Three Days Before the Shooting . . .

by Ralph Ellison

  “I agree, but right now I’m enjoying this Choc, which is excellent—so maybe you should send her a bottle….”

  “… And get crucified? Not me! She’s against any kind of liquor because of her religion, so let her. And if she wants to let some old Hebrews tell her what to do and what not to do she’s welcome. But like I tell her, those suckers couldn’t have lasted a year in this country. Talking some foolishness about a goddamn snake causing all the world’s trouble—Hickman, you know what we did with snakes when I was living amongst the People? Hell, we’d grab the bastard by his tail and snap off his head! No offense to Adam and Eve—or you either….”

  “And none taken,” Hickman said, “as you can see from my grinning. What’s more, my granddaddy did the same back in Georgia, and his snakes were rattlers. But what can you tell me about this young man? What did he want?”

  “What most orphans want, which is to know about their parents. That and maybe to see me again. Years ago he used to visit me whenever he could get away from Janey, who was against it. She was always warning him and the others that I was a heathen and a bad influence for her little Christians—ha!”

  “I can understand her concern, but why did he come to you? Were you able to tell him anything?”

  Settling back, Love gazed at the beer in his glass, and now as he spoke again his voice became more like that of an Indian.

  “This is the way it was: When he was taken from Janey he was only a cub, but he still remembered enough to know that if there was anyone around who could tell him what he wanted to know it would be me. So he comes to Love. And, Hickman, dealing with what he wanted to know gave me one hell of a time….”

  Pausing, Love held up his glass and stared at the beer with a thoughtful expression.

  “You know, Hickman, this Choc is a drink blessed by the spirits. That’s why the People treat it with ceremonial respect. It takes charge of time and brings men together like the sacramental wine of your churches….”

  “I understand,” Hickman said. “It’s not what folks drink but what they do after drinking that makes the difference. You say that the boy gave you a hard time—what did he want?”

  “Wanted me to tell him who his father was. But when he’s asked a question like that, how can any man be sure of his answer? Only the mother would know, but in his case that’s impossible because she put the knife to her throat when he was still too young to even know about death. So while she was the kind of woman who would have known, there wasn’t time for her to tell him. Then Janey took him and started raising him and loving him like she did all those others, and even though he was taken from her years ago she still wouldn’t give him the answer. Not even if she knows it. Because telling the boy would mean giving up more of the little she has left of him … memories of him as a baby and all. And that’s because she don’t like the idea of somebody else being more important to any of those boys than herself.

  “Hickman, I think you already know, but I’ll say it: Janey’s the kind of woman who can never bring herself to give in to a man but can’t live without children around her. And so back in those days she started picking up all the orphans and strays she could find and went about raising and feeding and loving them. Yes, she loves them, but the woman is so damn proud of what she does that she refuses to share it. Especially with women who have a chance to give birth but refuse it. That’s her way. She wouldn’t tell the boy what he wants to know even if she knows it. So when she refuses him he comes to me.

  “After all those years he comes to me, Love, who’s sometimes known as old Loveless Love. And seeing how disturbed he was, and knowing how long he’d been carrying that question around inside him, I tried to help. That was my first mistake—if it was a mistake. Because I had no idea that he would go beyond me, or that the road he’s taking would wind around so far and spiral so high….”

  Suddenly Hickman leaned forward, saying, “High? What do you mean?”

  “Hickman, you’ll just have to listen and draw your own conclusions, because now I’m speaking in words that leap back and forth as they wrestle with time. Are you willing to listen?”

  “Of course, and excuse my interruption….”

  “Done! So as I was saying, what happened will happen, ‘cause like you preachers keep repeating, in the beginning was words. So I told the boy what I knew, and even though I went at it at an angle, like when you use a parable to say something that you’d rather not run the risk of saying straight out. So he got something from what I said, and when he finds his man we’ll both know the rest. I feel sure that he will, that he’ll keep on the trail until he gets satisfaction, but I can’t be too sure.

  “Hickman, as we both know, the truth has penalties. Maybe that’s why it’s truer when it’s told in circles. All this talk about truth being straight ain’t no more than what the great bull left steaming in the field behind him. Therefore I went about tracking it for the boy in circles, when maybe I should have looked deeper into what lay in the road ahead. Instead, I looked so far into the past that I failed to question the future. And that’s because the boy’s story cuts across my own and touches on the fact that I died a bit with the dying of the People and surrendered the sacred medicine they invested in me—Hickman, drink up and let that Choc help you in understanding what I’m saying.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hickman said, “and if I look puzzled it’s because I’m trying to see where you’re going.”

  “Good, because when medicine men consult in earnest good Choc makes the talking flow smoother.”

  With a quick look at Love’s mask of a face, Hickman smiled.

  “If I’m hearing you right that’s a compliment, and I’m honored.”

  “And I’m serious. I don’t know what kind of ordeal you had to endure to earn your credentials, but when I speak of medicine I speak of knowledge I had to earn by being sent to die on a mountain. Yao! I had to suffer to earn it. And in the course of my instruction the Eagle, my totem, entered my skull and left my young body of flesh lying on the stone of the mountain.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t see, but that’s how I learned to soar with the Eagle’s wings, see with his eyes, and hear with his ears. Then, after I had learned that powerful part of the People’s medicine, I was given the responsibility of using it wisely. But then years passed, and with the world changing I thought I had put all of that behind me. But here, way late, that boy turns up and I forgot to look through his returning and into the unfolding of things yet to come….”

  Hickman leaned forward. “Mr. New, are you saying that you have the gift of second sight?”

  “Just call me Love—no, it’s not me, but that which speaks through me. And if you don’t believe what I say about the eyes, ask any of the old-timers around here. They’ll tell you that I speak the truth. They used to make bets on my vision, and on my hearing too. Even today I can tell from across a good-sized room which of two watches is ticking the loudest. With the State Negroes that’s something unusual, but I had to earn it. Yao!

  “Like I say, when I went through my trials on the mountain I died, and when I returned I was of the Eagle—which is something I don’t expect you to understand, much less believe. Not as a preacher of the State Negroes. But even though the State people, the Americans, won’t believe it, there are other ways of living life than the one they pursue. They insist that their way is the only way, so I don’t argue. What I know, I know; and I am older than most of them. Not always wiser, but much older and more experienced. My name is New, yet I am older than the hills and the rivers. A man of the People’s medicine sees what he trains himself to see, and if I put my mind to it there are still things I can foretell. So what happened between me and the boy came about because I’d put my Eagle’s knowledge aside. So maybe in trying to spare him I harmed him. We shall see.

  “So he came asking me who was his daddy and I believed that I knew the answer. But how could I tell him? He’d been gone all these years and now, all of a sudde
n, he’s back here asking that kind of question. I thought to myself, What kind of man has this boy become? He’s still young, but even so he’s old enough to have learned that some questions are better left unasked—or if you just have to ask it’s better not to wait for an answer.

  “Because just as shorely as thunder breeds lightning, somebody’s bound to come up with an answer, whether they know the truth or don’t know it. And that’s just the beginning of more confusion. So why the hell would he come back here for that after he’d been gone so long? Sure, anyone might think of asking it at one time or another, but you’d think that after all this time he’d have made his peace with that question. But no, he had to ask it.

  “Better that he’d forgot it. Better that he’d said, I am me, myself, and that is sufficient. And even better if he’d said, I am my own father, and gone on from there.

  “For many have said it and done pretty good, have gone on to make up whatever was missing, mother, father, and family. But no, he’s dying to discover an answer, so that afternoon here he comes, a fine-looking stranger. And no sooner than I recognize him as the boy I used to know through Janey, I offer him a welcoming drink of hard liquor, some cigars, and pipe tobacco. Then the minute he’s settled in his chair he asks me, Mister Love, who was my father?

  “Hickman, it was the last thing I expected, and when he asked it this old nose of mine starts to twitching so hard that I had to sit back and study him.

  “Now if he had given me a little time I could have prepared, but with his coming at me straight as an arrow he caught me off guard. He reversed time and space without warning and I was left hanging on air. I say that because except for now being grown with a voice that was deeper he sounded just like he did as a kid. Like the kid he was when he had the habit of stopping strange men on the streets and asking the very same question.

  “That’s right. A man would be walking along minding his business, when all of a sudden there’d be this little nice-looking kid grabbing his pants leg. And when he looks down the kid’s looking up like he’s holding a pistol, saying, ‘Mister, are you my daddy?’ ”

  “He did that? Why, the poor little fellow!”

  “Yes, and he asked it over and over without receiving an answer. So how about you, Hickman; did he ever ask you?”

  “No! And what’s more, I was seldom on the scene at that time. And later when he saw me at Janey’s he could see that I wasn’t exactly the right color.”

  “Color? Hell, Hickman, the boy didn’t care about color, he just wanted his daddy! But black, white, or Native, any man he hit with his question had to be surprised and flattered, because he was a fine little boy in spite of it. Fellows used to joke about his confusion—not that they disrespected his mama—but because he was raising a question which a lot of folks would be within bounds of reason for asking, even some who might not have thought so. What’s more, there was many a fellow who would’ve been proud to say truly, Yes, son, I am, and rush to pick up the burden.

  “Because, you see, his mother was a woman of stature. That’s how the people of my tribe described her, which is after the Spanish. Oh, yes! And as you preachers like to say, I tell you verily that she was something to see. Naturally pretty and lovely, and even prettier from the process of giving birth to a baby. So she was the kind of girl that many a man would have been proud to tie the knot with—and I mean for the rest of his life. But when the boy asked me, ‘Mister Love, who was my daddy?’—no, ‘father’ was the word he used—well, I looked at him a while and knew that I was getting old.”

  “But since you did know his mother …”

  “Because being that which I am I should have seen his question arriving and been prepared to turn it away. But I didn’t, so I was caught. Then as I sat there staring and remembering I felt my nose bleeding. What’s more, I could feel it grow cold the second it touched the back of my hand. But even that didn’t warn me in time.

  “So being of no mind to lie, I just looked at him in a state of suspension. And then all of a sudden I entered a state of mind like I had when I lived among the People. Of that kind of attention, and when I saw the look in his eyes my mind whirled up and took flight. Because in his eyes I saw fear and hope and insistence, so I flew up and around and climbed to the zone of the Eagle. Then in my mind I was back to the town as it was in the old days, seeing streets full of people and wagons, the tents and shanties they lived in. Yes, and the trees and the gardens, the red clay, and tracks in the dust on the roads. Then I was back to the times of the old Territory—

  “Hickman, I was living in this land long before there was such things as states, railroads, or cities. And then I was southwest and up in the mountain where I had died in my young days. Yao! And I could see myself stretched on the rocks with my head to the east, my feet to the west, and my arms to the north and the south. I was there, where I’d been for many days without food or water, naked to the sun and the wind and the rain. There, where the Eagle finally came to rest upon me, speak to me, and give me the medicine meant to stay in my keeping and be my responsibility until I died the death you call natural.

  “All this happened in a flash, you see? You understand? But with such a great slam and bang of my spirit that I was disturbed. Truly disturbed. Because that was the first time I had left my body and soared since I settled here in town and gave up the ways of the People. And that it could happen these days is still a mystery, because the elements that go into such a happening—the earth and the weather and the blood and atmosphere—weren’t of the right proportions. Sure, being the son of his mother the boy bore some of the blood of the People—just as a heap of State Negroes bear a trace of the blood—but he was not, and had never been, of the People. What’s more, his were now the ways of the East, of the white State people. And yet something he brought into the room caused me to take flight, so I found myself soaring and returning to a scene which existed shortly before he was born.

  But there I was, hovering over the streets and looking at his mother, Lava-trice, as she was at that time. She was just a slim young thing who was getting into a strange-looking auto. One of those with a slanting hood over its engine, broad running boards, and reversible cloth top. Yao! It was her, climbing in, looking over her shoulder at some of her young friends standing on the sidewalk, there in the sunlight, and all of them smiling. She was a beauty, and that’s the truth even in the eye of the Eagle.

  “Hickman, it was as though the Negro and the Indian and the white Sooner blood, the black and the white and the old Native red, had settled together in just the right mixture to produce the finest young woman those three warring, dog-assted bloods could possibly come up with. So there she was, climbing into that touring car—Yao! Into his car. Because while I couldn’t see who was behind the wheel—the Eagle didn’t mean for me to see him, understand?—I’m sure that he was the one.

  “Hear me, Hickman: She was dressed in a long black skirt and wine-colored blouse which was full in the right places and narrow in the places where a young woman should be narrow and thin. Yao! And that jet-black hair of hers was done up in the style young women of the time were proud to be wearing. And when she bent over to get into that car a necklace of blue turquoise—stones of truth, the Navahoes call ‘em—swung down from her neck to her bosom. Then a teasing little breath of wind made her black skirt flutter and swing, and everybody on the scene stopped what they were doing to take a look and admire her.

  “Me too, back then and now as I hung poised there in time and space over her head. Yao! And that’s when I felt hate for that fellow who brought that one-eyed contraption to this town….”

  “Wait,” Hickman said, “what’s this about a contraption?”

  “That lying camera,” Love said. “That three-legged thing with a single eye which was its owner’s snare and the source of all his illusions. I really hated him—Yao! But how could I tell that to the boy? He was sitting with his head cocked to the side, looking me straight in the eye. Even looked a bit like his mot
her, but now he had the ways of the Eastern white State folks.

  “So I said, ‘Boy, are you asking me about your daddy? Didn’t Janey Glover raise you?’

  “And he said, ‘Yes, she did until I was taken away. But she wasn’t my mother.’

  “Well, I didn’t say anything to that, I just crossed my legs and looked at him a while. Then something struck me a sharp blow behind my right eye, and the moccasin I was wearing fell off my right foot and I felt the tears well up but managed to control the pain that it dealt me. I had to, because it was the Eagle that did it. He’d showed up and his peck was a warning. And that’s when I knew I was really in trouble.

  “So I told the boy, I said, ‘I know all that. Sure, Janey mothered you, but she wasn’t your mama. At least not of the flesh. Anyway, you’re asking about something that happened a long time ago. Many moons ago.’

  “Then he said, ‘Yes, but not too long for you to remember, so please, go on and tell me….”

  “So then I said, ‘I’m old and well-preserved but not all-knowing. Did you ask Janey?’

  “He said, ‘No, because Miss Janey is a woman, so naturally she wants to protect my mother’s memory. Besides, I don’t think she knows. Any more than she really knows who took me from her and sent me to live in the East—but I think you might know.’

  “So then I looked into my glass and again felt the pain, this time behind both of my eyes. And my nose was bleeding again. So I looked out to the yard, and sure enough, I saw the Eagle. There he was, circling the air like he was about to plunge into the yard after Mrs. Gresham’s chickens. I knew then that he was warning me of my oath and that no matter what had happened in the meantime I was still of the People.

  “Hickman, what I’m telling you is true, all of it. He was reminding me that I had gone West and come back from the dead. So I looked at the young man and managed a smile. I myself would have liked to have been his daddy, because then I could have trained him in the ways of the People. Anyway, about that time one of these double-winged airplanes flew low over the houses and I could see the Eagle resting in the top of a tree with the sun glinting on his neck and the point where the white and black feathers formed such a fine pattern. He was looking at that man-made bird with contempt, and then he stared across the yard and into the house at me. So then not knowing what was going to come out I said, ‘I can remember a time when folks used to run out of the house to see one of those—do you remember?’ And he shook his head.