above the going price for initiating the millionaire into the subtleties of bedroom mechanics that turned out to have some of the liberating effects of a lengthy psychoanalysis. After that he became what Sippy termed his “main man.” And with the shredding of one inhibition leading to the loss of another, the wealthy divinity student got rid of his shyness, broke with his father, and lost his religion.

  More important, he was so thankful for his liberation that he regarded Sippy as more of a companion than a servant. And since Sippy was of light complexion and indeterminate racial features (unless of course one was from the South and familiar with types produced by its after-dark activities), he was often the millionaire’s companion at sports events, stags, poker games, and interracial carousels. But remember, this was during the so-called Jazz Age, when things were hanging loose, at least among the rich flappers and jelly beans. So while members of the millionaire’s social set were aware of the companionship, few objected. And of course its Negro observers just laughed and got a kick out of watching Sippy give the man a freewheeling Ph.D.’s instruction in subjects whose basics Uncle Remus had taught the one little white boy who absorbed his wisdom. Besides, the white man was so rich that under Sippy’s influence he discovered that he could do anything he wanted and dare anybody to try to stop him. It was as though he enjoyed flaunting social conventions and was using his wealth to rise above them. And naturally Sippy was right in there with him!

  That Negro even had that white man kissing women’s hands and bowing Continental style, and taught him to dance, swing, strut, and jive! I tell you, that Sippy was slippy—which should have been his name! And then, having taken the millionaire over with such success, the rascal went to work on your boy—providing, of course, that he was your boy.

  Nevertheless, from what I could glean the young man took to Sippy’s instructions like a duck to water. And as you’d expect of somebody who, as I gather, had been well prepared by his early association with you, the boy was a quick and willing student. By which I mean to say that he was already something of a natural-born actor and potentially a man-of-all-situations, and therefore made to order for Sippy’s ultimately subversive plan.

  Hickman, before long this butler had shaped the boy into his idea of a white American gentleman! Bought him clothes and taught him to wear them, worked on his manners, and had him reading all kinds of books so that he could hold his own among the educated. However, after discovering that the kid could change his modes of speech with the facility of a traveling salesman or a world-traveled mynah bird, Sippy left his speech alone. Instead, he drilled the boy in the vernaculars of baseball, boxing, gambling, and in Harlemese, Brooklynese, and the bits of Yiddish which he himself had picked up while working for a Jewish agent whose specialty was booking vaudeville acts and jazz orchestras. And finally, being as good at the craft as you were back when I backed you on the drums, Sippy steeled his student against any easy provocation, whether from hostile individual, error of choice, or circumstance, by coaching him in the finer points of the dirty dozens. In fact, it was the boy’s familiarity with that form of contentious discourse that strengthened my suspicion that he was indeed your man.

  Well, as far as I can recall I left town for a semester to continue my studies at Chicago and thus lost contact with the experiment. But by the time I returned Sippy had come up with a Falstaff-Pygmalion feat of transformation that can only be described as a combination of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, P. T. Barnum, George Washington Carver, Groucho Marx, Billy Sunday, Yellow Kid Weil, Wlliam S. Hart, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, Gaston B. Means, and Lon Chaney—plus our own dam’ Sam, John Henry, and Brer Rabbit. A creation which turned out to be so swindle-prone, fluent, and shifty that absolutely no one could get him into focus. And that goes for most cynical and worldly-wise Negroes who happened to be tracking his progress.

  Because even under the most rigorous scrutiny, the rascal’s image simply kept fading in and out of focus and reforming and realigning itself into so many ungraspable and shifting shapes that even the most knowledgeable and sociological of observers were utterly confused! Those two, mentor and student, operating as master and servant, Arab sheikh and interpreter, con man and shill, could charm the tail off a brass monkey or raw beefsteak out of the jaws of a hungry hound. They worked more scams than Houdini performed escapes, and were reported as having been seen from time to time on every level of white society. But what was so amazing to me was that most folks saw in them, and especially in the boy, whatever it was they wanted to see. All they had to do was think it, and there he’d be in the charismatic flesh!

  And aliases? Hell, he had enough to fill an encyclopedia! Name a place and he was from it, accent and all. And with the manners and costume to fit. Sometimes he wore Texas boots and a cowboy hat, sometimes a derby, chesterfield overcoat, and spats; sometimes an opera hat, white tie, and tails; or, as the occasion or ploy demanded, high-rise gamblers-striped pants, spats, and an Oxford gray cutaway morning coat with its braided lapels adorned with a white carnation. And on one occasion, during which he must have been in the grip of some reckless frenzy of larcenous fantasy, he was seen ambling along the streets of New York’s Lower East Side wearing a prayer shawl and yarmulke!

  Apparently the boy was driven by some obscure need to transform himself into any and every image of possibility that entered his Sippy-scrambled mind! Because once when I’m visiting my old church back in Dallas, I look up and there he is, up in the pulpit preaching a fire-and-brimstone sermon—and I mean rocking the church with such effect that I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, scream, or expose him! Of course I didn’t, both out of respect for your concern and the kick I got from just watching him operate. In fact, watching him confirmed what I’d been taught during my excursions from the classroom, which was that in this country the most instructive drama is not to be found in the theater—where most of what you get is souped-up soap opera having nothing to do with the life we know—but in the street. And Hickman, I assure you, those two transformed the streets of every good-sized town and city in the country into their own reality-defying stage! Or so it seems, because I was often unable to kee
p an eye on them and had to depend on others for my information.

  In fact, after that pulpit bit, it was a year or two before I saw them again, this time in the North; and by then something must have gone wrong between them. Because I learned that Sippy was serving time for cracking some thug’s head with a billiards cue. It was said that he had acted in self-defense, but that for some reason the boy refused to supply him with a lawyer. This ended their friendship, and shortly afterwards the boy disappeared. I asked some of my friends with whom I had been enjoying his and Sippy’s career what had become of him, but none would admit to having seen him—probably because they put him down for betraying Sippy. Nor was I surprised, because as I said earlier, Sippy was the type who always looked out for number one, and since he’d fashioned the boy in his own ideal image some such parting of the ways was to be expected. So, having lost his trail, I finally gave up; both out of frustration and because my fellow observers were not your ordinary variety of change-shocked and color-blinded citizens, they were experienced, people-watching Negroes; men who worked for all kinds of businesses and institutions, and included Pullman porters, dining-car waiters, and truck drivers with whom I patronized the same barbershop. Therefore I concluded that he had taken off for Europe, or perhaps Hong Kong. However, during the same period a Pullman porter friend did tell me of an incident which you as an old jazzman might find amusing.

  It seems that one night when on a trip to the West Coast he looked into a parlor car to check it out and saw a white songwriter of some reputation who was drunk and down on his knees at prayer. So seeing the situation, my friend said that he was about to close the door when something the songwriter was mumbling pricked his ear and stopped him dead in his tracks. He said that in the first place he was surprised that the man, who he had served before, even believed in prayer. But what stopped him was hearing a white man asking the Lord to make his latest song a success by having it fall into the hands of Louis Armstrong!

  After I recovered from a fit of laughing I told my friend that he had to be lying, but he swore by his mother and Alberta Hunter that he was telling the truth, and went on to tell me in all sincerity that this celebrated composer and lyricist was not only laying his case before the Lord with the passion of a true believer, but that he was pleading with Him to “please, please, please” (these were my friend’s exact words) “make that gravel-mouthed nigger listen to Thy divine will and do right by my beautiful song.” This I give you for what it’s worth, but who knows? Certainly there is enough evidence around to suggest that maybe the Lord responded and gave ole Satchmo a nudge. What’s more, to my faulty ear that mocking, “Oh, yaaas!” which Satch uses to end some of his numbers sounds suspiciously like an ambiguous “Amen!” Anyway, I suspect that if you scratch an old-time Negro jazzman deep enough and hard enough you’ll find yourself a strayed apostate preacher!

  However, and all joking aside, I couldn’t recall your having said that your young man possessed musical talent and thus concluded that he couldn’t have been the prayerful songwriter. But then, sometime later, when getting some gas at a filling station, I saw this chauffeur who was sitting behind the wheel of a big limousine dressed in a finely tailored gray uniform. At that time there were plenty like him around so that in itself wasn’t unusual. Conk-haired Negro chauffeurs were comporting themselves like brown-skinned Valentinos all over the place, gold slave(!) bracelets, guardsman’s overcoats, English riding boots, and all. But this was no “blood,” at least not an ordinary one, because he looked like a movie star and it was obvious that he had something going with the high-class lady in the backseat. Therefore I took a carefully guarded second look, and dam’ if it wasn’t that boy again!

  This time, from what I could learn from the station attendant who was servicing my car, he was employed by an elderly but powerful politician, a really old one. And when I took a second look at the woman (a middle-aged strawberry blonde) and then at the limousine and your boy, I said to myself, “Now there sits a car that’s in for some hard, fancy driving, and a fool of a woman who’s had some fancy ‘tampering’; so somewhere in this town there has to be a husband who’s in plenty of trouble!”

  Later I checked the address of the old man’s estate and drove out to look it over, and it was what you’d expect of a Southerner who’d started out on grits and greens and rose up to spend forty years in Congress. It had fine lawns, a swimming pool, and tennis courts that were suitable for the Olympic games, and a servants’ quarters which, given its own site, would have looked like a small mansion. But although the main house was staffed by a large staff of servants, including a French maid and a slew of us, the servants’ quarters were strictly the domain of your boy. One night when I drove through the alley there seemed to be a party in progress but although the phonograph was blaring “Some Sunny Day” I saw no one. And since he no longer visited his old haunts, probably because of his break with Sippy, I was unable to check his movements. Then the old man and his wife took off for Europe and I assumed that once again I had lost contact. Which except for one final, somewhat bizarre, incident which came about through my constant need for funds to stay in school, was true.

  That summer I was waiting tables in Maryland with a fellow student who told me about a movie based on the Civil War that was being shot on a nearby historical site where one of the battles had actually been fought. At first I thought, “So there they go messing with history again,” but I became interested when he told me that the producers were having trouble hiring Negro extras to act as slaves. I asked him why he didn’t give it a try and he said, “Hell, man, I have enough acting to do in just holding down this job. And besides, who the hell needs a second go at slavery?”

  I approved of his sentiments, but since I needed extra cash and he assured me that it would only be a two-day deal which required no special experience, I rushed to Antietam and was hired.

  Hickman, you would have died laughing to see me, a college man and aspiring intellectual, marching down a dirt road wearing overalls and carrying all my earthly belongings bundled in a red bandanna; but, as the old folks say, hard times will make a black rat swallow his pride and eat raw red onions. There were over two hundred of us, young and old, men and women, struggling along a road full of mule-drawn wagons, cannon, caissons, and panicky Northern soldiers in retreat from Southern cavalry. It was one hell of a scene, with cannons roaring, rifles crackling, and cavalry charges in which horses were rearing and neighing and kicking up dust as though they were caught up in the real thing, whether we humans recognized it or not. For as far as those animals were concerned us human beings had gone stark raving crazy. And it didn’t matter who the hell they had in their saddles. Because they were being ridden by everybody from ex-cavalry men to cowboys, jockeys, and society equestrians—or anyone else who was willing and able to act the roles of that rip-roaring Johnny Reb cavalry. That movie crew reproduced the Battle of Bull Run in every detail they could come up with. From variations in the weather to the spectacular spilling of blood, sweat, and tears, to military equipment straining, banners flying, bugles blaring, wild-eyed, bit-chewing horses a-foam and lathering, sabers flashing, and men and mule turds falling—all timed to an array of real-life sound effects. They even shot a scene in which some Northern congressmen and their wives, dressed in the costumes of that period and carrying parasols and picnic baskets, came out to watch the action as though the battle was some kind of athletic contest. You should have seen them haul ass when those Southerners made a dash toward the Capital with those minié balls flying!

  It was so realistic that in the thundering, ear-banging excitement I had to remind myself that for all the dash and slash those Southern horsemen were laying on the boys in blue, Time hadn’t really reversed itself and transformed me into what I might have been if instead of winning the battle (which in fact it did) the South had been beaten back, redeployed, and then gone on to win the war.

  Then it occurred to me that under such circumstances “history” didn
’t exist but was an afterthought imposed later as an explanation. History was a picture of events that were juxtaposed, recorded, and given meaning during the shooting of a given scene. It was not a product of destiny, but of the sound and fury of man-made, man-controlled action that was taking place in a fabricated context of events in which such mortal matters as birth and death, duration, change, and chance—those defining limits of human experience—were safely absent.

  Because I was there, sweating and straining on a once bloody ground of political contention while taking part in the shooting of a movie that proposed to conjure up the past with optics, cogs, and film. But in fact neither the scene, the action, nor the “me”—the nonactor who was performing the part of a slave—were real. I “was,” but was not; the war “was,” but not truly, only “reely”! Because in fact my “role” was a nonwinnable “non-role;” something like that of a bone over which two dogs are fighting to see which one would eat it.

  So it came to me that what is called “history” is to the actual as a reel of film to the scenes and action that we see unfold when we sit back in a darkened theater and watch lifelike shadows make their moves on a wall-sized screen. All of it, actors, scene, and action, lack life’s depth and endless concatenation of detail and changeability and thus are without the consequences of mortality. It’s something like the difference between disemboweling oneself in the Japanese ritual of hari-kari and pretending that you’re Harry Carey chasing bad men and stray cattle in a Wild Western movie. And this despite a movie’s ability to arouse and structure emotion. History is a tale told about the joys and anguish of survivors, winners or losers, by those who weren’t there or even born when the actual events occurred…. But oh, how taking part in a historical movie can make you reel! And without your being aware of how and where you’re tilting!

  But such conjectures didn’t stop me from going the full course. Besides, taking part in it turned out to have been far more instructive than reading the history book I consulted later to learn what the battle was all about. However, the point of all this speculation—which is a matter of notes I made at the time and not necessarily a matter of my present thinking—is to modulate to the incident which grew out of my venture into acting.