Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  Two days later, after the shooting was over and I was standing in line waiting to be paid, I received a most unexpected bonus. It wasn’t anything like the forty acres and a mule the real slaves were promised and then refused, but I happened to look up to see the famous star of the movie and a bunch of his supporting actors passing by and got a shock—yes, you’re right on target! There he was again, this time swaggering along beside “Jeb Stuart,” dressed in Confederate gray, carrying a saber, and wearing a foot-long feather in his hat!

  Hickman, I swear, I was so disoriented that for a second I didn’t know where I was, whether in “now” or “then,” in the present of Antietam or lost in movie-confused “history.” And as I stood there wavering between making myself known or following my old routine of fading into the background where all such matters become blurred, a strange thing happened. For even though I was in blackface, filthy as could be, and still wearing the overalls and bandanna which they’d given me for a costume, I didn’t have a chance. Because at that very moment he turned in my direction, stopped in mid-stride, and looked me over. That’s right, he recognized me! And for the very first time in all the years that I’d been on his trail he indicated that he knew who I was. I say this because during the second our eyes met I could see a little smile playing around his mouth. Then he winked and gave me such a sweeping salute with his Confederate hat that its feather trailed in the dust, and I stood there looking down at the lacy marks it left like a chicken does when hypnotized by having its beak pressed into the dirt. And then to make sure that I would know who he was, he swaggered off after the Jeb Stuart character by doing a cute little hustler’s limp!

  It was as though he were telling me, “So all right, sport, we have finally met on neutral ground and therefore it’s checkmate. But when you get in touch with Hickman don’t forget to tell him that I let it happen. And if you should bump into Sippy you can give him my regards.”

  Hickman, all I could do was to stand there sweating more real sweat than I had during all the ruckus and strain that the movie director had put us through. And not so much because he had recognized me as from the shock of finding him slap-dab in the middle of a made-up world. It was upsetting because up to then I’d always found him acting in a world which I accepted as “real,” but here he was acting in the middle of a made-up time and place; otherwise he would have been a Rebel officer and I would have been a slave. Therefore I had to ask myself where illusion ended and reality began, and what would happen if he ever stopped acting and decided to limit himself to a single role? I guess I’m trying to say that for the first time I had a sense of the frightening possibilities of the worlds, real or illusionary, in which he chose to operate and its possible consequences. What would happen if he operated in an actual job as he’d been doing in his endless con games? You’ll understand when you consider how a movie actor can start his career playing bandits and horse thieves and end up playing sheriffs and judges, begin as villains and end as heroes…. But here I go trying to think again and I’m no more prepared for it now than I was back when I was playing your young man’s shadow. However, I can say that my face-to-face encounter with him raised questions which cooled my enthusiasm. I think it was because I was already too uncertain about my own life and living too close to the edge of my own form of hell to keep prying into such mysteries….

  That’s my report, and I’m sorry I have nothing more to add, because without threatening me outright he managed to convey a warning that I should keep off his trail. And since I’d come to believe him capable of damn near anything I decided that it was best to leave him alone. That explains my silence and I’m sure that you must have grasped what had happened. I lost the game, but I had done my unskilled best against one hell of a player—or so I consoled myself whenever I felt guilty.

  Other than that I’m doing fairly well and still fighting my habit by making do, for the most part, with what you used to call “dark-complexed coffee.” And for all the frustration it’s brought me I’m still studying and supporting myself by teaching a few courses in night school. I’ve also gone back to music. Nothing big-time, understand, but when I’m on a gig with a group of old-timers the excitement returns and it makes me wonder why anyone as good as you were could have given it up for preaching. For as I see it, you probably influenced far more souls for the better with that trombone than you’ll ever do as a preacher. But don’t get me wrong, I respect your decision, and while I’m thankful for the entertainment and instruction I received from trying to keep up with that character of yours—and was well paid for doing so—I hope and pray that one day you’ll relent and tell me just why in hell, and where in hell you became interested in his activities.

  In the meantime I must confess that back in those days when we were performing together I was so ignorant as to think that someone like you wouldn’t understand the ideas which were rattling my booze-confused brain. But now I feel free to write you to the limits of my capacity because I’ve entered the age where I’m forced to recognize that experience is experience long before words can impose the unstable meanings for which they’re employed. Therefore I realize that wisdom is wisdom, no matter how it’s gained, and no matter the words through which it finds expression. So now, having done the best I can, I’m sure that you’ll read right through my words and supply your own meaning. But words are no substitute for the pressing of the flesh, so if you’re ever up this way please look me up. For not only would I be glad to see you, but there are still a few old-timers who refer to you fondly as “King Kong the Baptist” or as “Big Lon the Signifying Revealator” who’d like nothing better than to see you.

  And come to think of it, Sippy is still around and living, some say, on some kind of pension set up by his millionaire. Should you have an interest in meeting him I would try to make it possible.

  [DECISION]

  SO, HICKMAN THOUGHT WITH a grin, you were not only “King Kong the Baptist,” but “Big Lon the Revealator.” Which wasn’t so bad, considering what could happen to a man when fellows like that put the badmouth on him. What’s more, there are still a few around who’d probably be pleased to come up with something far worse. Since Millsap proved to be so dependable I guess I should have told what it was all about, but what he didn’t know didn’t hurt him. In fact, not knowing might have saved him the burden of more hopeless knowledge—who knows?…

  But that boy he was trailing tried everything! Not only his stunt in that Dallas church, but others in Chicago and Lord knows where else. Playing small Southern towns with Lasses White’s Minstrels, then up in Vermont with small carnival shows … sometimes playing Mister Bones in blackface, sometimes Mister Interlocutor with the barest of makeup. Then that hairdresser telling me about his being secretly in business making bleaching cream and hair straightener which he hired a bunch of attractive young women to peddle from door to door. Then he expands his business with wigs, hairpieces, and straightening combs which he labeled with the picture of a pretty, brown-skin Queen Cleopatra combing snakes out of her hair! And when that pays off he tries his hand at designing ads for the cosmetics trade. But there he slips up, because his ads were so ambiguous that after a few turned up in the comic section of a white newspaper he had to grab a freight train out of town. Maybe that’s what led to his turning up in the movies, because even before Millsap’s report turned up one of the members had spotted him in Virginia dressed in Rebel gray and riding a fine horse while taking part in a scene being shot near Richmond. So when the movie was premiered we rushed to see it, but sitting up there in the peanut gallery even I was unable to spot him among all those hard-riding Rebels. So for a time we lost both the man and his shadow…. Millsap would have liked it otherwise but I doubt that the boy could have been the fellow who was heard praying in the Pullman car—and yet I did hear that he’d cooked up a batch of what he tried to pass off as blues lyrics and was brash enough to try to palm them off on a famous white woman blues shouter….

  Hickman, how could it happe
n? What did you ever do to let such a rascal loose on the world? Once he ran away and stepped over the line he seems to have become like a kite broken loose from its string. Dipping and diving and whirling about, first rushing away from us and then making unexpected feints in our direction and darting away. And for all we were doing to keep an eye on the rascal it was as though each time we decided that he was going too far and agreed that we’d either bring him back to the fold or expose him, he sensed it and disappeared.

  As he did after that terrible thing which happened to the young woman Janey told me about. I hoped and prayed that he’d make peace with himself and come home to rest, but it wasn’t to be—at least not then. He just turned up again in other places and on other levels, and always exploiting and debasing the very best things we’d tried to give him. Conned and bankrolled his way to where he is today by using whatever it is he rejects in himself simply because it came from us. And as though that isn’t enough, and in spite of our silence, he still keeps acting as though this country is a plantation which he owns and us, his old friends and guardians, no more than field hands to be denied and exploited. And what makes it so hard to bear is that he seems to be punishing us and anyone like us. Us, who gave him our love and who still hold true to our early commitment. So whatever’s eating on him has to be something other than a madness for power. Maybe it’s metaphysical, some kind of irrational need to deny his connection to us while taking revenge on whoever and whatever was responsible. Maybe he wants to turn back the clock so that he can be present at his own conception, observe the penetration, belly to belly, skin to skin; would listen to the sighs and moans, inhale the smells and feel the moisture…. Or even more desperately it must be the colors of skin-pressing skin that he yearns to see! He would recreate circumstances which are so far beyond his knowing—and mine—that they can only be accepted as an act of God and borne as an act of faith and self-acceptance. Maybe the explanation of his arrogance and restlessness lies in his desire to be the total product of his own creation—Bliss immaculate! If so, then it’s his own self-chosen form of living hell. Yes, and just as being bound to him is my retribution for the sin of misguided pride…. May the Lord forgive us, him and me…. Amen…. But the sad, fly-in-the-milk joke of it is that I hoped to do good. Like the character in that high school play proclaimed, I’ve been true to our dream. So if now the time has come when I’ll have to pay for my dreaming I’ll see it through to the end….

  Say me some Shakespeare, Daddy Hickman.

  You mean to tell me that you want to hear me do some spear-shaking, Bliss?

  Yes, sir.

  But why?

  ‘Cause it sounds so good.

  Okay, so just give me a minute to think—how did it go? Oh, yes:

  Mine honesty and I begin to square

  The loyalty well held to fools does make

  Our faith mere folly; yet he that can endure

  To follow with allegiance a fallen lord,

  Does conquer him that did his master conquer and earns a place in the story …

  And I thought the teacher who made me memorize such words was making an ass of himself and a fool out of me! Now look at me!

  Replacing the report in its folder, he went to the closet and returned with an old alligator-hide briefcase from which he removed a batch of orchestral arrangements and sheafs of newspaper clippings. Fading and falling apart, they were notices from the Negro press of dances and theatrical dates of his performances, each displaying a publicity photograph of himself as an arrogant, cocksure young man. Placing the clippings carefully aside, he searched deeper into the briefcase, removing papers and mementos until he found a small bundle wrapped in pink tissue paper, from which he removed a packet of photographs and began flipping them to the desk as though dealing himself a hand of solitaire—until, coming to a snapshot of a young couple with a nineteen-twenties touring car in the background, he paused and recalled the spirit of adventure, good times, and success which it held in timeless suspension.

  Young, tall, and robust, he stood before the car’s high convertible top with his arm around the waist of a pretty young woman who snuggled against him in her short fur coat. In the brilliant light his homburg tilted backwards, lending his image an air of self-esteem which caused him to grin now as he noted how pleasantly the young woman had smiled and how brightly the car had gleamed in the sunlight. It was a Dodge, he thought, and that fur coat she’s wearing was called a “chubby”—but though huggable she sure wasn’t chubby. If anything she was lean, keen, and unexpectedly mean. Built for speed but lacking the usual down-home warmth of our sweet teasing browns….

  How did it begin? You remember: In that riverside park where spring floods finally caused the white folks to turn it over and then make jokes about its being “the nigger Eden”—where else? It was the Fourth of July with you sitting high on the bandstand with members of the Elks band playing everything from patriotic marches to ragtime and jazz. And as usual your big glad eyes were ever a-roving—remember?

  Yes, and the crowd of folks enjoying an afternoon of freedom. With some listening, some strolling, and others at the far end of the park yelling as they watched a baseball game. And far down the slope to the left of the bandstand girls in long skirts, headbands, and white blouses, and boys in white flannel trousers chasing tennis balls darting about the red clay courts with racquets. And beyond the crowd around the bandstand the backs of young men sporting sailors’ straw hats and striped silk shirts strolling toward the trees with laughing young women who saunter and sway twirling parasols. And others like them, coming toward the bandstand with the wide brims of beribboned picture hats bowing gently around spit-curled, beauty-spotted faces as they smile and flirt with beaus who move with a silk shirt flouncing, “strutting-with-some-barbecue” swagger. And far beyond their spoony bantering small children are rising and falling—See-saw Margery Daw—or whirling in dreamy delight on the park’s carousel. And farther still beneath the low-branched trees families are gathered around tablecloths loaded with food and picnic baskets. And as you view the bustling activity around carts selling hot dogs and hamburgers, ice cream and lemonade, popcorn and spun cotton candy, you see the tug and toss of inflated balloons clustered on a string attached to a candy-striped cart. Then in standing to take a solo you see a single red balloon floating toward you over the heads of a young man and two young women. And as the three draw near, nodding their heads to the beat of the rhythm, it happened—

  And there she was, with the warm, peachy bloom of her brown complexion bugging your eye and heating your horn and the music. Yes! And then with sly growls and bluesy moaning you were riffing thirty-two bars of trombone sweet talk—all for the sweet young lady under the red balloon, saying:

  I like them!

  Like what?

  Them!

  Them what!

  Lovely peaches!

  Get on with it—what peaches?

  Those peaches!

  WHAT! Them lil’ ole things? Them little Albertas?

  Don’t care!

  But they might be canned!

  Don’t care!

  But they might be clingers!

  I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care!

  And if they’re freestones?

  It don’t matter because freestones are sweet-sweet-sweet to my hong-gone-gongrey taste!

  So?

  So ooooh, aaaah! Oh-ho-ho! How I’d like to shake …

  Yas?

  I said I’d like to shake …

  Yas?

  … The leaves of that love-love-lovely …

  Yas?

  That lovely little, peachy little, unplucked a-little …

  Yas?

  ‘Cause just gimme one little shake and she’ll never have to say say—Oh, no!

  Now say it, SAY it!

  If you don’t like my peaches …

  … Keep a-coming! Keep a-coming!

  Just a-let my a-peach a-tree a-be!

  Well a-yass, yass, a-ya
s-yass-yaaas!

  And then giving her that snappy, horn-flipping bow and your signifying “It-was-all-for-you-darling” smile you looked straight into her curious big brown eyes. And then at the end of the set you made that tap-dancer’s “How’s-this-for-a-big-man” leap from the bandstand and it was: May I introduce myself, you said.

  Oh we know who you are, he said.

  Fine! But how about you, young lady?

  Her too, he said, hugging the girl on his right. Any girl of mine has to know about you!

  Now that’s really good news, and I thank you. But how about this other young lady?

  I’m not sure, she says, but I think I’ve heard of you.

  Is that right? Well let me make myself known, it’s Hickman. Alonzo Hickman. And yours?

  Oh, go on, girl, he won’t bite you! So tell him!

  Oh, I know that—Mr. Hickman, it’s Janey …

  And what a sweet name for such a pretty lady. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Miss Janey, and I’d like nothing better than to see more of you—is that possible?

  But Mister Hickman, I’ve just met you …

  I know, but I have plenty of patience—oh, Lord! There they go, signaling me back to the bandstand. So before I go, is there any way that I may get in touch with you? And before you answer, think about this: If I don’t see you again, and soon, I’ll simply wither away and away and away until there’s nothing left but a wee tiny voice whispering Janey, Janey, oh, please, Miss Janey!

  And then with a giggle she’d surrendered her address, and you returned to the bandstand thinking everything was coming up roses. The very next day you paid her a visit, met her parents, and escorted her to several parties before leaving town for a series of Northern engagements. Then came your return during the bright fall weather of the photograph, and the fateful church social in which your luck turned bad. Thought everything was copacetic, then one of her friends’ parents looked up and recognized you and informed her parents of your reputation, and that was the beginning of the end. For in spite of your—no his, your old self’s—pride over his way with words, you could get no farther. Not even when you proposed marriage. So you reaped what you sowed, after climbing many a wicked, easily climbed mountain you finally looked down upon a lovely valley and got turned away….